As I was thinking
about the Jacob story this week, a line from Ocean’s 11 got stuck in my
head—not the 1960 original version but the George Clooney, Brad Pitt, 2001
version—where Tess says “You’re a liar and a thief” to which Danny replies, “I
only lied about being a thief.”
Everybody lies. I mean,
not all the time. Often we tell the truth, but every one of us has lied from
time to time. Same thing with cheating: every one of us has bent the rules to
our advantage. In spite of this,
we have this default setting when reading the Bible that every character must
be some kind of other-worldly rock of virtue. Some of you grew up watching
those religious Sunday School movies about Jesus’ life, or about Moses and the
burning bush, or Charlton Heston’s Ten Commandments.
The one universal theme in these movies is that all the characters are incredibly
pious people who, if they were living today, would probably be monks or at the
very least would cross themselves every couple of seconds—and recite a few Hail
Maries—to remind you how devout they are. So, basically what we have done in
this mythologizing of the biblical characters is create models for our faith
that are so incredibly unreal that we can no longer relate to them as human
beings.
Who of you gets up
in the morning and thinks, “I really want to be like Moses today?” This is a
problem since the Bible is filled with these really human
characters.
Let's start with Jacob. He is no pillar of
virtue. He comes out of the womb grabbing on to his brother’s ankle, and his
mother, Rebekah, takes one look and exclaims, “He cheats!” or in Hebrew,
ya-chov—Jacob. And Jacob, for his part, lives up to the name—tricking his brother
out of his birthright, lying to his father about his identity, and stealing the
blessing that should have been Esau’s. If you’re looking for one of those
stuffy, pious paragons of the faith it is not Jacob.
So what's the moral of the story: Should we be like Jacob? Is it OK
for us to cheat others, to cast them aside on our way to the top as long as it
is part of God’s plan? The great thing about this question is that I can ask it
to five and six year olds and every one of them will say, “No! It’s not OK.”
But you ask it of adults and they’re less sure. Well… no… but… sometimes it’s
the way the world works. You hear this kind
of justification all the time. We revel in Jacob stories. We love stories of
the person who is born without means and rises to the top through sheer
determination and grit—and perhaps some timely advantages—to become something
great. If you haven’t watched the Olympics this year—or any year for that
matter—I just summed up every single story that NBC has told you for the past
couple of weeks.
If it’s OK for
Jacob then it’s OK for us, right? That’s the conclusion we tend to draw… I
mean, God did bless the people through Jacob and eventually form the nation of
Israel from his progeny. That must mean that Jacob was justified in his
actions, doesn’t it?
I think,
intuitively, we know the answer. There is something not right about Jacob. He
is clearly not the person we want him to be. He’s not a model of virtue. He’s
not the kind of son we want to raise. He’s not the kind of person we want
leading our country, even if he is exactly the kind of person who does end up leading
our country. Jacob is a mess, and still, God works through him.
You see, this is
not a story about Jacob’s morality. The future of Israel is not dependent on the
conniving actions of a very determined man. It is not dependent on Rebekah’s
guile in deceiving her husband, Isaac. It is not dependent on a dim-witted
brother, Esau, who is more concerned with food than with the future.
This is not a
story about Jacob. This is a story about God.
It doesn’t matter if you think
Jacob is justified in his actions or not; God is justified in getting the job
done. The job is to lead the chosen people into their future, and whether
that’s through a starving brute of a man in Esau or a scheming genius in Jacob,
God is the star of the show. But still, our little minds with our little
desires keep us captive to the little questions raised by Jacob. Is it OK to
cheat? Is it OK to cut corners to get what we want? Or most dangerously, could
God be calling me to cheat? Do the ends justify the means?
Our trouble is that we live in a cheater culture. It’s become not just common-place but in some
places completely acceptable to cheat on your taxes, to cheat on your spouse,
or to cheat in school or sports. And for those of you who are feeling pretty
good that I didn’t mention anything that you’ve done, I have one word for you:
speeding. We have all cheated.
I have cheated in
the past—and I’m sure in spite of my best intentions, whether it’s speeding down
the highway, rolling through a stop sign on my bike (and yes, I do that A LOT),
or something much worse—I will cheat again sometime soon. And I’m willing to
bet so will you, and the worst part is that we cannot justify the choice to
cheat. We are cheating the rules—yes—but more than that we are cheating
ourselves. There’s a saying that cheaters
never prosper; that might sometimes be true, but I think it’s more accurate
to say that cheaters do initially prosper. But cheating also takes a toll. It
makes us guilty, it compels us to lie to cover our tracks, it turns our
consciences inside out and we don’t like what we see. Then, ultimately, we
discover that cheating wasn’t worth it; not because we didn’t prosper but
because the collateral damage was much worse. For example, it’s not that every
person who texts while they are driving will have a horrible accident, but some
will. Is it worth the collateral damage?
So our paradigm of
cheating and prospering, Jacob, is struck down by the very blessing he
receives. As it turns out, the easier life would have been to sit in Esau’s
shadow. Jacob’s blessing means challenge after challenge. It means fleeing to
strange lands, difficult relationships, the rape of his daughter, and the
travails of his sons. It means pain, suffering and regret long before it means
the adoption of Israel.
Only then can we see how God was working through Jacob all along—not for his
own prosperity but for the prosperity of a people yet unborn. Jacob’s foresight
was pretty good—it is after all how he robbed Esau of his blessing—but God’s
foresight trumped Jacob’s by leaps and bounds. His cheating meant both blessing
and burden.
So does ours.
No comments:
Post a Comment