Two weeks ago, Kathy and I listened to a sermon for the new year. It’s 2024. The sermon was called ‘Picking up. Letting go’ and was based on a text in Genesis 33, a part of the Jacob and Esau story. They were twins but Esau had been born first, so he had the birthright, which, in those days and in that culture, meant something. Jacob had been a bit of a sneak, a manipulator, sometimes dishonest. Esau, on the other hand, was the camel man, a hunter, tough, outdoors, Clint Eastwood kind of guy. Jacob hung around home a lot, more with his mother, Rachel, and Isaac, his dad, preferred Esau.
In chapter 25, Esau comes in from the open country and is hungry. He asks Jacob for a bowl of stew. Jacob takes advantage and offers the stew but first, Esau must swear off his birthright, which he does. He’s starving, so it’s the stew, silly!. Another time, Jacob with his mother deceived Isaac, so that Isaac gave Jacob a blessing before Isaac died, rather than Esau, whom Isaac had planned to give a blessing. (I’ve never understood why he couldn’t bless them both equally, by the way.) So there was some bitterness, and Esau, for a while, wanted to kill his brother. It became a decades-long, tense relationship that involved both parents and the very different-from-each-other twins.
Two wives and some children later, and apparently wiser, the now older Jacob lives with a lot of guilt and some fear of his brother. When he learns that his brother approaches with an army (400) of men, Jacob gathers animals, wives, children together and walks out to meet Esau, bowing down 7 times as he approaches. ‘My Lord’, etc, he calls out to Esau … and offers flocks and herds as gifts. Esau has done well for himself also and doesn’t need anything from Jacob, but they do reconcile. He embraces Jacob and they discuss how to move on from there. But in this post-apology exchange, Jacob comes across as the slightly annoying one … too grovelling, too detailed, too everything. He frets. He overthinks. Relax a little Jacob! But he can’t and Esau accommodates him … as he seems always to have done. I get the annoyance.
But the sermon didn’t end with the story. There was a point. About letting go. Picking up. Moving on. About apologies and forgiveness.
A lot can be read into stories like this. The one about the prodigal son (Luke 15) that Jesus tells is like that … about forgiveness (not sure there was an apology), and resentment. Equally complex.
Our preacher talked about all this and then asked if there are things, going into the new year that we, any of us might want to let go of, using, in this case, Esau as an example. Instead of killing his brother, he embraced him and suggested they move on. Jacob, however, the way I read the text, was still having some trouble moving on. He doesn’t quite trust their restored relationship, even then.
At a conversation last week, in our very cold Alberta weather, this all came up and it reminded me of other stories about forgiveness and apologies. A few years ago, someone asked my forgiveness for a time when he felt he had treated me poorly. It was a long time ago, and I didn’t expect an apology. When it came, I felt very little and now, after reading the Jacob and Esau story, it makes me wonder a little if forgiveness is overrated. Did it really settle things for my friend? I don’t know. It was a brief conversation. Like a transaction. Maybe he should have brought me some cows and goats. Would that have made it a different experience? Did receiving forgiveness settle things for Jacob?
Apologies and forgiveness are important. I think we should apologize easily and often. Can you imagine the impact if Israel and Hamas would meet and apologize to each other? Or even share bread together? Reconciliations mean a lot and can change the course of a life and of the world. On the other hand, Canada has made a lot out of reconciliation with the indigenous people who were here long before the rest of us. But somehow, every time we talk about reconciliation these days (as if saying it means we’ve done it) it seems a bit empty to me, and I wonder how it seems to an indigenous person. Reconciliation can’t possibly be just a transaction, much as we would like it to be so. Maybe cows and goats help, but maybe also, an important part of thinking about all this must include something about living with our disappointments, our unanswered prayers, our life-long little resentments, our post-forgiveness emptinesses? Yes?
We linear oriented people make a lot of fuss about ‘fixing things’. But life, in most cases, is lived in the tension of things not being quite fixed. The Bible is loaded with paradox and tension. We are, all of us, too much one and too little the other thing, which means life is lived, and we all know this, with a conscious amount of lament. Things we live with. Maybe the unspoken part of the sermon about Genesis 33 is that it’s not just about letting go and picking up. It is, but it’s also about living with nothing ever being quite finished.
And that, I suspect, oddly enough, is at least partly why life on this world is so puzzling and rich at the same time.
Messy Notes 