A sermon on Genesis 32: 22- 31 & Matthew 14: 13-21 by Nathan Nettleton

We live in a society where spiritual experience is commonly regarded as another commodity in the range of lifestyle enhancements on the market. It is assumed that if you find the right supplier or take the right class and master the techniques they teach, then you can gain access to spiritual benefits that will be a great little addition to your life. These spiritual benefits, of course, are all assumed to be desirable and enjoyable, even if at times they are seen as a bit quirky and odd, and a little outside the mainstream values of the world we live in. God is portrayed as everybody’s friend, and the giver of all good things, who loves us and always looks to bless us with good and desirable things.

Tonight’s scripture readings face us with a disturbing challenge to such thinking. All three readings speak of a more ominous side of our relationship with God. Paul, in his letter to the Romans speaks of feeling torn apart inside; of an anguish that is like a stabbing pain deep within him that just won’t go away. The gospel story of Jesus miraculously providing food for thousands of hungry people sounds more in tune with our expectation of God providing good things, but there was a dark shadow hanging over it. The story opened by telling us that Jesus had just got the news that his cousin, friend, and early mentor, John the Baptiser, had been executed at the order of the king. Jesus tries to get away, to deal with his grief somewhere alone, but the crowds track him down and confront him with their need for healing and compassion.

But the most unsettling story is the one we heard of Jacob. Perhaps part of what makes it so ominous is its lack of clarity, its dark mystery. Jacob is on his way home. After twenty years in exile, he is a day away from facing the brother he had swindled out of an inheritance. He has no idea what sort of reception he is going to get, so he is already beset by all sorts of uncertainties and misgivings. And then, in the dead of night, he is attacked by a shadowy stranger. Jacob and the stranger wrestle against each other all night, and although the stranger neither confirms it nor denies it, Jacob is later convinced that it is God he has been wrestling with. Jacob, who as we know from other stories will do anything to gain an advantage, has held his own in the struggle and refused to give way until he has managed to persuade the stranger to give him a blessing. So he does indeed leave this encounter with God blessed, but he also leaves limping. In this struggle, which he is convinced is with God, Jacob has received a low blow that has dislocated his hip. He comes away both blessed and crippled.

Such a story is not going to make the basis of a successful advertising campaign. It is not a trendy way to think of spiritual encounters, but I suspect that if we explore it a bit further, we will find that it actually lines up with our own experience of God. Many of us have had times when we have felt assaulted by God, and for that matter, assaulted by life, the universe and everything. Many of us have felt that the negotiation of our relationship with God has been a struggle and a fight. And that fight has not always been because God is trying to get us to do something and we’ve been resisting, but at times it has seemed that we were striving with all our heart and all our strength to draw near to God and be what God wanted us to be, but God has seemed shadowy and elusive and uncooperative.

And many of us, too, can witness that our greatest blessings and our deepest scars came from one and the same experience. Whether it be the death of a loved one, or the breakdown of a marriage, or a life-threatening illness, the events that inflict upon us wounds that leave us limping for the rest of our lives have at times been the events that we also look back at with a measure of gratitude for the way they have reshaped us and borne fruits of grace within us that would not otherwise have been possible. And as we recognise that we often see in those same events the unmistakable fingerprints of God, if not in the causing of the events, then at least in the ways they were utilised in our lives. Am I right?

If you’re anything like me, then as grateful as you might be for the benefits that have flowed from such times, you often wish that God would find some more gentle way of bringing them about. I can see that I have many strengths and gifts and blessings that grew from the ashes of my first marriage, but there are still times when the scar causes me to limp painfully, and I wish that I hadn’t had to go through that to get to where I am now. I wish there had been some other way.

But perhaps there isn’t another way. At least it seems that Jesus couldn’t find one. When he wrestled with God in the dark of the night and cried out in desperation for another way, for the cup of suffering to be taken away if there was any other way of achieving what had to be done, no other way was found and he had to go ahead and drink the cup in full. In those awful hours, the one who we know to have been God sharing our flesh, also shared the depths of our suffering in order to make the fullness of life possible for us. As we express it in our prayer at the Table, he suffered in passionate solidarity with the suffering of all the earth, and bore in his own body the wounds of creation. Wrestling with God and suffering the worst that anyone can suffer — betrayal by a loved one into a death by torture and the terror of feeling utterly abandoned by God — he received wounds that have never healed, but he also came away with the blessing of resurrection life and a world reconciled to God.

Clearly this is a God who hungers for the best for us; who longs to bring us into the fullness of life and love we were created for. But this is no namby pamby God who goes faint at the sight of blood and wimps out of making the cuts that enable us to be reconstructed in the image of Christ. No, this is a God whose love is tough enough to wound us when it is the only way to bring us into the full blessings that have been made possible for us by our wounded saviour. This is a God whose love is tough enough to drown us in the depths of sorrow so that we can be raised up to a life we never imagined possible with a new name, a new identity, and a new reason for being. And this is also a God who has the tough courage to be wounded by us, and crucified by us over and over again, rather than let us walk off unscarred, but comparatively loveless and lifeless and still unsure whether we have got what it takes to face the fears of tomorrow. This is the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, who comes to us again and again, offering us his own broken body to feed us and heal us, and who promises to be with us as we in turn are broken and poured out for the life of the world, an offering that seems to be pitifully inadequate in the face of the world’s hungers, and which yet, in this great mystery of breaking and blessing, becomes abundantly more than enough to feed the thousands and to heal the wounded world.