Ninth Sunday after Trinity by Revd Lucy

Genesis 32.22–31 · Romans 9.1–5 · Matthew 14.13–21

Jacob has spent most of his life trying to secure a blessing. Let’s do a quick recap of his story.

He came out of the womb with his hand round his brother’s heel. As a young man, he made Esau’s birthright the price of a bowl of stew. Later, with Rebekah’s help, he put on Esau’s clothes and stood before their blind father, taking the blessing Isaac intended for his elder son.

Jacob fled because Esau intended to kill him. He arrived in Laban’s household with almost nothing and spent the next twenty years trying to secure a wife, wages and a future. He worked seven years for Rachel and was given Leah, then worked seven more. Laban repeatedly changed his wages. Jacob’s flocks increased while Laban’s diminished, and Laban’s sons accused him of taking their father’s wealth. Rachel and Leah said that their father had treated them like foreigners and consumed the money that should have been theirs. Each household believed the other had prospered at its own expense.

Then God spoke to Jacob, “Return to the land of your ancestors and to your kindred, and I will be with you.”

Jacob leaves Laban because God has called him home, but home is where Esau is. Esau is the reason Jacob left. God’s promise, “I will be with you”, doesn’t provide a way around the brother Jacob has wronged. It accompanies him towards that encounter.

In Jacob’s family, blessing operates within an economy of scarcity. There is one birthright and one paternal blessing, and each can settle on only one son at a time. In Laban’s house, the same economy governs wives, wages and flocks: whatever one household gains, the other experiences as loss, and that is the arithmetic Jacob carries towards Esau.

The verses before our reading are full of calculation. Jacob sends messengers ahead, hoping to find favour in Esau’s sight. They return with news that Esau is approaching with four hundred men, and Genesis says that Jacob is “greatly afraid and distressed”.

He divides the household into two camps, so that if Esau attacks one, the other may escape. Then he sends goats, sheep, camels, cattle and donkeys ahead in carefully spaced droves, each carrying the same message. He hopes to secure Esau’s favour before he has to meet him face to face.

By the time our reading begins, Jacob has sent his wives, his maids, his eleven children and everything he owns across the Jabbok.

“Jacob was left alone.”

Genesis doesn’t tell us why he remains behind. Perhaps he has gone apart to pray. Perhaps he is waiting to see whether the gifts soften Esau before he puts himself in danger. He may be keeping himself safe while his household faces whatever comes first. The narrative leaves him there in the dark, between the household he has escaped and the brother he fears, with nothing more to divide and nothing left to send ahead.

Then a man wrestles with him until daybreak. They grapple through the night. When the man sees that he doesn’t prevail against Jacob, he strikes him on the hip socket and puts his hip out of joint.

Jacob still holds on. When the man says, “Let me go, for the day is breaking”, Jacob answers, “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.”

It is what Jacob has always wanted, but none of his usual methods is available here. He can’t name a price, put on someone else’s clothes, manage the breeding of his flocks or send another gift ahead. He is holding onto someone he can’t bargain with and whose identity he doesn’t know.

The man asks, “What is your name?”

Earlier, when his blind father asked, “Who are you, my son?”, Jacob answered, “I am Esau your firstborn.”

Here, in the dark, he gives his own name.

“Jacob.”

Then the stranger gives him another name: “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.”

The blessing Jacob once received under Esau’s name now comes after he has spoken his own.

Jacob asks the stranger’s name, and the stranger won’t give it. Jacob receives the blessing, but he doesn’t gain possession of the one who blesses him.

When the sun rises, he leaves with a new name, a blessing, and his hip out of joint.

Genesis doesn’t explain the injury. It doesn’t say that Jacob needed to be wounded before God could bless him. The blessing doesn’t mend his hip, and morning brings the brother he still has to meet.

Further on than our reading takes us, Jacob looks up and sees Esau approaching with four hundred men. He arranges the family once more, placing Rachel and Joseph at the back, but then goes ahead of them himself, bowing seven times as he approaches his brother. Whatever kept him behind at the Jabbok, Jacob now puts himself at the front.

Esau runs to meet him. He embraces him, falls on his neck and kisses him. They weep.

Jacob had said at Penuel that he had seen God face to face and lived. Now he tells Esau, “Truly, to see your face is like seeing the face of God, since you have received me with such favour.”

The face Jacob has dreaded for twenty years receives him.

Esau initially refuses the animals Jacob has sent, saying, “I have enough, my brother; keep what you have for yourself.”

Jacob urges him to receive them: “Please accept my gift that is brought to you, because God has dealt graciously with me, and because I have everything.”

Two men are standing in a field, one saying, “I have enough”, and the other, “I have everything”. That has never been true of these brothers before. The economy of scarcity has begun to loosen.

The word translated as “gift” is berakhah: blessing.

The man who once took Esau’s blessing now urges Esau to receive one from him. Jacob is still limping while he does it. Whatever happened in the night, his blessing no longer depends upon his brother going without.

Paul writes to Rome from another unresolved struggle, “I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart.”

Only a few verses earlier, he has said that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ. Now he says that, for the sake of his own people, he could almost wish himself “accursed and cut off from Christ”.

He is writing about his own family, his own people, and the promises through which he has learnt to know God. Their scriptures are his scriptures. Their worship has formed him. Paul’s anguish comes from trying to speak truthfully about the place of Gentiles in Christ without speaking as though Israel has been pushed aside.

There is an easy way he could resolve this. He could put Israel’s gifts in the past tense: Israel once possessed the adoption, the covenants, the law, the worship and the promises, and now the Church possesses them instead.

Paul won’t say that.

“They are Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises.”

The verbs remain in the present tense. The patriarchs are theirs, and from them, according to the flesh, comes the Messiah.

Paul will not give Gentile Christians a place by removing Israel from theirs. His anguish continues beyond the five verses we heard, but he refuses the answer that would make one people’s blessing depend upon another people’s loss.

Matthew’s Gospel brings us next to a deserted place, but Jesus doesn’t go there without cause. In the scene immediately before our reading, Herod holds a birthday banquet and John the Baptist is killed. John’s disciples take his body, bury it, and then go to tell Jesus.

When Jesus hears, he withdraws by boat to a deserted place by himself.

Matthew has already placed John at the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry. John baptised him in the Jordan, prepared his way, and preached the words Jesus later took up: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” Jesus called him “more than a prophet”.

This is the second time Matthew has described Jesus withdrawing in response to news about John. Earlier, when Jesus heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew to Galilee. There he began preaching the same words that John had preached.

Now John has been killed, and Jesus withdraws again. Herod has also heard reports about Jesus and concluded that he is John raised from the dead. What has happened to John now hangs over Jesus’ own ministry.

Matthew doesn’t tell us whether Jesus is seeking safety, prayer or room for grief. He gives us the withdrawal and leaves those possibilities open.

Matthew then says that, when the crowds heard, they followed Jesus on foot from the towns. He doesn’t specify what they had heard. It may have been the news of John’s death, the news that Jesus had withdrawn, or both. By the time Jesus comes ashore, a great crowd is there. He sees them, has compassion and cures their sick.

By evening, the disciples look at the hour and the place. The day is nearly over, and the villages are the only visible source of food. Their proposal is sensible: send the crowd away while there is still time to buy something to eat.

Jesus says, “They need not go away; you give them something to eat.”

The disciples answer, “We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish.”

Their calculation is accurate. Five loaves and two fish won’t feed thousands. The villages are the obvious answer: send the crowd away while there is still time to buy food.

Yet Matthew has placed this meal in a “deserted place”, a word that can also mean wilderness. The scene recalls Israel’s journey through the wilderness: a hungry people, far from fields and markets, about to receive bread where no source of food can be seen.

The Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann calls Pharaoh’s Egypt an economy of “administered scarcity”: grain stored and controlled from the centre, with fear of shortage answered by harder labour, greater accumulation and tighter control.

Even after Israel escapes, Egypt’s storehouses can still seem like the only place from which food might come. In the wilderness there are no crops, no markets and no stored grain. The people remember Egypt as the place where they sat beside the fleshpots and ate their fill of bread.

Yet the wilderness becomes the place where Israel discovers that life does not depend upon returning to Pharaoh’s storehouses. Quails cover the camp in the evening, and in the morning manna lies on the ground. Some gather more and some less, but when it is measured, those who have gathered much have nothing over, and those who have gathered little have no shortage. When people try to keep some until morning, it breeds worms and becomes foul.

That older story sharpens Jesus’ refusal to send the crowd away. The disciples can see no source of food except the villages. Jesus asks them to bring him what they have.

He tells the crowd to sit down on the grass. He takes the loaves, looks up to heaven, blesses and breaks them, and gives them to the disciples. The disciples then give the bread to the crowd.

Matthew never describes the moment at which the food becomes enough. He says simply, “And all ate and were filled.”

John remains dead, and Herod still rules. The meal doesn’t explain the violence or turn it into something good. It takes place in the deserted place to which Jesus withdrew after hearing what had happened.

The arithmetic of scarcity has shaped Jacob’s life and the disciples’ proposal. Paul stands between those readings and refuses it. Gentile Christians are not welcomed by stripping Israel of the adoption, the covenants, the worship and the promises. God’s mercy reaches the nations while those gifts remain Israel’s own.

That is what abundance means here. Another person’s welcome does not make ours smaller, and our salvation does not rest upon somebody else being denied it.

God blesses Jacob, and the promise entrusted to Israel is that all the families of the earth will be blessed. Jesus blesses five loaves, gives them to the disciples, and the disciples place the bread into other hands. What comes from God is received by particular people and carried beyond them.

We are invited into the same exhilarating movement: to bring to Christ who we are and what we have, however inadequate it may seem. We don’t have to manufacture abundance or secure our own supply before we begin. Christ receives what is brought, blesses it, and gives it back into our hands as something that can be shared. What we carry to others is the grace, mercy and provision we have first received from him.

That begins to change how we use what has been entrusted to us: our time, our talents and our money. We may think these are too limited to make much difference. The disciples thought the same about five loaves and two fish. What they placed in Christ’s hands became more than they could have provided by themselves.

Only afterwards do the disciples gather what remains: twelve baskets full of broken pieces.

Matthew doesn’t explain the number, but beside Jacob and Paul, Israel’s number is hard not to hear. The twelve baskets recall the twelve tribes. The blessing entrusted to Israel is extending outwards, feeding a crowd, without Israel being displaced or deprived. God’s mercy reaches others and still bears the shape of the people through whom the promise has come.

The disciples entered the deserted place believing there wasn’t enough. By evening, they are walking through it with bread in their hands, sharing what they have received from Christ.

Everyone eats and is filled.

Twelve baskets remain.