Understanding Genesis: Jacob

If we weren't sinners, it wouldn't be a struggle. We would, I've used that image before, we would dance with the Lord. We'd walk in easy harmony with him. But because we're sinners, we're, we're gonna fight with them, and we end up, as Jacob does, wounded by the struggle.

Welcome back to The Word on Fire Show. I'm Brandon Vogt, Senior Publishing Director at Word on Fire. Today, we're going to continue our series on understanding Genesis. We'll be focusing on Jacob, the famous patriarch of ancient Israel. How should we understand scenes in his life, including the famous Jacob's ladder, his mysterious wrestling match, and much more?

But before we get there, I want to welcome Bishop Robert Barron. Bishop, always good to see you.

Hey Brandon, always good to see you too. Even though it's across, what, 3,000 miles of territory, but it looks like you're right here with me. We're recording this in December, where, of course, in Florida, it's still in the upper 80s. Uh, but I know you, you just told me, in Santa Barbara, it's chilly.

It's a little chilly, and our studio here doesn't have, uh, heat, and so it gets really cold here when it's cold outside. But I'll survive.

Listen, um, you just got to do something that is unique to bishops, and that is ordain a young priest. Tell us about that experience.

Oh, it was a great experience. Just the other day, I was at one of our parishes in Oxnard, California, which has a lot of people. And, uh, he's a young man from the Missionaries of the Holy Spirit order. Um, you might know Bishop Gustavo Garcia-Sierra, who used to be bishop in Chicago, auxiliary, and now he's the Archbishop of San Antonio. He's a member of that community, and they're active, very much in my region. So I ordained this, uh, young man, who's a great guy, and it's just a terrific celebration. The church was filled with people. I think, you know, everyone's kind of sick of COVID, and so it was great to get together. And, uh, it's such a beautiful liturgy. I've been to a, I've been to a thousand, I'm probably a little bit jaded, you know, but most people have never seen a priestly ordination. There's so many beautiful touches to it. So I, uh, enjoyed that immensely. It's, as you say, a unique privilege of a bishop to do it, and so I always enjoy it.

I know a lot of listeners here are already members of the Word on Fire Institute, but whether you are not, I wanted to share with you news of a brand new course that is just launching this week at the Institute. It's titled Faith, Science, and Sin, and it's taught by our good friend Dr. Christopher Baglow. Bishop, I know you know Chris Baglow very well. He is the Director of the Science and Religion Initiative at the University of Notre Dame's McGrath Institute for Church Life. But this new course looks at the richest insights of the Catholic intellectual tradition, facing the problem of evil amidst God's creation. So it deals with questions like, what makes humans so special? And how might modern science serve as a stepping stone rather than a stumbling block to understanding the problem of evil? So if that sounds interesting to you, science, theology, God, evil, sign up for the Word on Fire Institute and check out this brand new course.

All right, Bishop, let's get back to our series here on understanding Genesis. Every, uh, month or so, we do a new episode. We've been walking through the creation story and Adam and Eve and Abraham. Today, we're going to talk about Jacob, who is the son of Isaac and one of the seminal patriarchs of the ancient Jews. I want to start at the beginning of his story. We read this, this kind of weird story of his birth between him and his twin brother, Jacob and Esau. I'm going to read you the text in the NRSV version, although I, I understand you have a, a funny King James version interpretation or impersonation. Uh, but the NRSV says that when the time to give birth was at hand, there were twins in her womb, in the mother's womb. The first came out red, all his body like a hairy mantle, and so they named him Esau. Afterward, his brother came out with his hand gripping Esau's heel, so he was named Jacob. When the boys grew up, Esau was a skillful hunter, a man of the field, while Jacob was a quiet man, living in tents. Isaac loved Esau because he was fond of game, but Rebekah, the mother, loved Jacob. Maybe let's stop there and talk about this juxtaposition that the scriptures present to us between these two brothers, Jacob and Esau.

Yeah, it's so interesting, isn't it? It's classical in some ways. Our version would be, I suppose, um, Luke and Leia in Star Wars, you know, this set of twins that's an archetypal theme. So the, the tension between two types of individual. So you see it there with Jacob and Esau. Um, Esau is hairy, he's a hunter, he's a man of the earth and of the field, and sort of, you know, back to basics. Jacob, uh, who's more associated with, with his mother and with the tents, which means like the area of civilization or the city, we might say. So they represent this archetypal tension between two interests, two styles of life, two approaches, two ways of prioritizing. And you can see it up to the present day, can't you? People fall into these patterns. So what the, you know, story here is reflecting on, among many other things, but one of them, I think, is this tension that's out there in the world and in society, but also in here. Bob Dylan's got that line, "I fought with my twin, that enemy within." So that we, we all are made up of, of, you know, tensive opposites. Paul Tillich called them the ontological polarities, you know, for unity, but also for diversity, for creativity, but also for form and order. And so, in a way, that's Jacob and Esau in their mother's womb, and they're, they're from the beginning, sort of fighting with each other. So Jacob grabbing at the heel of Esau, uh, it's the tension going on around us and in us in regards to some of these basic patterns of life.

You want to give us your story from Father Tom about the hairy Esau and the smooth Jacob?

My good friend Father Tom O'Connor, who's a priest and, uh, he teaches at Maynooth over in Ireland, and he used to laugh because I guess there was this comedy album back in the day, and it was a man kind of mocking this sort of high Anglican preacher. And the translation evidently in the King James is, is, uh, "My brother Esau was a hairy man, and I was a smooth man." And so he chose that kind of peculiar text as his, as his, you know, sermon theme. Anyway, that's a, that's another story.

All right. Well, moving on in Jacob's story, um, we, of course, learned that Jacob tricks his elder brother Esau out of his birthright. So Esau was born just a few seconds earlier, so he was the firstborn, he gets the birthright from Isaac. But he trades it for a bowl of stew to, to Jacob. Jacob then becomes fearful of Esau, recognizing that Esau might seek revenge for this trick, and so he flees. Um, but along the way, as he's fleeing from Esau, he has one of the most profound mystical encounters in all of the Old Testament tradition. Near a place called Beersheba, Jacob takes a stone as a pillow. He's laying down on this stone for the night, and he has a dream of a ladder. It's set on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. And then the Lord speaks to Jacob, saying, "I am the Lord, I am the God of Abraham your father, and the God of Isaac. The land on which you lie, I will give to you and to your offspring. And your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south, and all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you." How should we understand this encounter?

It might take a whole lifetime to unpack that story totally. Go back to the very beginning, Brandon. The, um, play of Jacob and Esau. So Esau, the man of the earth, the hunter of primal desires. And let's face it, not that bright, because he's hungry in the moment, and so he's willing to sell his birthright. He's willing to sell the most kind of spiritually advanced attainment of his life for the immediate satisfaction of his hunger. Well, we all recognize that. That's all of us when we're in the grip of these sort of primal emotions for food and drink and sex. And if you're living at that very basic, primal level, you'll surrender the highest and best things for the satisfaction of an immediate need. Talk to anyone caught in an addictive pattern. That's often what's going on. Is, is there, I know I shouldn't do this. I know I'm sacrificing my family. I know I'm sacrificing my good name. I know I'm sacrificing what I could achieve in other areas of life, but I'll give up all of that for some bean soup or what, whatever it is that Esau is eating. It's a, it's a comical story, but it's also kind of a tragic account of what it means to be living only at that level. Now, do Pascal and Kierkegaard write this is living purely at the aesthetic level, purely at the level of the body? Now, Jacob is a lot brighter. So he's living at a somewhat higher level. He's a civilized man, he's living among the tents. He's craftier, right? Esau, basic hunter, food, now hungry. You know, where Jacob is now playing a much more subtle game. So he's after higher types of goods, but there's a shadow side too. He's, he's clever in a kind of manipulative way. Um, but we're looking at different levels of attainment. Uh, we can get stuck at the level of Esau. So there's a higher level, call it the intellectual, the civilizational, right? All the arts and all of that. But now, now go to the ladder. What if Jacob had just stayed there? Smart guy, clever guy, uh, uh, willing to kind of manipulate his not very bright brother. Well, okay, he's higher in a way, but he's also, he's also unrealized. Now, with the ladder, is there something that links us to the highest power that goes beyond mere mind and mere civilizational attainment, and is now a link to the highest value, the summum bonum of God? So I would read, Brandon, exactly the narrative you unfolded there, as the move from a real basic level, me hungry, food now, give me bean soup, to smart, clever, but a little on the manipulative and self-absorbed side, two, what links me to the highest power? So the ladder, it's, it's controversial among the scholars how best to render that term. The trouble, we say ladder, we think of like the ladder you put against the side of a house to climb up to the roof. That probably, the scholars suggest, it's more like a ziggurat, you know, a temple that went up like this, like a st, st, with steps and stairs. So the idea is a temple, a holy place where the angels of God ascend and descend. It's a point of encounter with the highest power. What's it like to transcend the mere bodily interest, the mere intellectual interest, and now come, go back to Pascal, the level of the heart, go to Kierkegaard, to the properly religious level of life? I think that's the progression that we're seeing in that narrative.

What's interesting about this Jacob's ladder is that it's one of the few scenes from the Old Testament that Jesus in the New Testament explicitly references and associates himself with. So remember in the Gospel of John, when Jesus is addressing Nathanael, who had been flabbergasted by Jesus's knowledge of him from a distance, the Lord tells Nathanael, "Do you believe because I saw you under the fig tree? You will see greater things than these." And then Jesus says to him, "Very truly I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man." What did Jesus mean by this?

This is one of the great themes in the whole Bible, isn't it? Go right back to the, the Garden of Eden. We talked about this. Eden is itself a mountain because the rivers flow forth from it, they flow down from it. Eden's a kind of elevated space where we go up, God comes down, and they meet. Um, we go to Mount Sinai later, you go to Mount Tabor, in Jesus' time, you go to Mount Zion, where the temple is built, where the tribes go up, Yahweh comes down, and there they meet. So this Jacob's ladder, based on the stone, I think now the Temple of the Rock, right? I've seen that in Jerusalem. Was it in their minds that upon this sacred rock, this, this Mount Zion, we find the place of privileged encounter? Jesus is saying, it seems to me, you know, all that stuff from the Old Testament, you know, all of it, going back to Jacob. I'm now the one in whom this is taking place in an unsurpassed way. I'm Eden, I'm Tabor, I'm Mount Sinai, I'm Mount Zion, true pole of the earth. I'm the rock upon which Jacob laid his head, because you will now see the angels of God ascending and descending upon me, upon the Son of Man. So it's Jesus as priest, as temple, as holy mountain. Now think of that. Catholics listening to me, every time we go to Mass, that's what the Mass is. Think of the altar, this, the stony altar, as like the stone that Jacob put his head on. Think of it as Tabor, of Sinai, of Zion, of Eden, of Calvary, right? It's this sacred place of encounter where we go up to the Lord, the Lord comes down, and meets us. All of that, it seems to me, is anticipated in this wonderful, you know, story of Jacob and sleeping, dreaming, we might say. What's dreaming, but a higher form of consciousness? So there's Esau consciousness, you know, me hungry, food now. There's Jacob consciousness, which is intelligence and and cleverness. But then, is there this highest level of consciousness? I think the dream of Jacob corresponds to Pascal's heart and to Kierkegaard's religion. It's the sort of highest form of perception. That's what we're talking about, I think, there.

I know a lot of the Church Fathers played with that same interpretation you just shared of Christ as the stone on which Jacob slept. But I think it's interesting after he wakes up from this dream, listen to what he does now with the stone. He says, "Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it." Then he took the stone upon which he rested his head, he set it up as a sacred marker, anointed it with oil, and then declared, "This stone which I have set up for a pillar shall be God's house." What's he getting at there?

Same thing. And we do it to this day, don't we? When we dedicate a church, and I, I love those liturgies. I've been involved in a number of them, and I've, I've done it. When you, you have to smear the oil over the altar, you consecrate the altar with the holy chrism. So that's what's going on there. Is Jacob, a priest, who's consecrating the altar as a place of communion and sacrifice? Now, that anticipates the temple in Jerusalem, which is exactly the same thing, anointed by the high priest for the sake of communion and sacrifice. That's Jesus, who is himself the temple, the altar, the priest, right? That's why, as a, when I annoy, when I ordained the priest the other day, this young man, I put oil in the, in his two palms. How beautiful too, by the way, that when he gave his blessing to the priests who came up to greet him, they reverenced his two hands, these newly anointed priests' hands. All of that, Brandon, I think, is being called to mind with this anointing of the, of the rock.

After this pivotal encounter, uh, Jacob still following his mother's advice to flee, ends up in the land of Laban. Laban was his uncle. He sits down beside a well, and I know the last time we talked about Genesis, we talked about the significance of these meetings at the well. And there he meets Laban's beautiful daughter named Rachel. He falls in love with her. He wants to marry her. But then he goes through this long, 14-year crucible of deception, where he's tricked into marrying Rachel's sister, Leah, and then he works for several more years to finally marry the woman he loved. How should we process this difficult episode of Jacob's life?

God's in charge, not us. And it's a basic biblical theme. Is, you know, we have lots of ideas about our lives, what we want. And some of them are really good. They're not wicked, they're good ideas, they're good programs and plans. And so we set out, here's what I want. Sometimes God allows us to attain these things, okay? Often he doesn't. Often God puts a block in the way of our project. Now, how come? Because it's wicked? Not necessarily. Sometimes he, sometimes he lets us do wicked things. We know that God permits sin to take place. But why does God block sometimes even a very good intention? I'll give you a good example. David, "Lord, I want to build you a house." And the Lord says, "David, you're great, I love you, but it's not for you, it's for your son." Right? David wasn't proposing something wicked, but the Lord didn't want David to do it. So with Jacob, he's got it together. I know the woman I want to marry, there she is. And and he will eventually marry her, in fact, but it wasn't time. Now, why? I don't know entirely. The text might give us some clues. Think of a related story, Joseph and his brothers. Will Joseph, in fact, rule over his brothers? Will they come and bow down to him? Yeah, they will. But at that point in the story, that little bratty kid was not ready to be the king or anything. He needed years of discipline. Think of Moses going out into the desert, right, for years, years after his time in Egypt, before he's ready. So Jacob, I don't know, the Lord made him wait. Uh, you find in Dante's Divine Comedy, the people who have come to Mount Purgatory, and boy, are they happy they're in Purgatory and they're ready to go. "Hey, let me get started, let me start the progression process, I want to get to heaven." Nope, nope, you got to wait. How long? I don't know. It's up to the Lord. Sometimes in the spiritual order, you have to wait, and it's mysterious, and it's hard to understand, but it's essential because we're on God's time, not God's plan, not our own.

Let's keep going with Jacob. He's got such an eventful life here. He goes from the whole early episode with his brother Esau to fleeing to the ladder to Rachel and Leah. But then we read about one of the most significant wrestling matches in the history of the world. Um, Jacob meets this strange figure, uh, and gets into a wrestling match with him all through the night until daybreak. Uh, who was this figure? What's the significance of this encounter?

It's one of my favorite scenes in the whole Bible since I was a kid and first came across that scene, I've loved it. I remember in the children's Bible my parents got for me, there's an image of Jacob wrestling, and it's, it's a good image, like he's really, really into it, you know, you can tell it's a struggle. And I've, I've loved that story and I've tried to plumb the depths of it and read all the commentaries on it, and it's intrigued, I think, a lot of the great spiritual figures in our tradition. Brandon, dealing with God is not easy, and it's not for the faint of heart. And if you think this is, oh, it's great, God, and God is great, and God loves me, and everything will be terrific, you're not dealing with the living God. Right? What we hear in the New Testament, it's a, it's a fearsome thing to fall into the hands of a living God. Uh, God wants us to be fully alive, but we're all sinners, which means we're always fighting him. We're always fighting him. Uh, I'll give you a dumb example, but you know, from golf. Uh, one time I was working with his golf coach, and, um, he was good, he was trying to get my body in the right position, right, to make the proper swing. So he kind of got behind me, and he had his, he was putting my arms, and as I'm swinging, he goes, "You're fighting me. You're f-" And I'm doing it right now, I can tell I'm doing it, I'm coming over the top. And he was trying to get me to come from the inside. I won't bore you with the details, but as I was, I was swinging, he goes, "You're fighting me. You're fighting me." See, you're, you're caught in a bad pattern, you're swinging poorly. I'm trying to get you in the right pattern, but you're fighting me, you know? So there's a lot of the spiritual life, right? To all my fellow sinners out there, that's a lot of the spiritual life. Is God comes to us, but he's gonna come to wrestle with us because he wants us in right form. And you're fighting me, you're fighting me, you know? So Jacob, to his great credit, gets in the list there with God. So this figure is a man, but is he an angel? Is he God? Well, he's all three in a way. You know, he's a, it's an avatar of God, I would say. This angel, but it symbolizes the struggle we all have with God because we're sinners. If we weren't sinners, it wouldn't be a struggle. We would, I've used that image before, we would dance with the Lord. We'd walk in easy harmony with him. But because we're sinners, we're, we're gonna fight with them, and we end up, as Jacob does, wounded by the struggle. Who's a holy person? One way to answer that question. Someone that clearly has a limp from a struggle with God. You can tell the people who've really wrestled with God, and those who are kind of horsing around with God, those who are off on the sidelines somewhere, you know? And those who said, "No, I'm gonna get into the arena with God." And, uh, I mean, God's gonna win because that's the way it goes. And the longer you're with him, the sure the chances are he's gonna win because he wants you to be fully alive. But, you know what? It's gonna hurt, and it'll probably leave you wounded because your sin was deep in you, and the Lord had to do something strong to extricate it. And I, I think the beauty of that, actually, I think in my own life too, that that the wound itself is a constant reminder of, yeah, yeah, that's the work God had to do to get me back online. It still hurts. It still hurts that struggle. I'm giving you one angle on it. I mean, read the Fathers and everybody else with all kinds of different perspectives, but that's how I look at that story. It's, uh, the story of every sinner. But you need the courage to get in there and fight with God. Don't give up. You know, trouble with secularism and all this crazy atheism and stuff is this people giving up. It's, "God is mysterious. God doesn't do what I want." Well, duh. I mean, it's, what do you expect? Do you think God's going to do what you want all the time? Or, oh, and I don't understand why we suffer. Well, no one understands that. It's, it's always been a dilemma. But you don't give up and say, "Oh, well, then there's no God," and "I'm just on my own." No, no. Get in there and wrestle with him. Get in there and wrestle with him. And, and he's gonna wound you, but he's also gonna name you, you know? And so Jacob becomes beautifully Israel, which means "the one who struggled with God." And that, to me, is supremely beautiful. The people Israel, named for him, they're the people that have wrestled with God. They still are, by the way. You know, I think of, of Karl Barth's famous line, like, "What's the best argument for God's existence?" He said, "The present existence of the Jews," meaning that there still exists this holy people of God, Israel, who wrestled with God. We, the Church, the new Israel, right? So grafted onto ancient Israel, we continue the struggle with God. I gave a whole sermon there. I apologize for that, but it's such a great story.

That wrestling scene occurs when Jacob is on his way home to apologize to Esau. He wants to make amends with him, maybe clear up the inheritance situation. So in a sense, the, the final meeting between these two is kind of an anti-climax. But despite Jacob's fears, his brother Esau meets him with graciousness. Jacob bows to the ground seven times as a signal of his obedience and his repentance. Um, but in a scene that always calls to my mind the Prodigal Son parable, we see, uh, Esau racing toward Jacob, and not, not in aggression, he's not coming to attack him, but in an eagerness to embrace him. Here's what the scriptures say: "Esau ran to meet him and embraced him, fell on his neck and kissed, and they wept."

You've said, Bishop, in your writings elsewhere, that this reconciliation of these two brothers is a beautiful icon of what a reconciled Israel could become for the rest of the world. How is this so?

Well, look at the arc of that story. They begin in the womb of their mother, and they're kind of, they're wrestling with each other. They go through their lives with all this archetypal conflict of the hairy person and the civilized person, all that stuff. They have a terrible falling out, I mean, awful falling out, when Jacob, uh, tricks him out of the most precious thing. But then at the end of the story, after both, now we haven't heard that much about Esau, we've heard a lot about Jacob, we know, but what the Lord put him through, the mill, didn't he? I mean, 14 years of waiting and and discipline, and then the great struggle, all of that, until they both were ready. So they begin in the womb, struggling. The long arc of the story, and then it's like they're back. Now, he fell on his neck, like they're, they're back in the womb together again, the two of them are reconciled. But here's the point: if they stand for these two dimensions of of human being, how do they get reconciled in God? See, if they just stay at this level, they're going to fight all the time. But if together they acknowledge the primacy of God, then they can find a way to reconcile. See, should we get rid of the Esau part of ourselves? No, no. We're embodied people. We get hungry, and we have primal needs, and all that. Beautiful, the body's great. God wants to save our bodies, right? We don't want to get rid of Esau. You don't want to get rid of Jacob, you know, get rid of the intellectual. No, no. You want them to be reconciled, and it happens through a common love of God. Now, we see their relevance to us, as Jacob and Esau are fighting inside each one of us all the time. How do we reconcile them together? Bring them to, um, acknowledge the primacy of God, and then they'll, they'll be reconciled in us.

Well, it's time now for our question from one of our listeners today. We have one from a woman named Autumn, who lives in your region, Bishop. She's from Santa Barbara, California. Name, Autumn. She's asking about the timing of salvation history. Why it was that God waited to when he did to give us the scriptures and to, to incarnate Christ? So here's Autumn's question.

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Hi Bishop Barron, this is Autumn from Santa Barbara. I'm a new Catholic. I just went through RCIA last year, and a big question that I have that I feel like wasn't answered during my RCIA was, why is it that we just got this information from the Bible from God 2,000 years ago, um, and why is it that Jesus just came 2,000 years ago? What happens to all those people before that?

Yeah, thank you. It's a question that goes back to someone like St. Irenaeus. God seems to like slow and steady processes. I'll take that as just a basic view. He seems to like things like evolution, that things gradually unfold in the course of time. So Irenaeus says, for example, the fullness of revelation in Christ needed a long preparation before anybody was ready for it. It needed the long preparation of Israel, all those centuries of God gradually disclosing himself, so that they'd be ready to receive the Messiah. Now, to your question, go back before that. What made the human race ready even for the revelation to Israel? Well, you might say, who knows? Eons of preparation as God is bringing his people to the point where they were ready to receive a particular revelation. And of course, he revealed himself to this particular people, not to everyone all at once. How come he did it that way? Well, he seems to like that too, that that great things begin small, that he begins with one, which then develops toward a more universal perspective. Let me give you one impression now about your, your question directly. What is there within the human heart from the very beginning of humanity? What we might call the natural law, that's to say, some keen moral sense of purpose, of what the difference between good and evil, etc. And, and yes, I'll say with C.S. Lewis, you could find that all the way back to the beginnings of humanity. Was that, in a way, a very distant preparation for eventually Israel and the Ten Commandments and eventually Jesus, the incarnation of the Torah? Yeah, yeah. And that seems to be God's preferred way. Now, is everyone lost before Jesus? Everyone lost before Israel? Well, no. As Vatican II points out, that, that even following one's conscience is indeed following Christ. Right? Christ is, as Newman said, the, the, uh, or the conscience is the aboriginal vicar of Christ in the soul. So are the all those, you know, eons and eons ago, who are following their conscience, in a way, you know, walking the path towards salvation. Yeah. But God seems to like this sort of slow, gradual unfolding of his plan over time. That's a quick answer to a complex question.

Well, thanks, Autumn, for your question. If you have a question for Bishop Barron, send it in to us at the website, askbishopbarron.com. Also, before we wrap up here, one more reminder about this brand new Word on Fire Institute course, which is just starting this week. It's titled Faith, Science, and Sin. It's taught by Dr. Christopher Baglow from the University of Notre Dame. It introduces us to some of the richest Catholic insights on questions swirling around the topics of sin, science, God, theology, and the problem of evil. So if you want to learn more about that, sign up at the website, wordonfire.institute. Get access not only to this course but to tons of other courses and bonuses, including the full library of Bishop Barron's films and video programs. Again, the website's wordonfire.institute.

Well, thanks so much for joining us for this latest edition of our Understanding Genesis series, and we'll see you next time on The Word on Fire Show.

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