JACOB’S LADDER AND THE SECRET LIVES OF FAMILIES

 

The stories of nations are told through their kings and queens and rulers; ordinary people rarely get a look in, especially the further back you go in history. But the origin of God’s people is told through a family, and a dysfunctional one at that.

 

We are familiar with the distinguished refrain, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. It sounds lofty, but the family that God chose to reveal his saving purpose through got tangled up in messes worthy of a soap opera. Both Abraham and Isaac lied when it suited them, while Jacob was embroiled in an epic battle for supremacy with his twin brother, Esau.

 

It’s said that ‘Esau was a skilful hunter, a man of the field, while Jacob was a quiet man, living in tents’. They were, if you like, the archetypes of the jock and the nerd. And the nerd was craftier and more calculating by half. Esau was the older of the two by a few minutes, and therefore the first born son with all the entitlements this bestowed in the ancient world. But Jacob, playing on his brother’s impulsiveness, conned Esau into selling his birthright to Jacob. This was compounded later on when Jacob, at his mother Rebekah’s prompting, disguised himself as his hairier brother in order to steal his blind father’s final blessing from Esau as the first born.

 

Let’s face it, Jacob was the kind of sibling who really irritates the rest of the family, who can’t be trusted to do the right thing and is always looking to promote his interests over others. This was compounded by his parents, Isaac and Rebekah, who showed brazen favouritism between them: Issac for Esau and Rebekah for Jacob. It’s often the case in families that parents have favourite children and yet seem blissfully unaware of how obvious this is to others or how damaging it proves. And it can be replicated in some favoured children when they become parents. An older, more mature Jacob should have seen the damage that his parents’ favouritism did to him and Esau, but he went on to show outrageous favouritism to his own son, Joseph, that tore the family apart.

 

And yet in all these events, God was quietly working his purpose out. It is a striking truth that God chose to work his eternal purposes out through a family worthy of Eastenders. And he continues his work of salvation in families today. I do not know the circumstances of anyone reading this, but I can guarantee that most of you, in your wider family, will have experienced at the very least annoyance and irritation, if not outright pain and hurt, at the hands of some relatives. It is often easier to love people we know less well, simply because we know less about them. Families are a wonderful means of grace and blessing when they are good, but the flip side is how much they mess with our heads when things go wrong.

 

God chose a family to reveal his salvation to the whole world and in doing so, showed the value of individual families to him. And in choosing a dysfunctional family, he shows the rest of us that no matter how bad things can get, he will always be present and innovatively figuring out how to bring good out of it all. It is not always advisable to get involved in the affairs of another family, but a church, when following Jesus, is at its best when it shows pastoral care for people who are hurting because of their families. Family stories may be knotted and hard to unpick, but God knows these stories inside out and is masterful at threading his salvation.

 

Jacob’s endless scheming was too much for Esau, who vowed to murder his brother after their father’s death. Hearing of this, their mother Rebekah pleaded with Jacob to leave home and move to another land to live with his uncle, under the pretext of finding a wife for himself. This is the background to the story of Jacob’s ladder in Genesis chapter 28. Jacob is temporarily homeless, tired and disorientated. A man renowned for loving the indoor life of a settled home was in the wide open, in an unfamiliar place, and on his own. It’s unlikely he slept well; the stone under his head making for shallow sleep and a stiff neck. Being in the open, he was also at risk from robbers and wild animals.

 

This was Jacob, the plotter who relished being in control, at his maximum point of vulnerability. And then in the middle of bad sleep he has this dream of a ladder reaching from heaven to earth, with angels going up it and coming down (which incidentally probably means it was a wider ladder than the one you use to clear leaves from the gutter). His future son, Joseph, was gifted at interpreting dreams, but Jacob’s dream came with a ready message from God, and it is easy to miss its significance.

 

When God appeared to his grandfather Abraham, he was writing the opening chapter of his story of salvation, announcing he would make a nation out of Abraham’s offspring, giving them a land of their own to live in. We know, too, that Jesus the Messiah would emerge from this nation. The promise to Abraham was first contact from God on where he would take the human race. God repeated this promise to Isaac, Abraham’s son. And he repeated it to Jacob, as Jacob watched the vivid scene of the angels ascending and descending.

 

We don’t know how this story was passed down the family line, but it must have been in some way or other. Yet the story was not enough; Isaac and Jacob needed their own personal encounter with God to bring this story alive for them. In Jacob’s life, there is no indication whether he had a prior relationship with God or not. The evidence of his scheming points to a man who didn’t know much or care much about the character of God, until this dream. But he woke up to say: ‘Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it!’.

 

There are many people today in families where previous generations had a living faith in God, but it got lost along the way. It’s a refrain you hear many times, often expressed unkindly in these terms: the grandparents had faith, the children lacked the faith but kept the values, and the grandchildren kept neither faith nor values. Around us today are many households who know about the faith of their parents and grandparents. But I wonder, how many of them are quietly having spiritual experiences – like Jacob - that they don’t know what to do with? I suspect the answer is: a lot. It may not be as intense as Jacob, rediscovering his family’s faith, but around us, God’s Spirit is endlessly, inventively moving in the hearts of people to bring them to faith. And this will have been the prayer of their ancestors.

 

So my open question is: what families can we offer pastoral care to, where healing is needed, and how would we go about this? And how can we help people interpret their spiritual experiences, to join the dots that lead them back to the faith their parents and grandparents had?

 

As we size up a world that feels like it is spiralling out of control today, we face sizeable challenges. However big those problems are, God will work his purposes out. And as so many times before, he will do it quietly, through the families we live in, warts and all.