Jacob’s Limp

One night, Jacob wrestled with a figure who was not quite a man.

Jacob had been away from the land of his fathers for twenty years after cheating his brother out of his birthright and blessing by deceiving their blind father, Isaac. Fleeing to Mesopotamia, he encountered his uncle Laban, a wealthy herdsman with even less guile than Jacob. Jacob married Laban’s daughters, Leah and Rachel, and after being double-crossed one too many times, decided he would fare better facing his brother Esau’s wrath than living any longer near his conniving father-in-law.

As he neared Canaan, Jacob couldn’t shake a sense of impending doom. He regretted deceiving his brother. Esau had become a powerful warlord in Edom, a territory Jacob had to cross on his way home. They would certainly meet, and Jacob did not anticipate a happy reunion.

The evening before meeting Esau, Jacob separated from his family and clans and spent the night beside the Jabbok River, a place where heaven and earth seemed to converge. Jacob had seen angels earlier that day and declared, “This is God's camp!”  (Genesis 32:1-2).

During the night he was attacked by a mysterious assailant. They wrestled until the breaking of the day. When his opponent saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he touched his hip socket and put it out of joint. Still, Jacob would not let him go.

The dark rival became concerned that Jacob might see his face in the light of the rising sun. “Let me go,” he said, “for the day has broken.”

During the struggle, Jacob sensed he was not dealing with an ordinary man. This was someone greater than he, someone divine. “I will not let you go,” he said, “unless you bless me.”

The man agreed. It was as if this had been his purpose all along. “Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed.” Jacob’s name meant “he takes by the heel,” a designation that pointed not only to the unusual circumstances of his birth but also his deceitful nature.[1] The unknown being offered him a new identity, “Israel,” meaning “he strives with God.” It dawned on Jacob that he'd been wrestling with God.

“Please tell me your name,” he asked.

His rival evaded the question, saying cryptically, “Why is it that you ask my name?”

In the morning, as the sun rose on him, Jacob left the valley limping because of his hip (Genesis 32:31).

That night, Jacob was forever changed. Up to this point in his life, he had been a conniving, negotiating, lying traitor. He was “Jacob,” the deceiver. But on the night he wrestled with God, he was blessed with a new identity, one that carried him forward as the father of God's treasured nation.

Not only did God give Jacob a new name, but he also left him with a limp, a perpetual reminder of their encounter at the Jabbok River. For the remainder of his life, when he rose from his chair or walked across the room, the pain and immobility reminded him of that night. He had been changed but humbled.

Furthermore, Jacob's descendants commemorated this injury by abstaining from eating the sinew of the thigh, as Moses noted, “Therefore to this day the people of Israel do not eat the sinew of the thigh that is in the hip socket, because he touched the socket of Jacob’s hip on the sinew of the thigh” (Genesis 32:32).

Life takes a toll, leaving us with scars. Cormac McCarthy said, “Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real. The events that cause them can never be forgotten.…”[2] As if memory wasn't enough, we have our scars. Our bodies are maps in which we read our past.

Then there are the scars we cannot see. People understand an amputated limb or a burn. They have a more difficult time understanding why a woman will not leave her home or why a man is angry all the time. There are psychological wounds that will not heal—hurt, fear, guilt, regret. We carry these burdens, too.

There are numerous possible responses to the scars, marks, and limps afflicting our bodies. Some of us want to hide. We don't want to tell the story. We don't want to stick out, feel different. We don't want anyone’s pity.

I've had Parkinson's disease for over a decade. As the disease progressed, it became impossible to hide it. I've become accustomed to the way someone's eye catches my trembling hand, the unusual kick of my leg, the difficulty performing a simple task. A shadow passes over his face as he wonders what's wrong with me. “Is he on drugs?” “Does he have a neurological condition?” “What is happening to him?” The discomfort on a person’s face, the pity, is palpable. Many of you can sympathize in other ways. Our injuries expose us. If you are a private person, the social anxiety can be crippling.

Why are we self-conscious? Why do we imagine these things about us in other people's minds? We don't know what they're thinking. Our self-consciousness says more about us than them. Maybe we have been judging others by appearances, sizing them up according to their injuries, comparing ourselves, looking for imperfections to make ourselves feel strong and young. Our projections on others mirror our souls. We are often guilty of the very things we accuse them of.

Some turn bitter, like Ahab in Hermen Melville’s Moby Dick. The infamous white whale had taken his leg, driving poor Ahab into an insatiable desire for revenge. When Ishmael sees the captain for the first time, he is struck by the false appendage.

So powerfully did the whole grim aspect of Ahab affect me, and the livid brand which streaked it, that for the first few moments I hardly noted that not a little of this overbearing grimness was owing to the barbaric white leg upon which he partly stood. It had previously come to me that this ivory leg had at sea been fashioned from the polished bone of the sperm whale's jaw.[3]

Ahab’s vengeance boils, becoming self-destructive.

…it was Moby Dick that dismasted me; Moby Dick that brought me to this dead stump I stand on now. Aye, aye," he shouted with a terrific, loud, animal sob, like that of a heart-stricken moose; "Aye, aye! it was that accursed white whale that razeed me; made a poor pegging lubber of me for ever and a day!" Then tossing both arms, with measureless imprecations he shouted out: "Aye, aye! and I'll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition's flames before I give him up. And this is what ye have shipped for, men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out. What say ye, men, will ye splice hands on it, now? I think ye do look brave."[4]

Ishmael realizes the captain had defined his profession, his life, and even his very soul by his injury.

Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since that almost fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung….All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it.[5]

Illness and injury are circumstantial—they happen to us; they don't define us. Unfortunately, sometimes we expect too much out of our bodies. We interweave them with our identities until we don't know one from the other. The body cannot hold up to these expectations. When a person who has attached his entire life to the fate of his outer shell inevitably succumbs to physical weakness, he no longer knows who he is, unless he is in his essence as broken and worthless as his body. He did not choose to break down; he believes he has suffered an injustice. The natural response is to seethe like Ahab and seek revenge. But how do you strike at an illness? How do you fight a chronic injury? The battle is as futile as Ahab’s ruinous quest for Moby Dick and just as tragic.

Life is give and take. Gains and losses. Addition and subtraction. There is an equilibrium that cannot be upset. Homeostasis, the doctors call it. In relationships we sacrifice time, energy, and selfish desires for companionship and love. In business, we understand that you cannot make money unless you invest it. Spiritual growth requires study, sacrifice, faith.

Life comes with a price. We gain experience. We pay for it with scars.

What are you going to do about it? You can pity yourself, mope about, feel self-conscious, try to hide. You can rage against the faceless enemy and fight the unwinnable war against illness and death. You can look at what a disease or an accident has taken from you.

Or you could look at what it has given you. There is a reason we heal with scars. Scars remind us where we've been, and we can't understand where we are unless we are able to trace the road we came on back to its origins.

God does not want us to be haunted by history. He paid for our salvation in blood so that we will not have to be defined by our regrets. In the Psalms he describes forgiveness as removing our transgressions “as far as the east is from the west” (Psalm 103:12). The cross replaces our sins with Christ's righteousness, an exchange we do not deserve, yet by grace it is ours (2 Corinthians 5:21).

The new covenant promise is, “I will remember their sins no more” (Hebrews 8:12). However, if we believe this involves a forsaking of God's omniscience, some erasure from his mind, a miraculous amnesia, we misunderstand his meaning. Yes, he treats us as if he no longer remembers our sins, but sadly, they cannot be wiped from our past. We are counted as righteous, but we will never be like the Son of Man who never sinned (Romans 4:5). We will forever be indebted to the one who never sinned and died in our place. With Paul, we say, “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost” (1 Timothy 1:15). Far from being a repudiation of the gospel, this confession confirms it. If we forget where we came from, we lose the ability to be grateful. So let us always give thanks by remembering that without Christ, we would be utterly lost in sin.

Jacob limped so that he never forgot who he was before and how he came to be the father of God's nation. We hobble along behind him, heading for glory despite our sins, thanking God we don't have to be who we were.

[1] Jacob was a twin born clutching his older brother's heel. The significance of “Jacob” as “deceiver” may be explained by the idea of someone slipping up from behind an enemy to catch him by surprise. Another possible connection may lie in the idea of tripping someone's feet.

[2]Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group: Kindle Edition), 135.

[3] Melville, Herman. Moby Dick: or, the White Whale (p. 90). Kindle Edition.

[4] Ibid., 116.

[5] Ibid., 128.