Lessons (Track 1)

As we’ve heard in the first reading, our hero Jacob has arrived in Haran. Why Haran? Well, taking advantage of the darkness of his father’s blindness, he’d stolen his brother Esau’s blessing, and Esau was out for blood. More, God had promised him many descendants, for that he needed a wife, and what better place to look than his ancestral stomping-ground?

There are two elements in the text we’re not going to focus on, and a third that will be our focus.

The first is the theme of brothers in competition, which has been almost a constant element in Genesis: Cain and Abel, Ishmael and Isaac, Esau and Jacob. And now two sisters: Leah and Rachel. In today’s text they appear very passive; in the texts immediately following their competition will dominate the action. (And those texts are very instructive for males with any fantasies regarding polygamy!) Jacob’s favorite is Rachel, but in God’s pleasure Leah has six sons, including Judah, ancestor of our Lord. The competition and preferences seem nearly inevitable, but we should not suppose—so the text—that God is going to put up with these indefinitely.

The second element: poetic justice as a sign of God’s presence. Jacob had taken advantage of the darkness of his father’s blindness to substitute the younger (himself) for the older (Esau) to steal the paternal blessing. Laban used the darkness of the wedding night to substitute the older (Leah) for the younger (Rachel). “What goes around, comes around.” Or, from St Paul:  “Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” Nevertheless, this is more the promise of a resolution than the resolution itself. “Eye for eye” alone produces a nation of the blind.

That leaves the element of desire or love. “So Jacob served seven years for Rachel, and they seemed to him but a few days because of the love he had for her.”

And I focus on desire because Jesus focuses on it in the text we heard this morning: “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls, who, on finding one pearl of great value, went and sold all that he had and bought it.”

Now that’s downright interesting. When people think about the kingdom of heaven, or, more broadly, the Christian life, they’re likely to do so in terms of the fear of God (perhaps expressed as what happens to me if I don’t) or of duty. And both the fear of God and duty can be pretty important. But here Jesus is talking about something else: desire.

The kingdom like a hidden treasure, the kingdom like a pearl of great price. And the finder responds neither through fear nor duty, but through desire. And the sacrifices the finder makes are like the 14 years that Jacob dedicated to gaining Rachel.

Where does Jesus get these parables? In this case I think he’s describing his own experience. How so? From the perspective of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, he’s left the carpentry shop and now has nowhere to lay his head. From the perspective of Paul, he “did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.” The Jesus we encounter in the Gospels: a man motivated not by fear, or by duty, but by desire.

That’s Jesus, and to Jesus we might add those we celebrate during the Church Year, and perhaps a few people we know. But how about us? Do we desire God and God’s kingdom? Sometimes. Where does this leave us?

We encounter ourselves as a swarm of desires, which rarely point in the same direction. On the trivial level: I want to be thin; I want unlimited amounts of chocolate. Part of growing up: learning that any serious desire means foregoing other desires.

If we think about the people we know and the people who keep reporters busy, we realize that the choices we make about our desires over time have a cumulative effect: there are lives of great beauty, other lives that are simply ugly, others that leave you scratching your head: “What was that about?”

Further, it’s often a problem to figure out what it is that we desire. We work hard for something we want, and then discover it’s not what we want. The Christian claim is that if we honestly pay attention to this, over time it will lead us to God. Augustine’s Confessions is organized around this insight: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you.”

So how do I deal with my desires? There’s a hard and a less hard way of doing this, and it’s related to today’s collect:

O God, the protector of all who trust in you, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy: Increase and multiply upon us your mercy; that, with you as our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal, that we lose not the things eternal…

The hard way is to do it without God as our ruler and guide. And like Augustine this long-term process of trial and error may eventually bring us to God. But this is not the only possible outcome; we can make choices whose cumulative effect is that we can perceive God only as enemy, and then how or whether God can get through to us is beyond human reckoning. So it’s risky.

The less hard way is learning to trust God as ruler and guide, to risk letting God shape or order our desires. The early chapters of Genesis tell us two things. We are created good and in God’s image, so we do not assume that desire per se is wrong. On this point we approach the world differently than the Buddhist, or the Stoic, who assume that desire in itself is the problem. But the second thing the early chapters of Genesis tell us is that we are in rebellion against God, so we do not assume that any of our desires are unaffected. As the collect reminds us, without God “nothing is strong, nothing is holy.” So these chapters tell me that I need to hold each of my desires up to God, and ask “What do you desire that I do with this?”

As we learn to trust God as ruler and guide, as God shapes our desires, these desires become stronger, not weaker. They give us greater, not less, coherence as human beings. They give us the capacity to sell all for that pearl of great price, to give 14 years for Rachel.

Now—and with this I close—the glorious secret is that our desire is only a weak response to God’s desire. “For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” God, the original Lover. And if we return to Jacob laboring 14 years for Rachel, we can see also not so much ourselves laboring to gain God, but God laboring to gain us—for love’s sake.