Genesis 29:15-28 Commentary

“When morning came, there was Leah!”

Hands down that is one of the funniest lines in the Bible.  Imagine the fun a good Hollywood director would have setting up the scene and the dramatic flair of music to accompany the moment of the big reveal.  Jacob wakes up, wipes the sleep out of his eyes, and taps the shoulder of his new wife, Rachel who is facing the other way in their bed.  Before turning over to face him, his wife says, “Good morning, darling” and then . . . ever . . . so . . . slowly . . . she rolls over, faces him, and smiles.

And it’s Leah!  Weak-eyed, less attractive, not-the-woman-of-Jacob’s-dreams Leah.  Cue the dramatic music, maybe some slashing violins a la Bernard Hermann.

We have been noting for the past few weeks in these sermon commentaries from the Jacob cycle of stories in Genesis that the playing of dirty tricks seems to have been a family tradition for Jacob’s mother, Rebekah and her brother Laban.  Jacob is powerfully good at it too but he is meeting his near match in Uncle Laban.  Jacob is living with Laban precisely because he had had to flee his home after colluding with his mother to deceive his father Isaac and so cheat his twin brother Esau out of the family blessing.   Esau had fratricide on his brain and so Rebekah sends Jacob out on the lam to his Uncle Laban.

Turns out it’s a bit of the old “out of the frying pan into the fire” scenario in one sense.  Jacob promptly falls head over heels in love with his first cousin, Rachel, who is described in fairly vivid terms in Genesis 29 as a swoon-worthy beauty.  Her older sister Leah . . . well, not so much.  Jacob is so deeply in love that he agrees to work seven whole years to earn Rachel’s hand in marriage and the time flies by.  Albert Einstein once somewhat cheekily described his theory of relativity this way: one minute sitting on a red-hot stove can feel like three hours whereas three hours sitting with your beloved on a sofa can seem like one minute.  For Jacob, we are told, the seven years of waiting for Rachel seemed like only a few days.

But all along, on every single one of the 2,555 days Jacob worked, his Uncle Laban had a plan.  Jacob would get Leah first (since the guys were apparently not lining up to marry her) and after that they could negotiate his taking a second wife in the person of Jacob’s one true love, Rachel.  He would not have to wait seven more years to marry Rachel but only one week (though he did have to work for seven additional years after that).  But of course the story does not end here.  After all, now Jacob has one wife he doesn’t love or much care for and another wife who is his be-all and end-all, and if that does not sound like a formula for a rocky future, I don’t know what would.

It’s pretty hard to square a good bit of the Bible in the Old Testament with the marriage and sexual ethic the Christian church would eventually adopt.  In the subsequent stories we are told God felt sorry for loveless Leah and so enables her to bear child after child while Rachel remained childless.  So Rachel uses her female servant as a sexual proxy for Jacob to have children with.  Not to be outdone, Leah will soon follow suit with her female servant.  Eventually we are told God finally took pity on Rachel and she ended up giving birth to Joseph and years later would die while giving birth to Jacob’s last son, Benjamin.  Unsurprisingly, Joseph was the apple of his father’s eye with Benjamin not far behind.  Also unsurprisingly this is not going to sit well with all of Jacob’s other sons and, well, we’ll get to all that in due time in Genesis.

Once again we are faced with narratives that in so many ways seem a bit on the unedifying end of the spectrum.  We’ve got deceit and trickery, jealousy and envy, and Jacob having sex with one woman after the next, two of whom are his first cousins.  This ain’t no Hallmark Channel movie.  Yet these are the characters through whom God is advancing his covenant to save all the nations of the earth.  The cleaned-up Sunday school versions of these stories just won’t cut it.  We need the earthy, gritty, and yes at times the unsavory realities of it all to sink in.  Sunday school gives us plastic saints.  The Bible gives us real people with foibles and flaws and faults.

These are the kinds of people who—same as all of us—both exhibit why we need God’s grace in our lives and who remind us that God doles out that grace in prodigal ways that do not wait for us to clean up our own acts perfectly before or until God will work in us and through us.  The Bible is less often a book filled with characters whose lives and morality we are supposed to imitate and is more often a book that is like a mirror held up in front of our own flawed selves so that we can see ourselves in these stories and wonder anew at the grace God gives us despite it all.

In the stories that follow (but that the Lectionary will skip), we will witness the births of the people whose names would pass on to the twelve tribes of Israel: Reuben, Simon, Judah, Dan, and the rest.  These are the real people who become the building blocks of the whole nation of Israel whose lineage will extend all the way down in history to the birth of the one they’d name Jesus.  This Jesus would found a New Israel and of that we who follow Christ as Savior and Lord are now members.  And like the sons of Jacob whose heritage we now claim spiritually speaking, we children of the New Israel likewise struggle and fail and are far from plastic saints at any given moment.  But God is present in all our messes.  And that is a grace worthy of loud and faithful proclamation over and over.

Illustration Idea

In other sermon commentaries here on the CEP website I have likely at some point mentioned something I learned a while back from the great artist Mako Fujimura.  Mako has regularly lectured on the Japanese art form known as kintsugi.  Kintsugi is the art that emerges after precious family heirlooms in the form of tea sets or other bowls and vessels break, perhaps from one of the many earthquakes Japan experiences.  In kintsugi the vessel is repaired, glued back together.  But unlike how we might do it in America—concealing where the breaks were so we can say in the end “It’s good as new!”—the mending points are actually highlighted, often in bright gold so no one can miss where the cup or bowl had broken.

It is a reminder, Fujimura says, that a new beauty can come out of our brokenness.  We need not deny our pains in life, our disappointments, the places where we have felt dislocated and broken.  Like the fact that Jesus somehow retained his crucifixion scars even after being raised with a resurrection body, so kintsugi reminds us that healing and renewal happen not despite our scars but through them.

When faced with narratives as fraught and broken as the ones we so often encounter in Genesis, this is a fine reminder for all of us who can see ourselves inside stories like these.