He had wrestled all night.
Wrestled is not quite the right word. Not with this opponent. In later years, he would look back over a life filled with fierce fights and remember this, his fiercest fight as being more a wrestling match with himself than as a contest against his opponent. It was as if his foe would simply turn his best moves, his most clever strategies, against him. With a strength born of desperation, he clung like a leech to an enemy he knew he could not defeat. His only hope was to hang on. Glancing occasionally at the face of his foe in the dark he got the distinct impression of the hint of a smile shadowing his face. Finally, dawn’s approach softened the darkness. His foe whispered without the hint of shortness of breath, “Let me go.” But still he clung – desperate, if not to win, at least to know to whom he has lost. It was only the searing pain in his hip that loosened his grip. “Tell me your name,” he gasped. The only answer, a calm, “Tell me your name.” His last ounce of strength ebbed as the fight ended with his dejected surrender of his name – his identity. “Jacob.” “No,” said his victor. “Not Jacob. Israel.” As day dawned, Jacob died and Israel was born. He limped across the river to start again.
What is the price of surrender? What is the deep pain out of which such stubborn surrender is the only escape, the only release?
There is a certain dying that we must choose, a certain stubborn surrender that we must engage. To cling to the old, to the familiar, to the known is to cling to a known dying. To lean into the embraced
dying and the unknown life that follows it requires a desperation born of terror. To die by choice – to give up my place, my identity, my life – demands a decision of us. We have to decide that death by choice is
preferable to death by default. It demands a stubborn surrender to the angel with whom we wrestle – an angel who will tell us nothing but our own new name. And who will leave us weak and wounded to walk into the dawn of our new identity. We have come to the painful conclusion that wrestling all night without hope of victory is preferable to not wrestling at all, and being embraced by defeat.
The truth is, like Jacob, we are going to die in any event. The only question is whether it will be death that ends life, or a death that begins life.
Staff writer for ExperiencingWorship.com.