The Warrior and the Trickster

Propers: The Nineteenth Sunday After Pentecost (Lectionary 29), AD 2022 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

The warrior and the trickster are two of the oldest archetypes found in human mythology. You can see them in Homer, with Achilles and Odysseus. You can see them in the Eddas, with Loki and Thor. And we find them in the Bible as the twin brothers Esau and Jacob.

The warrior and the trickster are archetypal because they represent the two most successful stratagems for getting ahead in the barbarian world. The warrior’s success is obvious: he is big and strong and fast and cruel. If he sees cattle, he takes them. If he sees a woman, he takes her. If he sees wealth, he steals it. And if anyone protests, if anyone gets in the way, he kills them. Simple, right? And very effective.

In both the Viking sagas and the Greek histories we find this notion that might makes right; that if you didn’t want your things to be taken, then you should’ve defended them better. Plato muses at one point that Hercules has a right to take your cows because you have them, he wants them, and you can’t stop him. Or as the Athenians infamously decreed to the Melians: the strong do what they will, and the weak suffer what they must. Such is the way of the warrior.

Now, the way of the trickster is different. It’s just as ruthless, just as amoral. But it has to do with those who outthink their foes. The tricksters are those who dance about the warriors, who fool them in order to get their own way. This too the barbarians respected. In the ancient conflict of brains versus brawn, they knew very well that the man who has both will likely prevail.

And this, mind you, is still the default setting for human morality. Philosophy can teach us right from wrong, but only the great religious traditions, such as followers of the Buddha and the Christ, teach a morality of selfless, self-giving love. Without philosophy or religion, we regress to the ways of the warrior and the trickster. We like people who win, regardless of how they do it; who get ahead, whatever the cost to the rest. It is the worship of the winners, the damnation of the losers.

In the book of Genesis, Esau and Jacob are brothers; twins, in fact, though you wouldn’t know it to look at them. Esau is huge and hairy and swift and strong, a master hunter, a man of the wilderness, truly a veritable sasquatch. While Jacob on the other hand—well, he likes to sit in tents. Esau is daddy’s favorite. Jacob is a mama’s boy. But he’s not without recourse; for Jacob is a trickster.

Indeed, the very name Jacob means “leg-puller,” supplanter. Don’t count him out yet.

With the help of their mother, Jacob manages to cheat his just-barely-elder brother Esau out of his inheritance, not once but twice. And in the understanding of the Ancient Near East, the blessing stolen from their father cannot be revoked. But now Jacob has a problem, you see. He was clever enough to trick the warrior, to bamboozle his brother, but now Esau’s going to straight-up kill him. Yeah, that’s a flaw in your plan, when your brother is a bigfoot. He could just tear you in half.

So their mother gives to her younger son the best advice she can: Run! Run away, Jacob. Run far and fast and hide in some foreign land, because you just ticked off the biggest, strongest, most tenacious hunter we have and he’s gunning for you. So he does. He flees. And with his cleverness, and his father’s blessing, and the promise of his father’s God, Jacob prospers amongst his mother’s people. He gains great flocks, great wealth: four wives, twelve sons. God help him.

And eventually, as a grown man, his trickster’s ways begin to catch up to him, and Jacob once again must flee, this time from his father-in-law. But he isn’t alone now. He has a herds and flocks and servants enough for all four of his households. He’s basically a roaming people at this point. And as he makes his way back home, back to the land of his parents, even after all these years, the trickster is still scared of just one thing: the warrior, his brother, Esau.

Esau is yet the boogeyman of Jacob’s dreams. Esau is the embodiment of his relentless reckoning, of his sins, his trickster’s ways, catching up to him at last. There’s only so much he can do to avoid those crushing, hairy, massive arms. So Jacob now does something which I find inadvertently humorous: he starts to spread his caravan out, to divide his forces, in the hopes that should Esau fall upon one part of his entourage, the rest could escape. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

And as he spreads his people out, he puts the wives and sons he likes the least right up at the front, while keeping his favorites closer to him. It’s actually kind of funny, though I bet his family wouldn’t have found it so. And then at night Jacob sends everyone to the far side of a river so that he alone is on the nearer bank. And again, it’s because of Esau. This way, if his brother attacks in the night, the water might slow him down enough for Jacob to skedaddle, all by his onesie.

Lo and behold, the nightmare appears to come true. In the dark of night, without any warning, an unknown assailant pounces upon Jacob, who wakes up to his horror, and wrestles desperately for his life until the dawn’s about to break. His attacker strikes him hard on the hip, a blow that will cripple Jacob for life. Yet Jacob has him in a headlock, some sort of hold, and he knows that if he lets go then he’s a dead man. So he clings, tenaciously, as though seizing a wolf by the ears.

“Release me!” cries the man in the dark. “Not until you bless me!” Jacob retorts. I ain’t letting go until you promise not to kill me. And the man in the dark says, “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with man and prevailed.” Then suddenly he’s gone, like a puff of smoke. And Jacob—now Israel—realizes that it wasn’t Esau after all. He’d just had a religious experience. And it wasn’t all in his head because his hip is out of joint.

This is the key moment in the story, because now, my friends, Jacob cannot play his trump card. He cannot do what he has always done whenever all his other plans have failed. Jacob cannot run away. He cannot flee, not with this limp. He must now confront the man who’s haunted his dreams his whole life long, his reckoning at long last. So he is resolved, when he hears that Esau is coming.

In a trice, he is upon him. Jacob has no defense in the bright light of day. And Esau pounces, wraps his arms around him—and kisses him! Embraces him! Weeps upon him! And Jacob is about as speechless as he’s ever really going to get. It turns out that all these years, a whole lifetime really, he has feared the wrath of the brother he’d cheated, the warrior he’d enraged. Yet those sins were long ago forgotten, long ago forgiven. Esau has prospered in his own right.

Esau has wives, children, wealth, land, flocks, everything he would want, everything but his brother. And when he sees Jacob, there is nothing left but love, nothing left but joy. It is a complete and utter reversal, one of the best twists in the Bible. The trickster’s out of tricks and the warrior’s out of war and God has delivered them both in ways that neither one had once been able to imagine. It gets me every time.

The life of Christian prayer, methinks, does often mirror the tale of Jacob. We go through our lives in fear and cunning, trusting our cleverness, pursuing prosperity, wounding those we meet along the way; always fretting, in the back of our minds, that someday our sins will catch up to us. We fear our elder brother’s wrath, the righteous indignation of the implacable warrior—fear it because we know that we deserve a certain punishment, and half want it.

But instead of inexorable justice we find the warmth of an embrace, of a brother’s love and heartfelt tears. We stood our ground, we couldn’t flee, we didn’t run away, and we were met with naught but lovingkindness, welcomed wholly home. That’s Christianity in a nutshell for you, right here in Genesis, right at the beginning.

Christians do not pray because we seek to bend God to our will. Such is magic, not religion. We pray to know the love of God, to open ourselves to His grace in every moment of every day. We want His will for us, for His will is our best. We pray that, Lord, Your Kingdom come, knowing full well that it’ll come with or without us, that the love of God is inexorable, the will of God undeniable, that the Firstborn will catch us at the last.

But we pray, that the Kingdom may come in us; through us; that we know our salvation now and be that salvation for others, to live as Christ for all the world. We cry to Him day and night, only to find that He never left us, that He’s with us all along. And when we have finished our fleeings, He will welcome us back to our home.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.