“This Is Not Who You Are!”

So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, “I have seen God face to face.”

Genesis 32:30a

The mirror doesn’t lie.

Or does it?

“Mirrors reveal truths you may not want to see,” writes journalist Natalie Angier. On the other hand, she suggests, “Give mirrors a little smoke and a house to call their own” ─ a carnival’s House of Mirrors ─ “and mirrors will tell you nothing but lies.”

Mirrors’ ability ─ under certain conditions ─ to trigger truth-telling or lying: It’s what makes them fascinating to researchers.

For example, subjects tested in a room with a mirror have been found to work harder, be more helpful, and less inclined to lie, cheat, and scheme compared with control groups performing the same exercises in a room without a mirror.

All you ‘Downton Abbey’ fans, think here Sarah O’Brien, Lady Grantham’s perennially-plotting maid. Spoiler alert! … Oh, wait a minute. This goes back to the finale of the First Season. If you haven’t caught it by now, what are the chances? Cancel spoiler alert.

In perhaps the most eye-rolling of the series’ stockpile of you’ve-got-to-be-kidding plot twists, a full 18 years after the birth of the last of her three daughters, Lady Grantham is pregnant … just after we’ve spent the entire season trying to marry off heir-apparent Lady Mary to keep the estate in the hands of the family. If the child turns out to be a male ─ meaning: male heir ─ fickle Lady Mary can rot in spinsterhood for all anyone cares.

But there’s a complication: Guaranteeing there will always be a tomorrow at Downton, O’Brien ─ bitter, bitter O’Brien ─ believing (erroneously, it turns out) she’s about to be given the pink slip, ensures that Lady Grantham will slip on a brick-of-a-bar of soap as she steps out of her bath. Intended result? Miscarriage.

But at the last minute, O’Brien passes a mirror. In it, she catches her own eye and weighs what she sees: “Sarah O’Brien, this is not who you are!” She rushes to avert the tragedy she herself has set in motion. There’s a scream, a thud. Too late.

But her eye-ball-to-eyeball interaction with her mirrored self? “Sarah O’Brien, this is not who you are!” In other words, “mirrors reveal truths you may not want to see.”

Proving that not only do everyday mirrors not lie, cheat, or scheme … they help us not to lie, cheat, or scheme.

That means, mirrors matter.

And in the story of Jacob wrestling with a shifty stranger, there’s a mirror hiding in plain sight. And it matters.

To see why, let’s recap: Jacob ─ on-the-lam, tricky Jacob ─ is tricked himself into marrying Leah, a woman not at the top of his dance card. Chalk this trickery up to Laban, Jacob’s uncle and Leah’s slippery father ─ every bit Jacob’s equal in the no-good-scoundrel department.

But after some heavy-handed negotiating, Jacob also gets to marry his heart-throb ― Rachel ― Leah’s younger and infinitely more attractive sister.

Now, here’s new data: Over the next few years, Jacob fathers 11 children with his two wives … and their maids. (It’s a complex family by our standards.) And in one episode after another, Laban’s already tenuous relationship with ethical behavior gets so shaky he’s beginning to give indicted former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell and his wife a run for their money. Well, actually the money in question isn’t theirs … and that’s the problem!

At any rate, Jacob decides it’s time to uproot his family and return to his roots. He sends advance word back home: "I'm on my way!"

But there’s a problem brewing at the old homestead: Esau, Jacob’s older twin. And the twins aren’t only yin and yang ― Jacob got the brains, Esau got the brawn ― but 20 years before, Jacob cheated Esau out of his mega-bucks inheritance. And Esau ─ who took a contract out on Jacob back then … has an impeccable memory now.

And yet, to his credit, Jacob attempts to hit the reset button by softening up his brother with extravagant gifts of livestock. Picture the outer perimeter of Esau’s territory: Breaking the distant horizon, one herd after another advances. Esau’s outer guard to the first oncoming herdsman: “Whose herd is this?” “Why it’s Esau’s, courtesy of his brother Jacob.” It passes by. A little while later, another herd approaches. “Whose herd is this?”  “Why it’s Esau’s, courtesy of his brother Jacob.”  It passes by. And another appears. Over and over again this happens. Very Lawrence of Arabia.

Problem: As Jacob takes the bribery route, the beefy brother with a beef plans a family reunion ― a reunion that involves 400 of his crackerjack, jack-booted “security advisors.”

And that’s why, on the eve of his meeting with Esau, Jacob sends his family just ahead of him over the border (the River Jabbok), deploying them as human shields: a cease-fire buffer between him and Esau’s armed militia.

That brings us to an episode that leaves just about everyone in head-scratching mode: Night falls. Jacob is alone. But not for long.

À la Harry Potter, a mysterious stranger apparates out of the darkness. Not an angel ─ at least in the Genesis telling of the story. And for reasons that aren’t entirely clear ─ for reasons that aren’t clear at all ─ Jacob and the stranger begin to wrestle. And they wrestle. And they wrestle. All night they wrestle.

Just as the match appears to be tilting in sweaty Jacob’s favor, the stranger ― with a mere touch! ― dislocates Jacob’s hip. Foul!

It’s only then that Jacob begins to suspect there’s more to this stranger than meets the eye. So he keeps him in a head-lock, employing his legendary grip.

The dawn’s rays pierce the sky. Beads of sweat course through the stranger’s grimace. Jacob refuses to let go until his adversary gives him a blessing.

But instead of a blessing, the stranger barely manages a question: “What’s your name?”

Answer? ‘Jacob.’ In some quarters: ‘Cheat.’

The stranger changes the subject. And in the spirit of “what kind of a name is Cheat?” he gives Jacob new name: ‘Israel’ (read: ‘Struggled with God’) “because,” the stranger says ― and here’s what they call in theater the “recognition scene” ─ “you have striven with God (God!) and with humans and have prevailed.”

OMG! The cheating stranger is none other than … God!

What a story ― a story Old Testament scholar Hermann Gunkel said was “worthy of a Rembrandt” ― and Rembrandt did indeed paint a picture of Jacob wrestling … with an angel ― but as “enigmatic as Mona Lisa.”

“Enigmatic” because the story raises more questions than it answers, the principal one being: Who won? That’s unclear.

But even more important: How seriously can you take the story?

As history, you can take it with a grain of salt. Because it’s not history. It’s a folk tale. It has all the trappings of folk tales about tricksters and cheats: all the way from Ulysses tricking the Cyclops to any number of scallywags trapping a leprechaun ― with a little bit of Dracula thrown in. I mean, God afraid of the dawn? What is this? A Bela Lugosi restrospective?

Well, yes, sort of. That’s because the story is reverse-engineering. It attempts to explain the time-honored name of a place: Peniel (meaning ‘God! Face-to-Face’). It’s like Scratchy Bottom in the UK. Why? Why ─ of all possible names and combinations of letters and words ─ why Scratchy Bottom? There’s got to be a story.

Same here. That is, pre-dating Jacob’s nocturnal adventure, the more ancient story-behind-the-story of Peniel likely involved a god ─ or dawn-dreading demon ─ guarding the river and challenging anyone who wished to cross (a hero!) to a grunting, face-to-face wrestling match. And it’s recycled here to fit into a story about a hero-founder of the people who would take his name: Israel. Only now, the seams between the lost-in-the-mists-of-time myth and the legend of Jacob are beginning to show.

But that doesn’t matter. The sheer illogic of it confirms that it’s a legend. And if you go to a legend like ‘Jacob’s Wrestling Match with God’ looking for theology, well, you've come to the wrong place. Because not everything in the Bible ― and not much in this story! ― is about theology.

For example:

Here, God appears as a human-in-the-flesh. Why, then, do we need Jesus, as in “Veiled in flesh the Godhead see; hail th’ incarnate Deity”? Kiss ‘Hark! The Herald Angels Sing’ ─ kiss Christmas ─ good-bye!

Here, God can’t quite seem to break free of a run-of-the-mill wrestler’s headlock. Whatever happened to the ‘Lord God Almighty’? Sure, the Lord-God-Almighty meme raises all sorts of questions about human freedom, but God caught in a headlock?

Here God is so weak ─ and so weaselly ─ God resorts to cheating. Really, why on earth would you believe in a God who cheats?

So, it’s not great theology. It’s not theology at all!

But it is a great folk tale … because it showcases how the budding hero Jacob  learns something about himself: sleaze.

It’s a whack up the side of his head: “Wake up! Look in the mirror!”

And that mirror appears the moment Jacob and his opponent (God!) are gridlocked: face-to-face, eyeball-to-eyeball, heaving breath colliding with heaving breath. And God does exactly what Jacob has always done when he can only get by stealth what he can’t come by honestly, and that is: cheat!

At that moment ― when, with the lightest touch, God dislocates Jacob’s hip ― at that very moment ─ in his shock and pain, Jacob sees not the face of God as we have come to know it in the face of Jesus Christ … but Jacob’s own cheating face ― the face that has prevented others (especially his brother) from receiving what by right is theirs, otherwise known as ‘justice.’

That is the most shocking “recognition scene” of all. A mirror of mistakes. Mistakes: what James Joyce called “portals of discovery.”

But that’s good news. Because it gives Jacob a portal of discovery, a mirror that doesn’t lie.

And there’s more good news. Jacob survives to live what he’s learned. “I have seen God face to face,” he says, “and yet my life is preserved!”

This most improbable folk tale, then, is our invitation to wrestle with God. Truth-in-advertising: it’s a dicey match. Just at the point you expect to encounter the face of God, you’re likely to confront your own face in a mirror.

And what you see may not be pretty: what you’ve done to prevent neighbors different from you from receiving what by right is theirs … those neighbors, like you, made in the very image of God.

It may be quite a whack up the side of the head! “This is not who you are!”

That’s good news, too, because it’s not the end of our story.

And it’s not the end of Jacob’s story either. What happens next?

The wrestling match ends. The dawn breaks. The tension mounts. The brothers meet. And Jacob presents himself to Esau not as ‘Cheat’, but as ‘Struggled with God’ ─ Israel.

And in an instant, 20 long years of estrangement give way to love, a love so strong that Jacob sees a new face in the mirror now before him. For he says to his twin Esau ― and the way Genesis puts it is as moving as you’re ever likely to see ― “Truly, to see your face is like seeing the face of God!”

Amen.