Lesser Is More
Genesis 25:19-34
My summer vacation starts in about [checks watch] two hours, not that I’m counting down the hours or anything. For this vacation I won’t be traveling, except maybe a day trip to Connecticut to visit family. Instead, I have some projects planned around the house—painting, landscaping, and assisting Sandy with her projects. What can I say? I am my father’s child. My father did not know how to take a day off. He spent most of his retirement working a part-time job.
Behaviors like that are often found in families, handed down from one generation to the next almost like biological traits. In seminary, I took a class called Marriage and Family. One of our assignments was to create a family genogram. A genogram is a detailed, multigenerational visual diagram of a family. Unlike a family tree, which shows only biological lineage (who is related to whom), a genogram includes detailed data on individuals and relationships, such as emotional bonds, hereditary illnesses, and significant life events. For example, while a family tree would show the connection between your uncle and your father, a genogram might note that they both suffered from depression or that their relationship became strained at some point.
While a family tree shows you who you come from, a genogram reveals the family dynamics that affect who you are. If a family tree scratches the surface, a genogram digs beneath the surface to uncover behaviors, patterns, and events that offer insights into how family dynamics shape us as individuals. That’s the theory, anyway.
I think it would be fascinating to create a genogram for Abraham’s family. Without a doubt we would see patterns repeating across generations. We see several of those patterns in today’s passage. For example, like Abraham and Sarah before them, Isaac and Rebekah have difficulty conceiving. Once again, infertility threatens the promise that God had made to Abraham that he would be the father of generations through his marriage with Sarah. If Isaac and Rebekah don’t produce a son, God’s promise ends right then and there, making Abraham the father not of generations but of just one generation, Isaac.
Part of God’s promise—the most difficult part, in fact—is the wait.
Part of God’s promise—the most difficult part, in fact—is the wait. Abraham and Sarah had to wait twenty-five years until Isaac was born and God’s promise was finally fulfilled. By comparison, Isaac and Rebekah have it relatively easy, enduring “only” a twenty-year wait before the birth of Esau and Jacob. For twenty years Isaac prays for Rebekah to conceive, beginning when he marries her at age forty. By the time the Lord answers his prayer, Isaac is now sixty years old. Can you imagine praying for the same thing for twenty years? The patience and the persistence that would take is difficult to conceive, no pun intended.
When Rebekah does finally conceive, rather than feeling joyful, she is unsettled. She senses that something is not right. This is beyond morning sickness or any other bodily discomfort that accompanies pregnancy. Her body is in turmoil. Verse 22 says that “the children struggled together within her.” The word translated as “struggled” literally means that they “smashed” or “crushed” each other. Good Lord! No wonder Rebekah is in such agony! So distraught is she by the roiling in her belly that she cries, “If it is to be this way, why do I live?” Why do I live?
Desperate for relief, or at least an answer as to why she suffers, Rebekah, like her husband before her, prays to the Lord. Fortunately, she does not need to wait twenty years for her prayer to be answered. The Lord reveals to her that she carries within her body not only twins but two nations, one of whom shall be stronger than the other, the older of whom will serve the younger.
This is not the way it’s supposed to be in the culture of the Ancient Near East. The older son, simply by virtue of being older, and without any regard to merit, is meant to be the favored son. For example, when it comes to inheritance, the older son traditionally received double the inheritance of the younger. This will come into play later, when the twins struggling in Rebekah’s womb continue that struggle as young men.
Even as the twins emerge from Rebekah’s womb, signs of their antagonism are already apparent. First comes Esau, who is described as red and hairy. Not exactly your typical newborn. Then, the first sign of the second twin isn’t his head, as one would expect, but his hand, which firmly grasps his brother’s heel. His parents therefore name him Jacob, or in Hebrew Ya’akov, which sounds amusingly similar to the word for “heel,” ah-KEV, the two words sharing the same root. More ominously, however, from the moment he is born Jacob grasps for that which belongs to his brother, a pattern that will continue.
Despite the fact that they are twins, albeit fraternal twins, the two brothers develop personalities, interests, and abilities that are a study in contrasts. Esau is an outdoorsman, while Jacob prefers the inner life, not only life indoors but the life of the mind. Esau is brash and impulsive; Jacob is quiet, clever, and calculating.
Each twin is the favorite of one parent. We’re told that Isaac loved Esau because he was fond of the game that Esau brought home from the hunt. When it comes to appetites, like father, like son.
Jacob, however, is beloved by his mother. As a man who prefers the indoors, Jacob has likely spent many more hours at his mother’s side than his brother has. Maybe that has even given him an affinity for cooking.
And it is in the kitchen cooking where we find Jacob one day when Esau returns home from the field. It’s been an unsuccessful day of hunting, because Esau arrives empty-handed and hungry. “Let me have some of that red stuff,” the older brother says to the younger. “I’m starving!”
Some of that “red stuff.” Maybe Jacob is going heavy on the paprika. In any event, he doesn’t show much brotherly love to Esau. He’s not interested in charity, but he is willing to make a transaction. He will share his stew with Esau, but only for a price. “First sell me your birthright,” the younger brother says to his older brother.
The birthright was the privilege given to the firstborn son to inherit a double portion of the father’s estate to that of one’s younger brothers…
The birthright was the privilege given to the firstborn son to inherit a double portion of the father’s estate to that of one’s younger brothers, and to become head of the family in the wake of the father’s death. Jacob is not asking for something frivolous. He is asking for the right to be recognized as the first son. He seeks to supplant his older brother—in effect, to become the older brother.
Shockingly, Esau accepts. “I am about to die,” he says. “Of what use is a birthright to me?” He even swears to Jacob, making an oath forsaking his birthright for a plate of lentil stew and a loaf of bread! “Thus Esau despised his birthright,” we’re told in the final verse.
Knowing what we do about what becomes of these two siblings—that Jacob will go on to have twelve sons who will become the heads of the twelve tribes of Israel, while Esau founds the nation of Edom, neighbors of and rivals to Israel—it’s natural that we might want to side with Jacob. He can’t help it if his brother is impulsive and foolish. He earned that birthright fair and square. He understood its value while Esau esteemed it too little. Jacob showed initiative. He was a go-getter!
There’s just one problem with that interpretation…the narrative never positions Jacob as the hero. Jacob is clever, yes, and cunning, to be sure. But the one who in birth grasped his brother’s heel, as a grown man grasps for that which would have been given to him anyway. The oracle that God revealed to Rebekah foretold that Jacob would emerge as Isaac’s heir, not because he was more worthy but simply because God chose him.
Jacob’s callous treatment of his brother Esau, treating brotherly love like a transaction, doesn’t secure his birthright. It simply ensures that he seizes it by dishonorable means, for which he will be punished. (You’re going to have to wait until I come back from vacation for that part of the story.)
At the same time, Esau is not an innocent victim in this drama. He does not value that which he’s been given and thus throws it away for a pittance…for a bowl of stew and some bread!
There is no hero and no villain in this story. There is no one here to emulate. This isn’t like the parable of the Good Samaritan, in which Jesus teaches his followers to model a mercy like that of the outsider Samaritan. The point here is not to be like Jacob or Esau, two very flawed and deeply human sinners. Because the truth is that we are already like them.
Like Jacob, our instinct is often to grasp for that which we’ve already been given. In Jesus Christ we are loved unconditionally, we are forgiven for all our sins now and eternally, and yet we continue to think that we are not enough, that we must be more, do more, grasp for something more. Surely God cannot be so generous, so gracious! But our grasping doesn’t get us a larger share of God’s grace. Instead it costs us. It costs us time that we waste. It costs us relationships that we destroy. It costs us the peace of knowing who and whose we are.
Or like Esau we hold too lightly the priceless grace that we’ve been given. We despise it. We trade it for something more immediately fulfilling, something that we can feel—pleasure, success, the esteem of others. Something that can be measured against what others have.
And yet God’s word to Rebekah didn’t wait on either son’s character or conduct. Grace was spoken before it was earned or seized. And that same word of grace is spoken over us. In Jesus Christ, God calls us beloved. In Christ, God chooses to be for us as God was for Jacob—not because of anything we’ve done but because in God’s wisdom God chooses to work through that which is lesser. And in Jesus Christ, the lesser is more than enough.