Genesis 31 "The Fear" Scott Hoezee

President Lyndon Johnson has been getting a lot of attention lately. The publication of the next volume in Robert Caro's masterful biography of LBJ and a recent TV movie about the Johnson presidency have brought the 36^th President back into focus. While reading this final episode about Laban and Jacob, I was reminded of something I once read about LBJ. Friends of Johnson have frequently remarked on the glaring disdain, even hatred, that existed between LBJ and Robert F. Kennedy. Placing Johnson on the ticket with John Kennedy in 1960 had been a political move to help cinch Texas and the South in what promised to be a very close election between Kennedy and Richard Nixon. The move worked, and JFK ended up winning the White House by just over 118,000 votes (or 0.2%). But most of the Kennedys, chiefly Bobby, despised the hard-driving Senator from Texas.

After President Kennedy was assassinated, Bobby stayed on as Attorney General for a little while before running for the Senate himself. But it is said that Bobby's hatred for Johnson was only magnified by seeing this man take his brother's place in the Oval Office. Aides to LBJ said that when Kennedy entered a room where Johnson already was, it was almost like seeing two snarly dogs approach one another--you could practically see the hair rising on the backs of their necks as each man looked at the other with a degree of loathing.

I think that's the way it was for Jacob and Laban. Over the course of the 20 years during which Jacob worked for Laban, the relationship between the two steadily deteriorated. Part of the problem was that these two were so much alike. Both were skilled tricksters and each had met his match in the other. If Laban wasn't coming up with some plan to outwit Jacob, then Jacob was out in the fields conjuring up ways to do some end-runs on his uncle turned father-in-law. Each had taken the other to the cleaners now and again, but in the end it was Jacob who bit by bit, year by year, managed to rob Laban blind.

So as Genesis 31 opens, we are told that the day came when Jacob realized that Laban's attitude toward him "was not what it had been." Truth is, it had never been very good to begin with, but now it was worse, and so Jacob knew it was time to hit the road and high-tail it back home. True, he had come to Laban on the lam and fleeing a furious Esau. But now he feels it's time to flee again. Maybe Esau was still a force to reckon with, but Jacob has concluded it was time to take the risk, to take the money and run.

As any number of commentators have noted, Jacob is very much a man of conflict. He feuds with, tricks, cheats, and flees from people throughout the course of his whole life. (Small wonder that in the very next chapter we find Jacob actually wrestling with God! It was just so like Jacob to be scrappy even with the Almighty!) Genesis 31 presents what is in some ways the apex of Jacob's long conflict with Laban. In addition to the immediate issues at hand, both men also make a couple of speeches in this chapter that recapitulate their two decades-long running arguments and deceptions.

But weaving in and out of the mundane tawdriness of these 55 verses are also some words from Yahweh, some words about Yahweh, and perhaps most curiously of all, a way of referring to God that is at once unique in all of Scripture and perhaps quite revealing for the stories we've been considering from Genesis in recent months. And just to spice the narrative up a bit more, there is also a sub-theme here relating to some much-prized household gods as well as another good dose of biblical irony and humor. Let's see if tonight we can unpack a few of the interesting ideas that emerge from Genesis 31.

The basic storyline is simple enough to summarize: after all those years of wrangling with one another, Laban and Jacob have both had enough of one another. Since Jacob has finally come out on top, financially speaking, he figures it was a good time to leave. Yahweh confirms this decision, appearing to Jacob for what appears to be the first time since the vision at Bethel all those years earlier. Once his wives agree with the plan to leave, Jacob waits until it is time for sheep-shearing, knowing full well that Laban and his hired hands would all be so busy with this annual task that it would likely take a few days before Laban realized that Jacob had absconded with most of Laban's estate in tow.

The plan works, and Jacob gets a three-day head start. But when you have vast herds of sheep and goats to drive in front of you, travel is slow, and so Laban doesn't have too much trouble catching up with Jacob despite his good head-start. No sooner does Laban find Jacob and company, and immediately Laban's unctuous, saccharine personality comes to the fore again. "Jacob, my dear boy! What is this now, leaving without saying good-bye, carting my girls and precious little grandchildren off this way! My, my, my. If only you had come to me, I would have arranged a farewell party for all of you. Honest! Dancing girls, tambourines, harps, a catered feast with foie gras and rack of lamb. The works! It would all have been for you, laddy!"

Of course, Jacob has heard this all before and didn't believe a word of it. And anyway even in the midst of all this buttering-up, Laban's fundamental anger comes through. "Why, you're lucky I don't kick your teeth in right now for pulling a stunt like this. Happily enough for you, some God named Yahweh told me not to lay a hand on you. And I'm perfectly willing to follow that request, so long as you return to me the idols and household gods you stole. You've always told me you already had a God, so what's the big deal swiping my own deities, eh?!"

Jacob was sure he had not stolen the gods--it was, in truth, about the only thing Jacob had not snookered Laban out of one way or the other. But in one last twist of irony, the text shows innocent Rachel outfoxing both her husband and her father. For some reason Rachel figured that promises from Yahweh or no, their journey would be safer if she took her father's good-luck charms along for the trip. Once Laban starts rooting through everyone's tents for the missing-in-action deities, we find out that Rachel is quite literally sitting on the gods, even going so far as to make up a rather, shall we say, delicate excuse to keep her father from finding them after all.

Once Laban concludes he had been wrong about this divine theft, he seems a bit calmer. After Jacob rips into him yet again for twenty years' worth of grief, Laban decides to call a truce, a cease-fire. So before going their separate ways, Laban and Jacob make a kind of non-aggression pact. What's done is done, bygones are bygones, and the two essentially say they will never mess with one another again.

Somewhere in the midst of all this hubbub, Jacob declares something surprising. In verse 42 he says that it was God who had prospered him. Despite the shenanigans, chicanery, and dirty tricks about which we've been reading the last few weeks in Genesis, in the end Jacob says that it had been God's work of providence all along. That's surprising in two ways: first, Jacob has hardly been a paragon of piety since his first appearance on the biblical stage, so we're not used to hearing him say such a religious thing. Second, however, we should find it slightly unsettling to think that God was working through a series of events that can best be described as rather sordid. Yet that is exactly what Jacob says.

In the last couple of sermons in this series, we've noted how God is in the details of even the most ordinary events of our lives. We've been encouraged to recall that it is fully possible that God can and does work even in those times and places when life doesn't seem particularly "holy" or "spiritual." But for tonight, in addition to sensing all of that once again through this story, we need to puzzle over Jacob's designation of his God as "the God of Abraham and the Fear of Isaac." Twice in this chapter, but nowhere else in the entire Bible, Jacob identifies Yahweh as "the Fear" of his father Isaac.

Some of you may have read Frederick Buechner's novel, The Son of Laughter, which re-tells the story of Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph. If you have read that, then you know that Buechner took a cue from Genesis 31 and consistently referred to God as "The Fear" throughout the entire novel. It is a most striking way to refer to God! What could it mean, and where did this appellation come from?

It won't surprise you to learn that over the centuries some commentators have tried to re-translate, and so soften, this term. Some have contorted the semantics of the Hebrew to make this mean something like "The Friend of Isaac" or "Kinsmen of Isaac," but these efforts to change the meaning here have failed. We are left with the fact that in verses 42 and 53, Jacob says that Yahweh was "the Fear of Isaac," with "fear" there meaning something along the lines of "dread."

Where did Jacob come up with this title? To the best of our knowledge based on the text of Genesis, Yahweh has now appeared to Jacob only twice: first at Bethel in the dream of the stairway to heaven and now again in Genesis 31 in affirming Jacob's decision to return to Canaan. But in neither place does Yahweh give himself the title "The Fear," and so we can only assume that this is how Isaac himself must have referred to his God while Jacob was growing up. Who knows--this may even have been something Isaac frequently said without intending his children to preserve it. Those of us who are parents all know that sometimes our kids repeat things out in public that we said in private (and that we wished had remained private, too!).

Whether or not that explains this one-time designation for Yahweh we don't know, but that it must go back to Isaac's own spiritual vocabulary is likely. If so, why would Isaac have talked about God in this way? Obviously we can't know for sure, but you wonder if it might just go back to Genesis 22 and that time when Abraham very nearly killed his son, his only son, Isaac whom he loved because, Abraham told Isaac, Yahweh had told Abraham to do it. Now nevermind for a moment the fact that God's angel also intervened to stay Abraham's dagger-wielding hand at the last second, the very fact that it had been just such a close call must surely have stuck with Isaac. You don't just brush aside and forget about that day when Daddy nearly did you in after tying you to an altar for burnt sacrifice!

Genesis 22 ends more or less happily, as we saw a couple of months ago. Father and son depart Mount Moriah "together" and life moves forward once again. But you just have to wonder if Isaac didn't keep a close eye on his father for the rest of Abraham's days. Who knew when Yahweh might suggest another test that might just imperil Isaac's very life all over again! Surely Isaac must have wondered what kind of a God would ask such a thing and just maybe that is what led Isaac to get into the habit of referring to Yahweh as The Fear.

Clearly, Isaac served Yahweh and clearly he made sure to pass along the promises of the covenant to his wife and to his children. But despite his loyalty to God and his faithfulness to God, perhaps Isaac also sensed that this was a rather surprising God, a bit unpredictable perhaps, someone to serve with a bit of fear, awe, dread, and trembling. God was out to bless all the nations of the earth, but life would not always be easy for the people whose lives got intimately caught up in that grand plan of salvation.

But hearing God called "The Fear" is not something we ever hear from Isaac's own lips but from Jacob here in Genesis 31. There is some irony in that. As we've seen in recent weeks, God's work in also Jacob's life presents its own kind of surprise. We would not have predicted that God would be so intimately connected to a man of conflict like Jacob--a wheeler and dealer, a schemer, a cheat, and a scoundrel. Who would dare to assert it were it not so plainly taught to us in the Bible? Despite his multiple layers of fault and foibles, Jacob turns out to be God's kind of guy! Who could have guessed it?

Yet the living God is active in just this way. When a real and alive and sovereign God interacts with real people who live in a world as quirky (and also as fragmented) as this world tends to be, unpredictable and surprising things do happen. That's the nature of a living God. Encountering surprises along the way is the nature of being a disciple of such a God. Maybe that's why there is that implied contrast in Genesis 31 between the Fear of Isaac and the dead household gods who cannot even make themselves known to Laban while he is looking for them. All it took to keep those false gods hidden was a woman feigning her monthly period--that's all it took to keep Laban from ever seeing those idols again.

There is nothing in particular to fear or dread in such blandly static gods such as the ones Laban was so desperate to find. But the true God, Yahweh himself, was a different matter. This is a God who is active, who is on the move, who is working through some surprising people and some odd events precisely to save all the nations of the earth. Before that cosmic story is finished and that salvation is realized, there will be more surprises.

Isaac one day found himself a whisker away from becoming a burnt offering at the hands of his own father. It inspired him (perhaps) to start calling God "The Fear." But eventually in the Bible the true Son of God himself would become the sacrifice that saves. No one would see that coming, either, including the disciples who had been closest to Jesus all along. But that's the way it happened on a hill far away in a time long ago. Yet that Son did not take to calling his God "The Fear" because of what had happened. He called that God his Father, and he taught the rest of us who follow after him to do the same.

The love we feel for this God casts out all fear, as James would later write in the New Testament. Perfect love casts out fear because the God we are privileged to call "Our Father in heaven" has shown us the love he has for us. He has a love for us that is so great, we are called the children of God, adopted into the divine family by the grace of Jesus, the first and truest Son. True, it all came about through a gospel we could not have predicted and through a humble servant whose sacrifice scandalized and shocked long before it became known as a saving event so fine we would dare to call that Friday "good." But when you serve a living and active God who works in and through real people in this very real world, those are the kinds of things that sometimes happen.

Jacob was a man of conflict, yet he's slowly learning a thing or two about God. He has come far enough on his spiritual journey to know that it has finally been God himself who has been blessing Jacob, even as this mysterious Fear of Isaac promised twenty years before at Bethel. Yet there is a sense in Genesis 31 in which it looks as though, in addition to a proper aknowledgment of God's work in his life, Jacob is also using God as a sanction for every dirty trick Jacob had ever pulled. Back at Bethel Jacob had responded to God's promises with a kind of "wait and see" attitude. Jacob said that Yahweh could become his own God if and only if Yahweh came through on the things promised in the dream. Jacob was forever working the angles, and it's possible he's still doing a bit of that, using Yahweh as much for leverage as anything else. But if he thought he could still outwit even God, the next chapter will shake up that idea. The next chapter will forever put Jacob in his place.

Jacob will soon change as we'll see in a couple of weeks. Yahweh, however, is the same always, yesterday, today, and tomorrow. The Fear of Isaac is now our Father in heaven--a father whom we love and trust fully and forever. But this is still a surprising God. The surprise of grace alone ought to be enough to keep us marveling over this wonderful God forever and ever. Amen.