God Loves an Underdog

Genesis 25:19-34

One of the great gifts of studying the patriarchs and matriarchs of Israel is the lesson that nothing is ever what it seems on the surface. The covenant between God and Abraham is not simply a supposed morally upright man being rewarded for good behavior. The relationship between Isaac and Rebekah is not just another passive woman being bought and sold for the benefit of men. The prayer lives of Rebekah and Isaac amid infertility and maternity fly in the face of the pattern that men are the intermediaries between humanity and divinity.  And the relationship between Jacob and Esau is not your standard-issue sibling rivalry. As Martin Luther once wrote, “the immoralities of the patriarchs are more encouraging than stories of their virtues.” Our encouragement comes from the simple fact that God does not wait for perfection. God does not seek out the “good person,” but works wonders through the lives of the imperfect, the unexpected, and even the immoral person. God works with what we’ve got, meets us right where and who we are, beginning with the first of us and stretching all the way to you and me. We do not study Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Esau because they are role models. We read and reflect on their stories because they are human beings like us, with breakable hearts and conflicted minds and inconsistent values like ours. If God can work great blessings through deeply flawed people, then there is hope for all of us.

Our matriarch Rebekah lives with her loving husband for twenty years before conceiving, and when she does it is a difficult and painful pregnancy. She cries out to God, and like Sarah and Hagar before her, God speaks to her directly. God explains in cryptic terms that Rebekah will have twins. One will be stronger than the other, and the elder will serve the younger. It is hard to imagine that this prophetic moment does not inform every choice Rebekah makes about her children, that God has somehow biased her toward her two sons. Rebekah and Isaac both fall prey to the same temptation that all parents face: prioritizing our expectations of who our children will be without seeing the ways those expectations shape their reality. Ultimately, it is Jacob and Esau who will define their own relationships to each other and to their birth order. But first, there is plenty of mischief to be had and mistakes to be made.

In a social system that prioritizes the firstborn over all else, Jacob and Esau are the prime example. Although they are twins, entering the world in quick succession, the first twin to take a breath of the open air is the prime, the superior. In a family like Abraham’s that owns land and herds and possessions, a firstborn is like a crown prince of their own little world, set to inherit all and to then steward the needs of their siblings, their household, and their descendants. Esau, simply by being born seconds before his twin, is entitled to everything. Jacob, the heel-grabber, has a lifetime of subservience to his brother laid out before him by the culture they both inhabit. Jacob, whose name means more accurately the “tripper-upper,” is the prototypical underdog.

It is clear again and again in scripture that God loves an underdog, and that the authors of scripture love to portray their ancestors as unlikely heroes. Esau, the eldest, who is favored by his father and a skilled outdoorsman, has all the makings of a classic protagonist. He is stereotypically masculine, both physically and in personality, and he seems to spend most of his time away from the compound where his family resides. As a hunter and man of the field, Esau is the provider, hunting game and foraging for the household. His little brother, quiet Jacob, is quite literally a homebody, living in tents and preparing meals for the family. Is it any wonder that Rebekah would have special affection for the son she saw most often, the one who stayed close to the cooking fires and kept their dwelling place safe when the other men were away hunting? It is soft-spoken second-born Jacob, the cook and housekeeper, who our story very much presents as the underdog. It is he who is raised to expect the leftovers, to be beholden to the will of his father and his elder brother, and yet it is he who more than once has something they desperately need. Jacob, the underdog, finds his power in the kitchen, and that gift leads to a saga of upside-down power dynamics.

When Esau returns from the field and seeks out Jacob, it can be tempting for us to assume that Esau is being a bit dramatic, and that the trading of his birthright for a bowl of stew is rash. But remember, nothing is ever as simple as it seems. Esau is not coming in from a field of crops out past the back fence. Esau is returning from the hunt. This is not a bunch of guys with a cooler in tow. Esau would have spent days and days exposed to the elements, surviving off of pieces of dried meat and fruit and whatever he could forage along the way. When Esau says he is famished, he very well might be on the brink of death. I think I’d despise my birthright too, if the alternative was starving to death.

On the other hand, Esau is a starving man standing in the middle of a kitchen. We might have compassion for him, and also acknowledge that perhaps the sale of his birthright was a bit hasty and unthoughtful. Was he really so reliant on his brother’s cooking that he could not feed himself in his own home? There is no way to know for sure, but our author clearly has little sympathy for the eldest who was willing to give away everything for a bowl of stew.

Jacob is the unlikely hero, able to bargain with the traditionally feminized skills he learned from his mother to reverse his fortune as secondborn. Perhaps this is what God meant in telling Rebekah that one of her children would be stronger than the other. Esau’s strength was physical, but Jacob’s strengths lay in household labor and relational intelligence. He pays attention, just like Rebekah. He knows the value of the food he has prepared and the dramatic tendencies of his brother. He knows that if Esau swears to sell his birthright, he will not be able to undo it or reclaim it. Jacob trades a bowl of stew that he was making anyway for the right to inherit all that his father and grandfather have built. In every way that counts, Jacob becomes the firstborn of Isaac.

This story might not make us like Jacob particularly much. It might bring up some things about our own sibling relationships or the ways our parents made their hopes and preferences known in our upbringing. It might not resonate at all. That’s okay. Spending time with these oldest stories of our faith is meant to push us, to challenge us and give us opportunities to see ourselves and God in new and different ways. We have the chance to see imperfect people living imperfect lives, seeking and interpreting God’s words and signs and exercising free will in ways that are perhaps not the ways we wish they would. Maybe it helps us see our own stories through the eyes of future generations, our shortcomings and our best efforts and the way God works through and within each of us despite our imperfections. I know it helps me see the enormity of God’s grace, and the gift of God’s continued revelation in the lives of each person I meet. God’s story did not start with Abraham, and it didn’t end with Jesus or Peter or Paul or John. We each have a role to play, whether we see ourselves as the firstborns or the underdogs or the tricksters or the matriarchs. God can use each of us, and God does use all of us. No story, including ours, is ever as simple as it seems. Thank God for that.