Finding Favor in Your Eyes

The Rev. Whitworth Ferguson III
The First Presbyterian Church
Washingtonville, New York
July 31, 2005

Finding Favor in Your Eyes
Genesis 32.22-31
Genesis 33:1-17

Admit it: you do it all the time.
You get mad at someone for something.
Husband, wife, child, parent, brother, sister,
co-worker, neighbor, perhaps even the minister.
The target of your anger did something,
or said something that got under your skin and set you off.
Or perhaps he or she was supposed to do something and didn’t:
“I asked you to stop at the store and pick up one thing.”
Or you may have hoped that he or she would say something,
but was silent:
“It would be nice to hear the words thank-you once in while,
thank you for the dinner, thank you for the cleaning,
thank you for the work, the friendship…

Word or deed,
committed or omitted: it doesn’t matter.
You are upset, annoyed, irritated,
peevish, petulant, piqued, and pouty.

You don’t say anything to the person.
You don’t say, “You know you said something that hurt me
or bothered me;
You did something that seemed awfully inconsiderate.
I put a lot of work into that dinner.”
No, that’s almost too easy.
If you did that you might work out your differences
and that would take away the power that comes with anger;
your power at holding the other person at a distance;
your power at being cold, removed;
your power that comes with sharing your anger with others:
“Do you want to hear what he did….?”,
“Can you believe what she said…?”

There is power in pique,
potency in peevishness.
We like holding onto our anger;
in fact, it is such a common human trait that we have a word for it,
a very fitting word:
“Grudge”
“Grudge”….It is an ugly word, isn’t it?
There is nothing delicate or light about the word.
It is dark, heavy…. guttural:
“grudge”.
We begrudge something or someone,
we hold grudges, hold them in our minds;
something that is formless, something we cannot see,
yet is so real and powerful to the one who holds it.
Grudge: The dictionary (Amer. Heritage 4th) defines it as
“a deep-seated feeling of resentment”
When you hold a grudge you are unwilling to forgive,
unwilling to give at all.

Here’s the problem: Holding a grudge is profoundly unchristian.
It rejects Jesus’ most basic teachings:
We are to forgive because we ourselves have been forgiven.
(Matt. 6:14)
We are not to judge. (Matt. 7:1)
We are to turn the other cheek. (Matt. 5:38)
We are to love even our enemies. (Matt. 5:43)
It is by our love for others that we are known as Christ’s disciples.
(John 13:35)

Jesus teaches us that none of us is perfect.
We all have logs, planks, great big chunks of wood in our own eyes,
even as we are pointing out the speck in the eye of the one
who has ignited our grudge.

We are all flawed, we all fall short of what God expects from us,
yet God never holds a grudge against any of us;
God doesn’t remind us of mistakes we may have made in the past;
God truly forgives and forgets and moves on.
God forgives us our sins, and loves us unconditionally.
Except – you knew that was coming, didn’t you? –
Except, as Jesus warns us, “[when] you do not forgive others
their trespasses, then neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”
(Matthew 6:15)
Translated: if you hold a grudge against another child of God,
God may very well hold a grudge against you.

Yet there are times we feel justified in holding our grudges,
hanging onto our anger: someone did something so awful
that we have every right to be piqued, peevish and pouty.
But long before Jesus taught,
long before Moses received the Commandments,
God provided us with a wonderful lesson how to handle a grudge:
If anyone had the right to begrudge someone,
to hold a grudge, it was Esau, the older brother of Jacob.
As we have learned over the past few weeks,
Jacob cheated Esau out of his rights as the firstborn son --
Esau was a willing accomplice to be sure --
“give me something to eat before I die of hunger” --
but still Jacob could have simply offered his hungry brother
some of the stew he was cooking,
rather than resorting to extortion.
And we know that Jacob did not stop there.
With encouragement from his mother Rebekah,
Jacob deceived their father Isaac into giving Jacob
the blessing that belonged to Esau.

First the birthright, and then the blessing.
if ever a person was righteous in his anger, it was Esau;
if ever a person was justified in holding a grudge, it was Esau.
Both Rebekah and Jacob understood this.
And so, Jacob the cheat and the liar ran away
to save himself from his brother’s wrath.
Jacob ran away to Haran, to live with his Uncle Laban and his family.
There Jacob met his cousin Rachel, Laban’s younger daughter,
and fell in love with her instantly.
He agreed to work for his Uncle for seven years
in return for Rachel’s hand in marriage.
But then the cheater was himself cheated
when on his wedding night, Laban led Rachel’s older sister Leah
into the darkness of the wedding tent.
Laban extracted an additional 7 years of free labor from Jacob
for both Rachel and Leah.
And then at the end of 14 years, Laban again cheated Jacob.

Finally, after 20 years in Haran, God called Jacob
to return to his own family’s home in Beer-sheba.
Jacob set out to retrace the path he followed that took him to Haran,
only this time he had his wives and his children:
11 sons and one daughter;
along with servants and their children,
and hundreds of animals: sheep, oxen, donkeys, goats.
It was a slow-moving caravan, a few miles each day under the hot sun,
moving from well to well
in the same way we travel
from motel pool to motel pool in the summer.
And as Jacob got near the region of his birth, his anxiety grew,
because he was also getting closer and closer to the land known as Edom,
where his brother Esau lived.
Edom was southeast of Beer-sheba, south of the Great Salt Sea,
what we now call the Dead Sea.

Even after 20 years, Jacob believed that Esau still held his grudge,
was still so angry with Jacob, still filled with a desire to see Jacob dead.
It would be another 1500 years before Damocles would sit
under the sword that hung by a single strand of horsehair
but the prospect of Esau’s bloodthirsty desire for revenge was truly
Jacob’s sword of Damocles.

As they got closer to the land where Esau lived
Jacob sent messengers out to find him,
and the messengers returned with a grim message:
“Your brother Esau is coming to meet you
and four hundred men are with him.” (32.6)
400 men: a small army
no doubt ready to turn the countryside red:
red with Jacob’s blood,
red with the blood of his wives,
red with the blood of his children, and all his servants.
Four hundred men, marching, marching up from Edom,
led by a man who had had 20 years to hold his grudge,
build it, refine it, let it take over his life.

Jacob’s first instinct was to limit the damage,
to keep the bloodshed minimal.
So Jacob separated his family and all his flocks and animals
thinking “If Esau comes to the one company and destroys it,
then the other company will survive.” (32.8)
But then Jacob did something we don’t expect,
something that doesn’t quite fit with Jacob’s character:
Jacob prayed,
prayed as he did when he first set out from Beth-el.
Only this time his prayer was different, it was more humble.
“Deliver me, please, from the hand of my brother
for I am afraid of him.” (32.11)

And then after praying, Jacob did what most of us would do
in the circumstances: he hedged his bets.
Jacob thought he might be able to soften up Esau with presents:
“two hundred female goats, twenty male goats;
two hundred female sheep, 20 rams;
30 camels and their colts;
40 cows, 10 bulls;
20 female donkeys, and 10 male donkeys.
All sent on ahead, “to find favor in Esau’s sight.”
The literal translation of the Hebrew records Jacob as saying,
“I will wipe the anger from Esau’s face,
with the gift that goes ahead of my face.”

But even with prayer,
even after splitting his family to minimize the damage,
even after sending ahead the gifts, Jacob was still troubled.
The sword of Damocles still hung over Jacob’s head:
the grudge Jacob was sure Esau carried.
So we should not be surprised that he had a sleepless night
out in Penuel all by himself, alone with his fears.
The Bible tells us that he wrestled with God,
or an angel of God -
the story is deliberately vague.
But Jacob was doing something we all do:
he was wrestling with his fears,
and when we wrestle with our fears,
we are wrestling with our faith,
and when we wrestle with our faith,
we are wrestling with God.
Morning comes and the struggle ends
with Jacob blessed, and his name changed to Israel,
for “one who strives”, strives not only with God,
but strives with humans, and all human emotions.

And as the sun rose over the hills to the east,
Jacob alone in the dawn, his hip sore,
saw his brother in the distance,
his brother with his company of 400 men.
Jacob limped slowly toward his brother,
bowing once, twice, three times, five times, seven times,
doing obeisance, not even daring to look Esau in the eye,
lest he should see the hatred, the murderous contempt.

And what did Esau do?
Esau, the one who had been so utterly wronged by Jacob.
Esau ran to his brother, and embraced him….
embraced him and kissed him
and the two brothers wept,
wept for joy that after 20 years and so much distance,
all was forgiven, all forgotten.
Esau bore no grudge toward Jacob.
Esau cared only about his brother, not revenge.
Esau cared only about reconciliation, not vengeance.
And Jacob looked into his brother’s eyes
and found favor in them,
found forgiveness in them,
found love in them.

Catholic theologian Henri Nouwen wrote,
“To forgive another person from the heart is an act of liberation.
We set the person free from the negative bonds that exist between us….
We also free ourselves from the burden of being the offended one.
As long as we do not forgive those who have wounded us,
we carry them with us, or worse, pull them along as a heavy load.”
Nouwen goes on to say that forgiveness is the cement of community life.
We cannot hope to have community in our homes, in our neighborhoods,
and in our church without forgiveness.
Grudges erode the mortar of love,
but forgiveness makes community stronger.

What is the story in your eyes?
What do people see when they look there?
We are all wounded, wounded regularly by family, friends,
those we care about, those we love.
But we also do our share of wounding:
wounding family, friends,
those we care about, those we love.

When someone looks in your eyes
what do they see?
What do they find?
Do they find the disfigurement that comes with grudges?
Or do they find favor?
The favor that comes with love,
love and forgiveness,
love and forgiveness that come to us
in the grace of God through Jesus Christ.
AMEN