Text:  Genesis 29:14b – 30:2                                                                                       W 5^th Lent Midweek

“Weak Eyes”

            In the name of Jesus, dear friends in Christ: during our Lenten meditation last Wednesday evening, we spent some time reflecting on how the principles of Law and Gospel are presented to us in the stories concerning the patriarch Abraham and the two women to whom he was married.  And perhaps I could have made it clearer then, but that was not just some clever bit of allegorizing a biblical text on my part; no, St. Paul used the same illustration in his letter to the Galatians.  He said that the two women, Sarah, Abraham’s wife, and Hagar, who was Sarah’s Egyptian servant girl, represent the two covenants that God has given and by which people attempt to come to God, or find salvation, or attain the promised goal – however you want to say it.  The idea is that Abraham represents every person who’s trying to attain the goal. In his case, it’s to have a son – because he knows that in order for the Lord to fulfill his promise to make Abraham into a great nation, and give them their own land for all generations, and most importantly to bring the Messiah through his line, he’s got to have offspring. The question is: how is he going to do it?  Sarah, the beloved wife of his youth, and with whom he has lived in happiness for probably fifty years has proven to be barren, and now she’s well past the time in life when conception is humanly possible.  It would take a miracle for her to have a child now – and that’s exactly the point.  If she is going to have a child, it will take God’s power.  It will be his work.  And that’s why Sarah represents the Gospel – what God does for us.

            But the Gospel takes faith and patience to bear fruit, and people are usually short on both.  So they look to other means, natural means, things they can do by their own power and strength to attain the goal.  They turn to the covenant of the Law.  In this case, it’s represented by Hagar.  She’s young and fertile and able to bear Abraham a son by their united human effort – and she does.  The trouble is that this is not the child through whom the Lord is going to fulfill his promise – the works of man never are.  So in due course, according to the timing of his own good pleasure and will, the Lord gives Abraham another son by Sarah.  This is the child of promise – the one through whom the Lord will give Abraham all he has said.  But now Abraham has a problem:  he has two sons, and he loves them both.  One is the child born by God’s power of the free woman, and the other is the child born by natural means of the slave woman.  One child represents the fruit of the Gospel – and he’s just a little toddler; the other represents the fruit of the law – the best and noblest works of man – and he’s nearly full-grown.  The day comes when the older boy begins to pick on the younger and make fun of him (the fruit of the Law always mocks the fruit of faith), and Abraham must make a decision.  The works of the flesh by the Law and the works of God through faith in the Gospel cannot live together in harmony, and Abraham can only inherit the promise through the work of God.  And so, as much as he loves the older boy, he must send him away and let him go.  And we too must do the same.  It’s like we sing in the hymn:  “Nothing in my hand I bring; simply to thy cross I cling.”

            Well, all that having been said, this evening we have another story to consider – one that deals with a man who ends up with two wives, one of whom can have children, and the other who can’t. Sounds awfully familiar, doesn’t it? Of course, there’s a reason for that. Just like before, the two women can be seen to represent the two covenants of Law and Gospel; and just as in all the other Genesis stories we’ve looked at thus far, this story gives us yet another aspect and deeper insight into the relationship that every believer has with these two covenants.

            But first a little background to shed some light on the story.  The principal character is Jacob.  He’s the grandson of Abraham and the son of Isaac who was the child of promise mentioned in the last story.  As such, Jacob is also an heir of the promise, and as it turns out, he’s the one through whom the Lord has decided to continue the line of Abraham’s descendants that lead to the coming of the Savior.  Now, you probably remember that Jacob has a twin brother named Esau, and Esau is the “older” twin – he was born first.  Nevertheless, against the tradition and common custom of the day, the Lord has chosen to bring the promise through Jacob and his descendants, and not through Esau.  That’s the promise – the trouble is that Jacob doesn’t trust the promise.  He thinks (just like his grandfather Abraham) that it’s up to him to make the promise of God come true.

            So you remember those stories you learned in Sunday School about how Jacob took it upon himself to steal his brother’s birthright and blessing.  God planned to give them to Jacob by grace and Gospel, and he would have if only Jacob had been patient – but Jacob had what he thought was a better plan.  He wanted to do it on his own; that is, he chose the covenant of the Law.  And you remember what he got for his efforts.  He got the promised blessing, to be sure (he would have had it anyway) – but because of the way he went about it he also got a very angry older brother who quite understandably decided to kill him for all the dirty, rotten tricks he played on him.   Jacob had to run for his life.  And what we have here is an interested replay of the fall of our first parents.  You see, Jacob begins his life in the Promised Land:  the place Abraham hoped to inherit.  It’s like Paradise.  And he’s the son of the fabulously wealthy Isaac.  Jacob lives like a prince – like our first parents who were the masters of creation and had everything they needed practically handed right to them. Jacob’s got all that and the promise of God to boot – but like our first parents who even though they had everything, he too reaches for the forbidden fruit – or to be more precise, he reaches for the fruit by forbidden means.  The result is that he’s forced out of “Paradise” with the sentence of death hanging over his head.  Now all he’s got is the promise and the shirt on his back – just like Adam and Eve when they were cast out of the garden – and like them, now he has to work hard just in order to survive.

            Having thus fallen, he ends up (of all places) in the same country from which his grandfather Abraham had been called out to begin with.  It’s back to square one, as it were.  There he finds his uncle Laban, his mother’s worldly-wise and conniving brother—but Jacob does not yet know these things about him.  All he knows at present is that he’s found shelter among relatives in a strange and potentially hostile foreign land.  So Laban comes disguised as a savior of sorts; but he’s not really. And that’s the way the world is: it looks good at first and promises much; but it always fails to deliver.  Though Jacob is family, Laban will deal with him more as a hired hand, and even then with dishonesty, suspicion, and resentment.  But that is yet to come.  At first, Jacob settles in and goes to work as if he were one of the family.  But then the day comes that Laban makes it clear that he is not.  He proposes to Jacob that he should name what his wages will be; and while this may sound generous, it’s not.  Laban knows that because Jacob is completely dependent upon his charity, he can only negotiate at an extreme disadvantage.  He knows that whatever offer Jacob makes will be much less than Laban can reasonably propose.  Beyond that, Laban has probably also noticed that Rachel has caught Jacob’s eye – and he knows that no man wants to appear to be cheap when trying to win the love of his life.

            But Laban has two daughters.  Rachel, the younger of the two, we are told is “lovely in form and beautiful”.  Today we might say that she was “one hot babe”.  She had the sort of appearance that men naturally find attractive. Leah, on the other hand, is said to have “weak eyes”.  What does that mean?  The truth is that we are not altogether sure.  The problem with idioms like this is that they can be very difficult to translate.  It’s like me saying that ‘Rachel was the kind of girl that stops traffic’.  You’d all understand what I meant; but Moses who wrote this probably wouldn’t get it.  So we’ve got Leah with “weak eyes”.   Taken literally, it might mean that she was near-sighted and went around squinting all the time.  Or perhaps it’s a physical description and means that she had sort of droopy eyelids, the kind that makes a person look like they’re half asleep all the time. It might have been something like that – but I rather think that the basic idea, especially as the description is set against Rachel’s beauty, is that “weak eyes” is a euphemistic way of saying that Leah was rather plain … no, that’s probably not strong enough: it’s a way to say she was downright ugly.  I don’t know, perhaps the thought behind the expression is that only way she’d look okay is if you were nearsighted.

            But again, what we want to see here is that these two sisters represent the two covenants.  Jacob is the man who lives in the fallen world and he’s given the choice concerning which covenant he’d rather have.  Which one does he find more attractive?  Which one will he work to attain?  Will he choose Law or Gospel?

Which is which? Well, remember in our previous meditations, we’ve seen that mankind naturally gravitates toward the Law. It’s the one that appeals to him more. It’s the one that makes him look good because it’s all about his work.  In fact, that’s the one Jacob already foolishly chose that got him here in the first place. The Gospel, on the other hand, we don’t find so appealing because there’s no part for us.  It makes us the poor beggars who only receive what God in his mercy gives.  And let me suggest that that’s one of the main ideas being presented in this story.  Rachel, the pretty one represents the Law, and Leah, who’s not so attractive, is the Gospel.  Jacob offers to work seven years for Rachel – which in that day and age was an unheard of sum to offer as a bride price.  Records from the period suggest that the equivalent of two or three months’ wages at most should have covered it.  So what Jacob does is voluntarily put himself in bondage to earn the prize he finds so attractive.  And really that’s what every person does who attempts to gain the goal of faith by Law.

But look then what happens.  The day comes when Jacob has fulfilled his excessive obligation and now he wants what he’s been working so hard for – but he doesn’t get it.  And there’s a couple things going on here.  On the surface, we see that Jacob who’s pulled plenty of dirty tricks on others gets the tables turned on him.  That’s the Law coming back to bite him.  But on a deeper level, it shows that when we attempt to work our way to the fulfillment of the promise, we don’t get it.  No one becomes righteous and earns salvation by the works of the Law.  And on a deeper level still, we see that despite our foolish attempts to earn our way to the goal, the Lord keeps slipping in the Gospel on us whether we want it or not.  He knows better than we do what we need.  You might say that it’s his custom here in the kingdom of grace to give the Gospel to those who think they want the Law.  But Jacob doesn’t learn the lesson.  He agrees to work seven more years for Rachel – which means that when all is said and done, he works fourteen long years for her and he gets Leah for free.  

But let me give you a current example of what’s being illustrated here. The other day I was reading an article written by a Christian pastor explaining why he had absolutely no desire to see the recently released film about the passion of Christ.  And please don’t misunderstand me:  a lot of good Christian people don’t want to see that film, and I certainly respect their decisions.  It’s a very tough thing to see and no one should feel guilty about not wanting to watch it.  But what caught my attention was the reason why this pastor was so opposed to it.  He really thought the film was a bad thing because, as he stated, it failed to present the whole story about Jesus. He really thought of the cross and suffering of Jesus as an unfortunate and unpleasant sidelight to what really mattered most about the Lord’s earthly ministry, which were the sublime teachings of Jesus as summed up in the Sermon on the Mount. That message, he thought, captured the true essence of why Jesus came.  There he found beauty and wisdom and inspiration to walk in the light of God.  He certainly would not find what would be of benefit to him in gut-wrenching scenes filled with blood and pain that he claimed appealed to people’s baser emotions. But you see what he’s saying?  The Sermon on the Mount, as beautiful as it is, is all Law.  Far from inspiring us, if read correctly it should terrify us because the whole thrust of it is “Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect”, and “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the holy Scribes and Pharisees, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of God”.  Read correctly, the Sermon on the Mount can only condemn you.  What it should make you see why the horrible, ugly passion and death of our Lord is your only hope for salvation.

But returning to the story, there’s yet another theme that comes forth, and that has to do with the relative fruitfulness of the two covenants. Put yourself in Jacob’s sandals now that he has the two wives (the two covenants).  Which one do you suppose he spends most of his time with?  The one he worked so hard for and finds so attractive, or the one he never really wanted and who he can barely stand to look at? The answer is obvious.  But no matter how much time he spends with one who represents the Law, she cannot bear any offspring.  She even makes demands, “Give me children or I’ll die!” but to no avail.  God is not doing anything for Jacob through her.  On the other hand, we’ve got the undesired, unloved wife who represents the Gospel.  It seems that every time Jacob comes anywhere near her—boom!  There’s another child.  She has four children in four Bible verses – that’s a record.  Through her we see the promise to Abraham that his descendants would be many being fulfilled – and of course, it is through her that the Lord will bring about the ultimate fulfillment of the promise because it is through her son Judah that the Christ will come.

But Jacob seems not to notice what God is doing for him through Leah.  He still hopes for the Law to do something. And what’s being shown to us here is our inability to see or appreciate what the true works of God in our lives are. We think about pleasing God through the Law:  we want to do good works, noble achievements, things we can be proud to offer him.  We drive ourselves by the Law to accomplish them – and come up empty handed every time.  Meanwhile, through the less attractive Gospel, the Lord is working on us to bring about the true works he delights in – the things he does to change us by his Word and Spirit, like giving us the capacity to self examine and see the depth of our sin, making our hearts contrite, and bringing us to confession and the joy of hearing that our sins are forgiven.  No, it’s not pretty, but in that way he gives us life everlasting. And having done that, he works in us the gifts of the Spirit:  things like humility, gentleness, kindness, patience, and longsuffering.  The world does not find these things particularly attractive.  Neither do we.  Nor are they things that can be readily seen or measured – but then, maybe that’s because our eyes are weak when it comes to spiritual things. We cannot see what the true treasures are.

May our gracious heavenly Father, who chose the weak, shameful, and despised things of this world give strength to our weak eyes that we may see his real glory, honor, wisdom, power, and yes, his beauty revealed in the Gospel of Jesus Christ and his ugly work for and in us.  In his holy name. Amen.

Soli Deo Gloria!