The Blessing That Got Stolen

(Genesis 27 – 28:5)

In this family there was a father named Isaac, and he was very, very old. His eyes had grown dim, and then they had gone dark. He could not see anymore. He could only feel, and listen, and smell.

And Isaac had two boys.

Esau was the older one. He was hairy and strong, and he loved to hunt out in the wild fields. Jacob was the younger one. He was smooth, and he liked to stay close to home. Their mother, Rebekah, loved Jacob best. Their father loved Esau best. Already there was a crack running through this family, thin as a hair, before anything had even happened.

Now Isaac wanted to give his oldest boy a special gift, something bigger than any toy or any pile of money. It was called a blessing. It was like a father holding your face in his hands and saying: God will be good to you. You are mine. You are loved.

But Rebekah wanted that blessing for Jacob.

So they made a plan to take it. A sneaky, whispered plan. While Esau was out hunting, Rebekah cooked the food Isaac loved. She dressed Jacob in Esau's clothes, so he would smell like the fields. She tied goat hair on his smooth arms, so he would feel hairy.

And then Jacob went in to his blind old father. And he told a lie.

"I am Esau," he said.

His father was puzzled. "Your voice sounds like Jacob," he said. So he reached out his shaky hands and felt the goat hair. He breathed in the borrowed clothes. And he believed it.

He held the wrong boy's face. And he gave away the blessing.

Then Esau came home, still smelling of the wild fields, carrying the food he had hunted for his daddy. And he found out. The blessing was gone. Taken. And Esau cried out a great and bitter cry, the kind of cry that shakes a whole house.

"Bless me too, Father! Don't you have even one blessing left for me?"

Long before, on another hungry day, Esau had traded his birthright to Jacob for a bowl of red stew and walked away as if it were nothing. But this was not nothing. This time the ache filled the house from wall to wall, the ache of wanting something with everything in you and watching it get snatched away.

And Esau was so angry now that he wanted to hurt his brother. So Jacob had to run. Far away. All alone. The family was breaking into pieces. Two brothers, who should have loved each other, torn apart by grabbing and lying, and one of them left crying, "Is there none left for me?"

Hold on to that cry. Because far down the long road of this family, another Brother was coming. The true one. And he would not grab the blessing and run away with it. He would do the opposite. He would open his hands and give his blessing away. To the left-out ones. To the cheated ones. To the runaways. To an Esau and a Jacob both.

He was coming to gather this broken family back together, and not one of them, not even the one who ran, would ever be too far gone for him to find.

But that night, Jacob only knew the road. He hurried into the dark with nothing but the clothes on his back, a cheater running from the brother he had cheated. He did not know that God was waiting for him out in the wilderness, just a little way down that lonely road.