I’m sure that we’ve all seen the film of “The Snowman”, based on the book by Raymond Briggs who died earlier this year. This enchanting film first appeared on Christmas Eve 1982 and has been shown every year since, which means that it’s now delighting the grandchildren of the original viewers. It’s famous not only for its magical artwork but also for its music by Howard Blake – this includes the song “Walking in the Air” which, contrary to popular belief, wasn’t sung by Aled Jones but a chorister from St Paul’s Cathedral called Peter Auty: Jones’ record came out in 1985 and made him a star, while Auty wasn’t even mentioned in the film’s credits until it was remastered 20 years later.

You’ll know the story of how the boy builds a snowman in his back garden and goes to bed. He wakes up in the night, looks out of his window, sees that the snowman has come to life, and goes out to meet him. Their adventures together climax with a flight to the frozen north where they take part in a wonderful snowmen’s party, presided over by Father Christmas. But the snowman is worried: dawn is near and they must leave. They fly back to England, the snowman returns to his place in the garden, and the boy goes back to bed. Later he is woken by the sun shining through his window. He races downstairs to see his beloved snowman, but he has melted. All that’s left is a pile of slush, a hat, a scarf, and a couple of lumps of coal. The boy is heartbroken: perhaps the adventures were just a dream. But then he reaches into his dressing-gown pocket – and pulls out the scarf which Father Christmas had given to him at the North Pole.

Something similar happens in the Bible story we read earlier. For in it we encounter Jacob, at night, alone and in a precarious situation – I’ll tell you more about that in a moment. A shadowy figure, a mysterious man, appears from nowhere; he isn’t named and we have no idea who he is. This man wrestles with Jacob, not just for a few moments but, one assumes, for several hours. It’s a hard fight as the two men are evenly matched. Finally the stranger resorts to a dirty trick: he hits Jacob on the hip and dislocates it. A short conversation ensues, in which the man still refuses to say who he is. Then he vanishes into thin air. In the cold light of day, Jacob wonders whether he has just had a bad dream – until he tries to walk and finds he can only limp.

This is one of the best-known Old Testament stories, yet it is one of the most puzzling. Who is the night-time wrestler? Why does the contest take place? Who is the true winner? What is it all about? I can’t promise definitive answers this morning, but we’ll try to find out what’s going on. And, as we do, we may learn something about the tussles we face in our lives – for even Christians have their struggles.

But first we must set this story in its context. And we have to realise that Jacob is not a nice man – in fact he’s a very slippery customer indeed! We all know how he took advantage of his father’s poor vision and his brother Esau’s hunger to steal his inheritance; since then Jacob has cheated, deceived, and manipulated virtually every member of his family, eventually running from Canaan to Syria to avoid them. By the time we get to this chapter he’s been away for twenty years and is finally on his way home. But what reception will he get? Will his past catch up with him? Will his brother Esau take revenge when they meet? Would it be best for everyone if Jacob simply turned back? He certainly sees the danger he’s in as he divides his family, flocks and servants into two groups and sends them away for safety. If there is trouble, perhaps one group will survive – the danger to them is real.

And Jacob is alone. I cannot overstate that, as solitude has been rare in Jacob’s life. His journey from Syria has been accompanied by the clopping hooves and bleats of livestock, the protestations of two sister-wives and two very intimate maids (not to mention the fuss and bother of eleven howling or argumentative or children). But all that has suddenly ended at the ford across the Jabbok river: the noise has died away and Jacob can hear nothing apart from trickling water. It’s an unusual and unnerving experience – we can almost imagine him looking around nervously at the tiniest sound. Is that one of Esau’s clan, out to kill him? That must be his fear – and here, in the desert, it wouldn’t be hard to conceal the evidence of murder.

We can imagine his heart thudding as his visitor appears, hear him call out, “Hallo, who’s there?” But the visitor says nothing: he silently grasps Jacob and begins pushing him to the ground. Jacob resists and the battle is on. This is no carefully-choreographed public match: it’s a genuine struggle. At times Jacob seems to be gaining the upper hand, at others the stranger appears to be winning. But neither is able to pin the other to the ground in submission and the man with no name wins only after taking decisive action. But he has cheated: so has Jacob really lost? It’s only then that the stranger comes out with a startling revelation: he knows who Jacob is and has deliberately targeted him. He tells Jacob that his name will now be Israel, offers him God’s blessing, shakes hands and departs. Jacob is left bemused and, after some thought, concludes that his wrestling opponent has been God himself. His fight has been a life-changing event.

But was Jacob right? – after all, it’s been suggested that the person he was fighting was his brother Esau or his uncle Laban. That seems unlikely, not least because he would have recognised them as dawn was breaking, if not earlier. We notice that the stranger changes Jacob’s name to Israel because he has “struggled with God” – which is what the name means – “and with men”. But, when Jacob demands (not very politely) to know his name, he refuses to disclose it. That was important in ancient Hebrew society, as knowing someone’s name gave you a measure of control over them. (We still see this today when senior politicians are being interviewed and say, “Now, Laura (or whoever), let’s be very clear …”, making the interviewer work hard to stay in charge). By not telling Jacob his name, the mystery wrestler retains control. Is this the same God who later confronted Moses at the burning bush and, when asked, “Who are you?”, was only prepared to say, “I am who I am”? It very much sounds as if it is!

But perhaps there’s another struggle going on here, as well. I’ve already told you what an unsavoury and untrustworthy person Jacob was – in fact his original name means “deceiver” or “supplanter”.  We only have his word for what took place at the riverbank, which may not be true – the one proveable fact about the whole tale is that he came out of it with a dislocated hip. So perhaps it wasn’t God that Jacob was wrestling with that night: perhaps he was fighting with himself, with what we might call his own “inner demons”. For he had reached a turning-point in his life. Was he going to take that crucial step of entering his homeland and seeking reconciliation with his brother, or not? It was still just about possible for him to do a U-turn (now where have we heard that phrase before?) and tell his family and employees, “Sorry folks, there’s been a change of plan and you’ve had a wasted journey: we’re going back to Syria”. We’ve all had sleepless nights before making life-changing decisions – so is that what was happening here, albeit dressed up in spiritual language?

Well, there may be some truth in that approach – but I wouldn’t want to paint God out of the picture and see this story in purely human terms. I’d also like us to recall that this wasn’t Jacob’s first night-time encounter with God: he had another one four chapters (and 20 years) earlier when he was travelling in the opposite direction, from Canaan to Syria. His brother Esau was murderously furious at the way Jacob had sneakily stolen his father’s blessing so Jacob was running away as fast as his legs could carry him! As he slept one night he had a dream – and this time we’re specifically told that it was a dream – of a ladder reaching up to heaven with angels ascending and descending. God spoke to him and, amazingly, said that he, Jacob, would become the father of a great (and as yet unnamed) nation. When Jacob woke up he cried out, “Surely the Lord is in this place – and I didn’t know it!” There are obvious parallels between this story and today’s.

One aspect of this story which I find uncomfortable is that way in which God disables Jacob. Does this say that God a trickster who resorts to underhand tactics in order to defeat us? That doesn’t sound like the honest and upright God of love we know – although he does sometimes have to dent our human pride and arrogance. That may well be what’s important, because it seems to be what happened here.

For as we move into the next chapter and see Jacob finally meeting Esau, he appears to be a changed man. As he sees his brother coming near, he bows to the ground seven times (and then makes every member of his entourage do the same). When they meet, he embraces him with a bearhug. When Jacob speaks, he calls Esau “my lord”, offers him gifts, and declares that seeing his face “is like seeing the face of God”. Is Jacob behaving like this simply to placate Esau and dispel his wrath? That is of course possible – but the wrestling bout with God really does seem to have changed him. The divine blessing and new name that he has received seem to signal that Jacob has started a new chapter in his life; he’s still the same person but he has now been commissioned to be the father of God’s chosen people.

So where does this story leave us? Is it saying that mysterious night-time struggles with God are normal (they are fairly common in ancient folklore)? Surely not. And is it saying that we need to “wrestle with God”, not literally but in painful and persistent prayer, until we manage to squeeze a blessing out of him? Jesus does hint at that in his own teaching, but there’s nothing mechanical about prayer: God doesn’t say, “You’ve got to sweat it out by fighting a certain number of rounds with me – then I’ll answer you”. It doesn’t work like that at all!

But what I can say without doubt is this: that God uses prayer to bring us round to his way of thinking. We’re not talking about liturgical prayer which repeats a set of words with little emotion, we’re not thinking of simplistic “God bless mummy and daddy” prayers, we’re thinking of something more profound, persistent, painful and even full of doubt: prayer which wrestles with God and also ourselves. Few of us know that kind of prayer; someone who did was P T Forsyth, the Scottish Congregational theologian. This is what he wrote over a century ago: “This wrestle in prayer is in a certain sense a resisting of God. It is not mere wrestling with ourselves, our ignorance, our self-will: that is self-torment, not prayer. Prayer is wrestling with God”. And he concluded, “It is a resistance that God loves”. So let’s be willing to grapple with God – if that’s what he’s calling us to do.