Whitehall Holy Week Service (Gregory Tucker)

‘Jacob said: 'I will not let you go, unless you bless me.'
…then [he] asked him, 'Please tell me your name?'  
But [the man] said, 'Why is it that you ask my name?'  
And there he blessed him.’
Gen 32.26, 29

The Christian story is unique because it is just that – a story.  It is narrative, script, folktale;  history, poetry and song, wisdom, apocalyptic visions, and law;  it is instruction, admonishment, consolation, letters to friends, memoirs for a distant people… 

All these things are gathered together into that great volume which we call The Bible, simply the Greek word βιβλιος which means nothing more than a book.  The Church does not and never has understood this book as a complete guide to life, the universe, and everything – it is not a book of answers, cheap catch-all phrases, a one-stop manual into which one can dive, looking up the present concern in the index and turning to the right chapter.  It is a story.  It is a story to be read and re-read, imagined and re-imagined, spoken, sung, shouted, whispered, but primarily lived – lived afresh by each new generation, which encounters the living Word of God in Christ Jesus.

We are thrown now in this Holy Week into the very heart of this story.  The very source of all that we do and say and think as Christians is God himself – the God who in his eternal outpouring of love ordained to become a human, like us in all but sin, in order that he might make for us the perfect sacrifice, and so gain for us the everlasting life for which his heart longs.  The whole of the life of God in Christ draws us into the life of the Trinity which is itself an outpouring of love, but there is something particular about this moment, this chapter in God’s story which we relive this week, and it requires our special attention.

If we treat the story of the Passion of Christ, his Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem, the days in the Temple before the Passover, the Last Supper with his friends, his betrayal, arrest, trial, his disfiguring death upon the Cross, his burial in the Tomb – if we treat these as only part of an answer-book which we would like God to have written for us and sent down on a cloud, then we diminish their meaning, we make the very mystery of salvation to be a plain fact, the divine flicking of a switch.  No, these must be for us a part of God’s story, our story.  What God achieves in Christ upon the Cross is beyond the capacity of humans to comprehend – it cannot be explained in words or symbols – it can only be taken, broken, consumed, and lived in faith by the people of God, which is why we set aside this Holy Week, our holy week, to make this story ours once again.

Why is it that you ask my name?  And there he blessed him.

Jacob was having a rough time of it when he met with the angel at the crossing over the River Jabbock, a few miles east beyond the Jordan.  What with his rather complex domestic arrangements (two wives – sisters, mistresses, eleven sons and one daughter so-far), his having fled from Laban (his father-in-law), and fear over impending action by his brother Esau, you would think he was rather too busy to have an encounter with God!  But it is in the midst of all this anxiety, confusion and fear – the stuff of ordinary human life – that God makes himself known to Jacob, indeed, more than this – wrestling with him. 

Jacob, like us, wants answers.  Please tell me your name.  It is not hard to imagine him, alone in those darkest hours of the night, separated from his loved ones for whom he is fighting so hard, tired from the wrestling, the battling in his soul – it is not hard to imagine him begging the angel to know him.  Who are you?  Who is it that keeps me awake, that has taken hold of me, that has struck my hip?  Please tell me your name.  Who are you with whom I wrestle, whom I will not let go, unless you bless me?  A name is a powerful thing, the emblem of our being, and it is this most intimate knowledge for which Jacob longs.  Who are you?  Please tell me your name.

We, like Jacob, cry out to the one with whom we wrestle, the one who bruises our hip and whose presence in our lives is so real as to be described in physical terms;  the one who does not grip us, but to whom we cling with all our might, longing for his blessing.  This is our story.  This is the story of God With Us; Immanuel; Christ crucified. 

Here are no glib answers, no quick-fix simple satisfaction.  When we cry out in the night to our God with whom we wrestle, and of whom we cannot let go, the God whose story is one and the same as our own, we get no answer.  We get a bruised hip and a limp, the comprehensible signs of the incomprehensible God in our life.  We get silence; we get day-break; we get a question: Why is it that you ask my name?  When we encounter God in the intimacy of the dark nights of our own stories, we want to own him for ourselves.  We long to lay claim to our God, to know him as he truly is, to name him as he names us.  We cling to him – and rightly we cling – but we cannot know him as he really is in this life, for we only see him in part, as the man with whom we wrestle in the dark and in the dim light of the dawn.

And there he blessed him.

Yet, in the wrestling and in the bruising and in the asking, we are not alone.  God allows us in all our weakness, our sinful broken humanity, to cling to him, to lay claim to Christ crucified, to make his story our own – to make our story the triumph of life over death, because nothing in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.  We do not simply turn to Christ distantly, the turning of our mind is not enough – this is not about solving a problem – but we take hold of him, firmly; and in faith, we do not let go, because there is nothing that can separate us from his grace, his love, his life;  there is nothing that can separate us from the blessing he gives us we shout or weep or whisper the question, Please tell me your name.

Who will separate us from the love of Christ?

At the heart of God’s story is a life, God’s life with us in Jesus Christ.  It is part of the same story which stretches back to Jacob, to Abraham and Isaac, to Adam; and it stretches forward through Our Lady, Mary Magdalene, Peter and Paul, those countless saints and martyrs throughout the ages who cling to God and wrestle with him.  It is also our story – not facts and answers written in a book, but our life.

Paul knew that when Christ offered himself in accordance with the Father’s will in the events of the week of his Passion, this Holy Week which we now live again, he withheld nothing.  He who owed no debt to God, gave from his love – that love which is nothing less that the life of God the Holy Trinity – everything that he had: his life, his story.  And having offered everything, what is left to withhold?  Christ renders our debt of sin as nothing, allowing us, like Jacob, to cling to him, and cry out to know his name, since neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Let us pray that in this Holy Week we may live again the story of our salvation in Christ, and as we wrestle with God, may we learn to cling to him more firmly, and call out to know his name, in the assurance that nothing can separate us from his love.


‘Jacob said: 'I will not let you go, unless you bless me.'
…then [he] asked him, 'Please tell me your name?' 
But [the man] said, 'Why is it that you ask my name?' 
And there he blessed him.’