(Genesis 27-28)
“What a schlemiel!,” Jacob smugged to his mother after he had pulled the wool over the old man’s eyes for the final time stealing the birthright from his unsuspecting hairball of a twin, Esau. “I can’t believe he fell for it.”
Rebekah wasn’t sure if the schlemiel was her son, Esau, or her husband, Isaac, but either way her scheme had worked. Just like the good ol’ days when Jacob had grabbed hold of Esau’s heel as they came through the birthing. “Couldn’t get ahead then so this is your last chance,” she whispered in his ear. But now what? Esau wanted him dead, he knew he couldn’t hang around, so Jacob hit the road with the blessing he had just stolen.
The greatest scam of all time.
Jacob, son of Isaac and Rebekah, grandson of Abraham and Sarah, had conspired with his mother and knocked his twin brother Esau off the family pedestal. As he was looking back over his shoulder running from Beersheba, hoping to land in Uncle Laban’s lap, hunted by his brother, haunted by the family feud, he stopped to catch his breath in the middle of nowhere which became for the Supplanter the center of everywhere. It turns out it was one of those thin places in our life-knowledge, one of those awesome places between heaven and earth where the veil is momentarily pulled back and the God-presence is revealed. Taking a stone for a pillow for his weary head he fell fast asleep, and dreamed.
So this is how God would speak to this deceiving son and brother? By this vision in sleep? Isn’t that a scam shame?
Jacob dreamed. Jacob found it within his haunted and hunted self to name that place, Beth-El, the House of God, because "How awesome is this place!,” he said, “This is none other than the house of God and this is the gate of heaven.” (Genesis 28:10-19)
Jacob's dream at Bethel is what we have named “Jacob's Ladder,” reaching up into heaven. But, you see, steps will get us nowhere and especially not into God’s presence. Steps separate the here-and-now from the Presence. Steps segregate the non-climbers from the pretenders.
So let’s dream a little deeper. The original Hebrew of the story uses the word sulam here, the only place in Torah where the word is used. As such, it is a word without singular meaning (as in “ladder”) but rather one which opens the imagination. At its root it means “to lift or cast up” or “to escalate.” †
Sulam is not the proverbial stairway to heaven of our childhood’s song, "We are Climbing Jacob's Ladder." It is more accurate to translate this mysterious word, sulam, into the English word ramp. What Jacob dreamed we can’t know for sure, of course, but from the use of this particular word we can guess that he dreamed of a Mesopotamian ziggurat, a tower made from earth, a tower built by royalty to glorify themselves, built as temples of greatness reaching into the sky where the gods lived. To gain access to the top, to the gods, builders would build not a ladder straight up the side of the tower but instead a ramp that encircled the outside until it climbed to the climax, the Greek word for the same ascending concept.
"And Jacob dreamed that there was a ramp set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven; and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it." (Genesis 28:12) Jacob's Ramp.
The mythical Tower of Babel was a ziggurat. We the people decided that we would build a city with a tower in the middle that would reach into the sky so that we could "make a name for ourselves." God didn’t much like that, though, and the tower fell along with our unity and our hopes and, as the story goes, we were segregated across the face of the earth. (Genesis 11)
Ah, but we don’t give up so easily. Like Jacob trying to make a name for himself as he ran from reality as fast as he could, so are we committed to building for ourselves towers that will get us closer to the God-presence.
“This one will finally get us there!,” we proclaim at the groundbreaking of a new cathedral headed into the sky, “A few more steps up and we’ll be at the peak and we’ll be able to peek in.”
So we’ve done over and over again as we’ve mixed bricks and slime, stones and stained glass, spires and steel. We’ve built our places of worship looking up, looking to heaven, looking for God, who will surely praise the name we’ve made for ourselves marveling at our upward mobility. Notre Dame, St. Paul’s, Westminster, St. Patrick’s, Hagia Sophia, Reims, Chartres.
“Oh how we reach out to God up there; oh how we’ve made a name for ourselves.”
Yet when we build like that we circumvent the very foundation of that which Jesus’ message reminded us. God is not out there somewhere but right here with us. Emanu-El – God-with-us – is the root of all that Jesus-followers proclaim. God-with-us, not God-up-there-somewhere. And when we build our towers to make a name for ourselves we exclude those who Jesus invited to the table, those who can't climb stairs, those who can't see stairs, those who feel like they can't get access to God, those whom history has tried to tell us are not worthy of “God-up-there.”
God forgive us this scam we have perpetuated. God forgive us for imagining that God is out there, up there, not here among us.
The Jacob scam was what sent him on the run and brought on that beautiful dream of a ramp to the God-presence. We have perpetuated that scam by building our steps and platforms and towers to “heaven.” God forgive us our scam. It is a scam shame.
What has become clear is that as long as we will accept these stories as access metaphors then we need to accept that as God speaks to Jacob in this dream, God has a different metaphor in mind. God lets Jacob know that angels, messengers of God, are ascending from earth first and then descending to earth second, and doing so by way of a ramp. The challenge is whether we can surrender our scam and build that God-way also.
“We are / ascending / Jacob’s ramp.” Let’s sing it like that. “We are / ascending / Jacob’s ramp.” Jacob dreamed of a ramp reaching to God with angels ascending into heaven and descending to earth. God is accessible by way of this ramp.
What a great image. And what it means for those with limited access when it comes to steps and stairs and ladders or those with limited emotional access to worship buildings or those who have been systematically denied access to worship for all these centuries is liberation. It means that despite what we as human beings have done regarding the physical shape of our places of worship, God will not limit anyone's spiritual access.
When we begin to create physically accessible worship spaces – as maybe we are finally doing – we create access to the God-presence which is here-with-us on this level plain.
© Copyright 2015
James F. McIntire
All rights reserved.
†“Balashon – Hebrew Language Detective.” www.balashon.com/2006/07/haslama.html; Yitzhak (Itzik) Peleg. “What H’slm Jacob Saw in His Dream.” http://lib.cet.ac.il/Pages/item.asp?item=9156&kwd=6342; Walter Brueggemann. “Genesis: Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching,” pp. 242-244.
