The night before, Jacob wrestled a stranger at the Jabbok and said afterward that he had seen God face to face and lived. Now the sun is up, his hip aches with every step, and the brother he has dreaded for twenty years is coming with four hundred men. Jacob arranges his family with the least loved in front and the most loved at the back, the same instinct that split his camp the night before. Then he does something new. He walks out ahead of them all, alone, toward the man most likely to kill him, 3"bowing himself to the ground seven times" before he reaches him.
That bow undoes something in the body that words could not. Years ago Isaac blessed Jacob thinking he was Esau, and one line of that blessing said, "may your mother's sons bow down to you" (Genesis 27:29). Jacob is bowing to the brother who was supposed to bow to him. He cannot return the stolen blessing, and he can reverse the posture that came with it.
Esau does not wait for the seven bows to end. He runs, embraces him, falls on his neck, and kisses him, and 4"they wept." Nothing in the text explains Esau's change of heart. It is simply there, unearned and unexplained, which is how grace usually arrives. When Esau tries to refuse the gift Jacob sent ahead, saying 9"I have enough, my brother," Jacob presses it on him: 10"I have seen your face, which is like seeing the face of God."
That line only makes sense after the night before. The word Jacob used for God's face at Peniel he now uses for his brother's. He had to survive seeing God before he could survive seeing Esau, and the two reconciliations belong together in his mind.
Then the old habits return, almost at once. Esau offers to travel with him, and Jacob politely declines, citing the children and the nursing flocks. He promises to come 14"until I come to my lord in Seir." He never goes to Seir. He turns aside to Succoth and then to Shechem, well inside Canaan and nowhere near his brother. The man who bowed seven times and called his brother's face the face of God still cannot quite say a plain no. He is Israel now, and in this moment he is also the old Jacob.
Genesis leaves both in the text. A tearful reconciliation and a small evasion sit side by side in one chapter, because change usually comes that way, in a body still limping from its last meeting with God and catching up to what it now believes.
What holds without qualification is the altar. At Shechem Jacob buys ground, the first he has ever owned in the promised land, and builds an altar there and calls it 20El-Elohe-Israel, which means God, the God of Israel. It is the first time he worships as Israel.
If you carry a broken relationship, do not wait for a complete reconciliation before you walk toward the person. Go limping if you must. And when you have peace enough to give thanks, worship as the person God has made you.
Prayer
Father, thank you that seeing your face, even wounded and afraid, is what frees us to face the people we have wronged or feared. We confess that our reconciliations are rarely finished in one embrace, and that old caution survives beside tears. Teach us to keep walking forward anyway, and to worship you as the God who has changed us. In Jesus' name, amen.