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prospered. Finally, he desired to return home to meet his brother, even if it meant Esau would try to kill
him. And that is where our story brings us in today’s lesson from Genesis.
Jacob returns home. Would this journey be his last? Would Esau kill him for taking his
birthright and blessing?
The answer, remarkably, is no. Esau, on the contrary, greets his brother. “Esau ran to meet
him, and embraced him, and fell on his neck and kissed him, and they wept.” (Genesis 33:4) Esau
rejoiced that his brother was in his midst.
Let us be clear. Esau could have killed Jacob. Esau had with him 400 men. He could have
killed his brother and his family. But he “embraced him, and fell on his neck and kissed him, and they
wept.”
Esau and Jacob knew what it was to have one in the dominant role – to have a first-born – to
have a majority and a minority. Esau and Jacob knew what it was to have the one control the agenda
and assets, and the other had to be content with that dynamic. And Esau and Jacob knew what it was
to have the one with less turn the tables and disrupt the social order. By claiming a different stake than
what had been established from the outset, Jacob, the one born in the shadow of his brother, forced a
new family pattern.
The brothers had to decide whether or not they could live with a different set of circumstances
than what had been promised when they were born. They concluded they could.
We, on the other hand, are not so sure. Christians in America are processing the presence of
significant numbers of people of other faiths. Hindus in India are struggling with the Muslim and
Christian communities. Muslims in the Middle East are challenged by Jewish and Christian
representation.
People living in minority religions have plotted, like Jacob, how to strengthen their position in
their locations. The shifts are well underway. Birthrights and blessings are changing hands. The
changes leave those both in the majority and minority confused. Tourists in Sharm El Sheik, Egypt, and
residents of London, England, have endured the recent worst-case scenario of the struggle.
In trying to sort through the confusion, Olivier Roy, author of Globalized Islam, writes that the
Muslim terrorists who reside in Europe “are not the militant vanguard of the Muslim community; they are
a lost generation, unmoored from traditional societies and cultures, frustrated by a Western society that
does not meet their expectations. And their vision of a global ummah is both a mirror of and a form of
revenge against the globalization that has made them what they are.”
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Unlike Esau and Jacob, there are some who prefer murder rather than risk living in peace.
We now we find ourselves in the third act of the drama of the brothers: shall we kill each other
or shall we live together peaceably?
Reinhold Niebuhr recognized that birthright and blessing would be challenged by global co-
existence. When speaking at Stanford University in January 1944, in the midst of the Second World
War, Niebuhr described our global task:
The world community, toward which all historical forces
seem to be driving us, is [humankind’s] final possibility and
impossibility.
Niebuhr, the great theologian of the 20th century, suggested that humankind would fail in its efforts to
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