There is an aspect of human behaviour known as differentiation. It refers to that balancing act whereby we are both individuals and yet part of a family, and possessed of both logical analysis and emotional fluctuation. Family is the unit God designed for our benefit in not only growing to maturity but in living our entire life – we never escape from being in family. We grow up and leave our family of origin but often it’s not long before we marry and establish our own family while as yet remaining children to ageing parents, who move on to a new role of being grandparents.
I’m convinced that part of the reason we have so much history in Scripture is so we can look and learn from others as they made their way through life. God is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and to my mind there are no more fascinating families in Holy Writ than the families of these three men. Of the three I suppose if I could be a fly on the wall to observe I would choose the family of Jacob. I mean there are so many dynamics in play and so many aspects of that family that fall outside the general design given by God at the beginning – one man, one woman, for life with what children accrue to that union. In an age when we are seeing the deterioration of home life it’s somewhat encouraging to see that God can work through the weaknesses and mistakes of people.
Some of the changes in family life have been quite rapid. A friend of our youngest daughter came home with her after school and after looking at the family photographs on the wall asked in all innocence, Are all you four children from the same father? If you knew this daughter you would understand her short, swift, and to-the-point answer. But it was understandable that her friend would ask such a question knowing her background. If we could hang Jacob’s family portrait on the wall it would be interesting – there’s Jacob, wife one, wife two, concubine one, concubine two, twelve brothers and half brothers, and one lonely girl, sister or half-sister as the case may be. It gives great illustration to the statement of Paul, and the times of this ignorance God winked at. Here was a family that had drunk deeply at the well of idolatry and worldliness and yet from the time of Abraham’s calling they had striven to follow God. God obviously tolerated a lot of ignorance in them at that dark time, which He would not do today, when, having illuminated the world by Jesus Christ, He asks all men to repent.
In many ways we bring to our own family, ideas, concepts, values, idiosyncrasies from our family of origin. One generation affects another for better and for worse. I want to look at the generation that preceded Jacob’s:- Isaac and Rebekkah and their relationship with Esau and Jacob. Working together as a team in marriage is not altogether easy. Certainly there are plenty of traps to fall into on the parenting journey. The concept of two becoming one certainly has application in that area. Unity of purpose and method is essential in the marriage cockpit, as any disunity will be exploited by children. But back of this, and underpinning this, lies the personal relationship between husband and wife. It has been said that the best thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother. Oversimplification? Perhaps, but there’s an awful lot of truth in that. It’s important that father and mother sort out their relationship as husband and wife else the dynamics in the family will be affected. Marriage comes before children in God’s design and will remain when children have grown and gone. We come to marriage essentially like concrete – all mixed up and set in our ways trying to become one with someone who is just as mixed up and set.
We play multiple roles in marriage:- husband/father, wife/mother; but we play roles in life from an early age, and roles, once learnt, are hard to put aside. “He’s our comedian”; “He’s our rebel”; She’s our quiet one” can be roles that we become programmed to fulfil. In close groups like families, roles tend to be reciprocal and complementary. For example, a girls is slightly more anxious to spend time with her boyfriend than he is with her. Left to his own devices he might call twice a week, but she would prefer to call three times a week. So if she calls three times a week he won’t call at all. So as time goes on she becomes the pursuer and he becomes the pursued. Or two parents who both expect their children to behave at the table: It may be the father has a shorter fuse than the mother and after ten seconds of rowdiness he tells them to quieten, whereas she would have waited for thirty seconds. So he will always speak first and she will never speak at all. Eventually they can become polarised into complimentary roles of strictness and leniency – and these roles reinforce each other since the strict one gets stricter to cover for the lenient one’s leniency and the lenient gets more lenient to compensate for the stricter one’s strictness. It’s important for parents to sort out these roles.
Pairing can lead to triangles, and the most common pairing is what happens in marriage. Some believe there is something inherently unstable about a couple in isolation and that the triangle is the smallest stable unit of relationship: (it is interesting to note that triangles exists spiritually – eg. the Godhead; husband, wife, and God; parents, God, children etc.) It is a general rule that any two person emotional system will form a three-person system under stress. Two people will recruit a third person into the relationship to reduce the anxiety and gain stability. For example, a husband who can’t stand his wife’s habitual lateness, but who also can’t stand up and tell her so, may start complaining to one of the children about her. His complaining may relieve some of the tension but the very process of complaining to a third party makes him less like to address the problem at its source. Or the wife that finds sympathy and understanding in a male friend that leads to adultery rather than dealing with the problem with her husband. Pairing in families can result in some perverse triangles:- eg. a child runs to his grandparent everytime the mother wants to chastise him and the grandmother defends him against the mother, or one parent complains to a child about the other parent.
And if relationship tension is not sorted in the original pair it will produce more and more triangles. Michael Nichols told a story that illustrates this: One Sunday morning Mrs McNeil, who was anxious to get the family to church on time, yelled at her nine-year-old son to hurry up. When the boy told his mother to “quit picking”, she lost her temper and slapped him. At that point her fourteen-year-old daughter, Megan, grabbed her and the two of them started wrestling. Then Megan ran out and went next door to her friend’s house. The friend’s parents noticed that Megan had a cut lip, and when she told them what had happened, the friend’s parents called the Police. One thing led to another, and a court case ensued. Eventually a whole host of triangles were present. Mrs McNeil, who had been ordered out of the house by the Family court Judge, was allied with her lawyer against the Judge; she also had an individual therapist who joined her in thinking she was being hounded unfairly by the child protection workers. The nine year old was still mad at his mother, and his father supported him in blaming her for flying off the handle. Mr. McNeil, a recovering alcoholic, formed an alliance with his sponsor, who felt that Mr. McNeil was on his way to a breakdown unless his wife started being more supportive of his handling of the kids. Meanwhile Megan had formed triangle with the neighbours, who thought her parents were awful people who shouldn’t be allowed to have children.
A case of pairing and triangulation is child-favouritism, and Isaac and Rebekkah made that mistake. It was a problem in the previous generation with the stress and conflict surrounding Ishmael and Isaac and the following generation with Joseph and his coat of many colours and his older brothers. Whatever the reasons, it always produces problems. According to Gen. 25:28, Isaac loved Esau. Why? – opposites attract? Esau could provide what Isaac himself could not provide? Esau lived the kind of life that Isaac secretly would have preferred? He was his firstborn? Whatever, Rebekkah loved Jacob. Luther ventured this opinion, Just as mothers are wont to love the sons who are of a more quiet and friendly disposition rather than those who are wild and bold, so fathers love those sons who are a bit more lively and bold. Or did she try to compensate in Jacob’s life because of the favouritism of the older brother by the father? Was it a reflection of the truth that had been told her in her pregnancy that the younger would be greater than the older.?
Whatever the case, a measure of partiality is attributed to both parents. That the boys were chalk and cheese is seen by the pottage incident. It could simply have been the case that each over-invested in a son due to emotional distance in the marriage. As I said, a father and a mother need to work on their own relationship – they need to make favourites of one another. When a man and a woman aren’t doing too well in their husband and wife relationship it is often the case that they expend their energies in their roles as father and mother, because in a family there is the opportunity to find others than your spouse to draw from and it’s easy to become emotionally over-involved with a child. In expending their energies in that direction the other relationship remains problematic, even beginning to deteriorate.
I saw a movie some time ago, called Family of Spies. I found it long and somewhat tedious, but interesting to some degree in that it was based on a true story of members of the one family in the U.S. Navy that spied for the Russians over two generations. A father sold secrets to the Russians, as did his brother, and then he raised his son to join the Navy and do the same. It all started with a marriage in trouble and the young son being caught up in a perverse triangle with the father running to his son after every blow-up with his wife and saying, You and me against the women, right? Why did Rebekkah hatch a plan with Jacob instead of dealing with her husband’s plan with her husband? What had happened? Gen. 24:67 says that when Isaac married her he loved her. Most, if not all, marriages begin that way. Gen. 25:20 says that Isaac was forty years old when he married and v. 26 says he was sixty when Esau and Jacob were born. So there was twenty years of waiting. That can produce all sorts of stresses from disappointments and unfulfilled expectations. We see it in Sarah (16:2), repeated by Rachael in 30:1ff and Jacob’s exasperation. We see it in Elkinah trying to console his wife Hannah with Am I not better to you than ten sons? We’re not told her answer, whether it was Yes you are darling, or No you’re not. I suspect it may have been Yes you are, but…..
Whatever transpired in those 20 years, by the time the boys were born it is evident there is a degree of estrangement and each parent has invested heavily in the son of their choosing. Many years go by till the time of our reading in Gen. 27. Isaac is 137, and we know he lived till 180 so why did he think he was near death some 40 years earlier? It’s not uncommon. We’re not told but it could be something as a bout of illness coupled with the fact his half-brother Ishmael had died 14 years earlier at age 137. He must have known what God had said about the two boys – the elder would serve the younger. Maybe he felt obliged to give his favourite son the blessing, seeing the birthright had gone to Jacob. That’s not our enquiry – our enquiry is why did Rebecca not go in and speak with her husband about his plans after she had overheard them? And after the deception had taken place and Esau planned to kill Jacob, why did she hatch an escape plan with Jacob to go to her brother Laban and lay low for awhile before going to Isaac with a lament about Esau’s wives and perhaps we’d better think about getting Jacob a wife from their family in Padam Aram instead of telling the truth? Games and deception, lack of forthrightness, crossed purposes, selfish agendas, unwillingness to communicate openly and honestly, all play a part in this sorry saga that afflicted the lives of both boys and the generations to come.
But pairing to produce perverse triangles is not limited to families. It happens in organizations where perhaps a supervisor joins with one subordinate against another or a professor complains about the department head to his students. It can happen in the church and the importance of Matt.5:23,24 and 18:15ff which address solving interpersonal problems as quickly and quietly as possible is readily seen. We are to sort out interpersonal problems, not simply relieve the tension by complaining to someone else. And we can stop being the third person being dragged into these perverse triangles by staying rational in times of stress and directing people to go see the person they need to deal with.