My company before is gone

Do you remember that famous painting entitled, "When did you last see your father?"? It portrayed the child of a Cavalier family from the period of the English Civil War being questioned by a Roundhead tribunal. In my mind, I transpose that image to an average Methodist church in the twenty-first century with the revised question, "When did you last sing 'Wrestling Jacob'?"

The answer is almost certainly going to be, "A very long time ago." If you are familiar with the hymn known as "Wrestling Jacob", that answer will not come as a great surprise, because the hymn has twelve verses, and each verse has six lines. It is one of the longest hymns in our hymnbook and after a congregation has sung it, especially if they sing it all in one go, a fair number of them need either oxygen or a stiff orange juice to recover from the experience. And so, one of our greatest hymns slips away into unused obscurity – for the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place knows it no more.

However, Charles Wesley was a wise and a skilful hymn-writer and he so structured his hymn so that it falls into the two equal sections of "Question and Answer". It can be sung thus as two separate but conjoined hymns, with alternative tunes to emphasise the different moods of the two sections of the hymn, with a "comfort-break" (as they say!) in between. So, we could begin with that wonderfully wistful hymn-tune, "STELLA", which, as "STELLA MARIS" (which means 'Star of the Sea'), Catholics use in their hymn of praise to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Then we could conclude with a tune to suggest the triumphant realisation within the second six verses of Charles Wesley's hymn.

When did you last sing Wrestling Jacob? On these revised terms, recently, and as often as you like. When did you last see your father? In my case, twenty years ago. And that is where the two questions meet, and are joined by a further one: "When did you last see your mother?" In my case, ten years ago – on February 4^th, 1997.

My company before is gone, and I am left alone with thee…

Charles Wesley's great hymn is based on one of the most haunting and moving stories of the Old Testament, which is to be found in the Book of Genesis, chapter thirty-two. This is part of the story of what today would be called a 'dysfunctional family'. Jacob, having stolen his elder brother's birthright, is preparing to rectify his underhandedness with prior gifts to bribe his brother not to kill him when he actually meets him face to face. The remainder of Jacob's company, his immediate family, he sends across the River Jabbok, and whilst alone on the nearer bank he has a religious encounter of the most profound kind. Genesis depicts this as a theophany; Jacob actually wrestles with God. The later prophet, Hosea, feels that this interpretation is unlikely and he transposes the story into one of Jacob wrestling with an angel, one of God's messengers. Out of the conflict, Jacob discovers who he really is and is given the new name of Israel, which passes down through the history of the subsequent nation. He does not come away from the conflict unharmed either, and the story of Jacob's dislocated hip is used to explain a later cultic abstinence in respect to particular food.

So much we know, but what we must also understand is how this story has come down to us over the subsequent centuries. Its beginning was in what we call the Patriarchal period; that is to say, almost two thousand years before the birth of Jesus. It began almost as long before the birth of Jesus as we live after it. So, Jesus himself would have been aware of the beginning of the layer of interpretation that Hosea had applied to the original story – Jacob wrestling with an angel. As the Christian Church combed the Old Testament for antecedents of the Incarnation of the Messiah, this story from Genesis took on yet a further meaning. It became a metaphor for the struggle of the spiritual pilgrimage, not only to arrive at the point of conviction, conversion and baptism, but also for the ongoing struggle after baptism. It was this paradox – that the redeemed also have continuing significant challenges – which Saint Paul dealt with in the seventh chapter of his Letter to the Romans. In Charles Wesley's hymn, Wrestling Jacob, the hymn-writer brings out this struggle by piling paradox upon paradox: I rise superior to my pain, when I am weak, then I am strong; and when my all of strength shall fail, I shall with the God-Man prevail.

The image of the struggle on the very bank of the river extended the metaphor further. In the Old Testament story, the River Jordan was the threshold that the children of Israel had to cross to enter the Promised Land, and so in Christian sermons and imagery the river of death as the threshold to the promised heaven became commonly cited. John Bunyan used it in "The Pilgrim's Progress". William Williams used it on an equally famous occasion in his hymn, "Guide me, O the great Jehovah", when he asked of God, "When I tread the verge of Jordan, bid my anxious fears subside…" Charles Wesley was even more subtle. Knowing the prevalence of those anxious fears, he referred to death in a diminutive of the metaphor, calling it not a river, but a "narrow stream".

You may ask whether a Christian of sufficient faith ought to have those anxious fears, but they are entirely natural, it seems to me, even for those of the greatest faith. For John Bunyan, it was when Christian was in the very middle of the stream that he felt the footing was disappearing beneath him. For William Williams, the implication was that the most anxious of fears come when you are on the verge itself. For Jesus, what in Saint John's Gospel is interpreted as the moment of victory is for Saint Mark the moment when Jesus utters the Cry of Dereliction. Which interpretation makes Jesus more human for you?

For Charles Wesley, the struggle is at its height when we are on the point of meeting, face to face, the "Traveller unknown" and of vindicating the truth of the promise that we shall "join our friends above that have obtained the prize." At that point, when my company before is gone, and I am left alone with thee… it is just between God and the individual Christian on the verge of the narrow stream. The moment is as poignant and as powerful as the conclusion of Honoré de Balzac's novel, "Père Goriot", when Rastignac, standing on the heights of Père Lachaise Cemetery, shakes his fist at the city of Paris below and cries, "It's between you and me now!" Or perhaps it is as wistful as the story of a friend of mine who died of cancer in her late forties. A mutual friend said of her, as we stood by the grave after the burial, "Well, she argued with God all her life, and now she has gone home to have it out with him, face to face."

My company before is gone, and I am left alone with thee… Charles Wesley, though the younger of the brothers, died in 1788. John followed him across the narrow stream in 1791. Just a fortnight after his brother's death, John tried to announce the hymn, Wrestling Jacob, but broke down when he reached the words of our text: My company before is gone, and I am left alone with thee… Truly, the greatest of Christians are bowed down by the "anxious fears". But what, as Christians, are we to set against them?

Firstly, we set against those anxious fears the story of Easter. Whatever else the story tells us, and it tells us much, the resurrection appearances of Jesus reveal that the narrow stream does have a further shore. Death is not a limitless ocean that swallows in oblivion all those who set out across it. It really is but a narrow threshold, with a future beyond. Only Jesus himself has been permitted to cross back over it, for our sakes and to diminish our anxious fears, but the suggestion is that there is a continuing correspondence between existence that is seen and existence that is unseen, and particularly in respect to the medium of prayer.

Secondly, we set against those anxious fears the promises of Jesus, especially those promises that are recounted in the fourteenth chapter of Saint John's Gospel. Jesus says: "In my Father's house are many mansions; if it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And when I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also. I do not know what the furnishings of heaven are like. I do not know the details of the table plan at the heavenly banquet. But I do know who will be there. Jesus is there, and those who belong to him are there. Furthermore, unlike the family of Jacob crossing the River Jabbok, those who cross the narrow stream before us do not cross it alone. Jesus has promised that he will come to meet them as they begin their journey. I know that Wilfred Owen wrote his great poem, "Spring Offensive", specifically in the context of war, but it contains that most wonderful line that always gives me the greatest comfort when I say farewell to a soul who is making that journey before me: Some say God caught them even before they fell.

Thirdly, thirdly… My company before is gone, and I am left alone with thee… Our company always goes before us. That is the nature of our mortal life. In most cases, it is by the expected order of the generations. In some cases, sadly, it is not. My grandmother saw the death of both her sons, the younger being my father. Her elder son died young, from TB. My father died from a heart attack when my grandmother was ninety years old. I have thought much about this over the years, but you do not hear many sermons about the omnipresence of God these days, do you? But what that doctrine suggests is that whilst God is waiting to welcome home the company that has gone before us, he is also present with us on this side of the narrow stream so that we are not alone to wrestle with our anxious fears.

John Wesley died on March 2^nd, 1791. He was eighty-seven years old. In his last few days, confined mainly to his bed, he kept singing snatches of his favourite hymns and he repeated over and over again, "The best of all is, God is with us."

As a matter of preference, I have always found that wrestling with the "Traveller unknown", which I have done throughout my whole life, is an exhausting and an often frustrating business, but it is that wrestling that has drawn me ever onwards on my Christian pilgrimage. With certain reservations, I have accepted the inevitable fact that my company before is gone. However, I can just about live with both circumstances, even the lonely wrestling, if I am persuaded that in my wrestling I am left alone with thee… and not entirely alone. If God is with me, and if God is Love, I may not "as a bounding hart fly home", but I shall get there, and I shall be reunited with my company who have gone before me.

Perhaps John Wesley, as he stood on the verge of the narrow stream, said all that we need to know: The best of all is, God is with us.