Today we set the scene for our next sermon series which will focus on some of the great prophetic voices within the Hebrew tradition – people who looked around them and said, “This is not God's will. You must change to come into line with God's purpose”: people who consequently had a major influence on the development of that faith tradition into which Jesus of Nazareth was born, and much of which he re-affirmed.

Today's story pre-dates the prophets and takes us right the way back to the earliest legends of the Hebrew tradition. We're going to look at Leah, the unloved and neglected wife of Jacob and we're going to encounter a God who cared about her, even when her husband didn't.

There is a powerful need within the human being to understand where we came from. Uniquely among the creatures of our world - as far as we can tell - we have a sense of history - and of our place in it.  In the realm of science, we have done much to unravel the mysteries of genetics so that we can account with great accuracy for why we look, behave and even think like our forebears.  We even entertain ourselves with television programs like 'Who do you think you are' in which celebrities look back through their family tree and - often quite movingly - understand themselves in new ways and with greater depth than when they started the research.  We do seem to have a deep-seated need to locate ourselves in both time and place and to understand the forces which influence our destinies.

When the various tribes of semitic peoples in the ancient Near East gathered together and told stories of how they came to be, where they came from, what their historical traditions revealed about their racial identity, they came to various conclusions about how things must have been in the past to bring them to how they were now.

And as their story began to be committed to writing after many hundreds of year of oral tradition, one factor which needed an explanation was why the broad federation of Hebrew peoples in the second and third millennia BC found themselves in 12 tribal divisions.  So an explanation was devised and crafted out of the ancient oral tradition of the call of God to Abraham to found a new nation, and the role of Jacob and his many offspring.

In order to embed the 12 tribe tradition into Hebrew history, somehow, Jacob needed to become responsible for 12 sons to found the various tribes and serve as their patriarchs.  And the tradition which ultimately found its way into the Hebrew record, involved a rather virile Jacob and four women - two of them were wives, and two were the wives' handmaids.

Wife number 1 was responsible for 6 sons and 1 daughter; each of the handmaids provided 2 sons; and wife number 2 eventually contributed a further 2 sons.  So the senior wife, in both age and productivity, may have earned her status, but the human interest element of the story gives a twist to the plot as we learn very early that she was never the love of her husband's life.  The first wife was Leah, and the second wife was Rachel.  And today we look at Leah.

Jacob never wanted Leah as his wife.  He fell in love at first sight with Rachel when he met her shepherding her father's sheep. He approached Rachel's father, Laban, and a deal was struck: Jacob would work for Laban for 7 years, and would then be given Rachel for his wife.    But Laban deceived Jacob, and after the wedding, when Jacob saw his new wife's face, he discovered that Laban had performed a switch, and that he was now married to Leah, the elder daughter.

A rather angry Jacob then struck another deal with Laban which involved another 7 years' work in return for the second daughter, Rachel, as a second wife.  But this time it was a hire purchase arrangement where Jacob got the goods straight away and was allowed to pay off the balance while enjoying the full benefits of his new acquisition.  So, right from the start of the marriage, Jacob had unlimited access to his beloved Rachel - and no real purpose for Leah.

It's left to our imagination to consider how Leah must have felt about all this.  She was used by her father as a pawn in a fraudulent marriage, and she found herself attached to a man who cared nothing for her and who could only think about her younger sister.  The text seems to be telling us that Leah had appealing eyes, but she really wasn't much to look at compared to her sister Rachel who seems to have been a stunner.

And when Rachel eventually joins the household as wife number 2, it could only have got worse for Leah.  She seems destined to have become a baby factory in a loveless marriage, within a household driven by rivalry and jealousy.

Now so far, we seem to have a fairly typical tribal story, based on a culture and morality of its own time, where the ends justify all the means and life is comparatively cheap.  For an Old Testament saga, it's very much of its time and in keeping with its context.

But there is a hidden gem in this story.  We meet a God who sees, understands, and heals the tragedy of a human situation.   The text says simply, 'God saw that Leah was unloved'. 

Why would it matter to the God of this nomadic people if one of their number happened to be unloved?  Weren't there bigger things to be bothered about.  Wasn't this a God of flame and fury, of vengeance and retribution, of judgment and jealousy?  Surely it was important to this God to get the tribe settled and fruitful, teach them obedience, and achieve growth and prosperity so that their worship and sacrifices would be more pleasing and impressive?

It seems not - because God sees someone is unloved, and intervenes.

Here is one of the earliest signs in our scriptural story that God cares for people and that love is important both to God and for God's people.  It is one of the earliest indicators that the God of the Hebrews is more than just one god among many; and it is part of an understanding of God which, over many centuries, will make the Jewish Faith - in its purest, uncorrupted form - a faith of love, justice, and integrity.

The true message of Judaism, by the time a small offshoot of followers of a teacher from Nazareth began to form,  was an amazingly humanitarian message.  It had been beaten, battered and corrupted over time by human greed and self-centredness; but at its core were the foundations of what Jesus sought to uncover and teach to his followers in a radically new way: because, for much of what Jesus said, it was the interpretation which was radical, not the core principles.

That belief system which wrote into the genesis of its scripture a simple episode where God responded to an unloved Leah, also brought forward the prophetic voices of Nathan, who told King David that he was basically a thief and a bully; Hosea, who made love the central meaning of God and drew his nation beyond the level of mere survival and into a life of serving and caring; Amos, who argued that human justice was in reality the worship of God being lived out among people, with special emphasis on the needs of the poor; and Micah who captured in his writing the core idea of what God requires of God's people - to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God.

As followers of Jesus, we are the inheritors of a long, long tradition in which God sees and responds to the unloved.  We also inherit a long tradition in which loving the unloved is a responsibility for those who would walk humbly with God.

There are parts of Leah's story which are not easily recognised as contemporary issues - yet much of it does still resonate in our modern life:

• people still get trapped in unfair contracts and agreements,

• people still get swindled and tricked by those they trust,

• people still find themselves in relationships where the love has gone - if it ever was really there,

• people still see their partners longing for another more beautiful rival and yet have no means of escape from the pain of that experience;

and yet, among all this, the story of Leah also tells us that it is in the nature of God to recognise and respond to the unloved and the unwanted in our towns, communities, families and social networks.  We might recognise such a response as a particularly Christian insight.  Leah shows us that it is also a deeply Jewish one.  In her way, she reminds us that our Christian Jesus was really a reforming voice proclaiming the holiness and godliness of the authentic Hebrew tradition. 

Over the next few weeks, the voice of the prophet among a wayward people will continue to challenge us to seek an authentic understanding of God. Just as Jacob's offspring gave shape to the tribal structure of the Hebrew ethnicity, so the prophets will shape and re-shape their peoples into a reflection of God's purposes for them.

But today, we still carry with us the tradition of a God who loves the unloved. Perhaps our choice, as those who seek to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God in our own world, is whether we might also feel called to recognise and respond to the unloved and unwanted - those whom God always sees, even when others don't.

Amen.

(Philip Jones)