They were quite the pair: Homily for Saturday, July 5, 2025

The Bible shares at least three sets of brothers that do not get along. Today it is Jacob and Esau, who were quite the pair. Readings for Today.

They were quite the pair

Brothers. They were quite a pair. Jacob, the favorite of Rebecca, and Esau, the favorite of Isaac. The theme of brothers is prevalent throughout the Bible, but I’ll pick three examples in particular where we encounter brothers who are having some difficulty with each other.

There is, of course, the brothers we hear today, Esau and Jacob, but there’s also Cain and Abel, and if we think of the parable of the prodigal son, there’s the younger son and the older son. Why do we hear about these brothers? I’d like to suggest that there’s a common thread that is present in each of the stories that help us to understand, and that is envy. All three of the stories involve in one way or another wanting something that they believe the other has.

Cain’s gift was, as we’re told, just a member of the flock. Abel gave his best. The younger son, although he might be seen as one who is not terribly faithful because he really says to his father, “I wish you were dead,” and goes off and wastes all of the money, but his heart is in the right place. He’s able to recognize that the way he’s lived is not very good at all, and he doesn’t even ask to be treated like his son again when he speaks to the father, but simply as a hired hand. But the father will hear none of it.

Today we encounter Esau and Jacob, and in order to understand it, we have to know a few things about Esau, because there’s something quite important that helps us to explain today’s story.

If we go back to a previous part of the book of Genesis where we encounter this story, we have an interesting encounter between Jacob and Esau, that this desire for the father’s blessing was something that Jacob had for some time. It wasn’t just a recent thing.

And so Jacob seems to be the more culinary skilled at making something to eat, and he asks Jacob, Esau does, for some game, which he liked very much. And his father liked it very much too. But before Jacob will produce the meal, he actually makes Esau sell his birthright. In other words, the decision to get the blessing had already been made.

There was something inside of Esau that was so attracted to whatever this dish was, maybe it involved a rabbit of some sort, I don’t know. But the important thing is that Esau’s willing to do that.

Now the birthright was a very important thing. It was a sign of one’s relationship with God, and when one had their birthright and got the blessing, they were kind of the successor to the father in terms of being a leader over the family and so forth. And they received the blessing that would bring good fortune to them. But Esau is willing to trade it simply for a meal.

And so when Rebecca, it doesn’t take any convincing on her part to convince her son. And I’d like to think that what we learned about Esau from the selling of his birthright described him as a person. And I suspect that Rebecca might very well have been afraid of the thought of Esau being the leader of the family.

Now what it means for us, I think, is to recognize and remember that we’re made for something much more. Had Esau recognized the power of God’s relationship with him, things might have turned out quite differently in his life.

The gospel assures us that this story about new and old wineskins is not really about new and old wineskins. I’d like to suggest that this is a story about our baptism. Because if you think of our life before we were baptized, we inherited the sinful condition of the world. We had original sin. And baptism removes that. We’re no longer the person that we were. We’re made for something more, different, better. We are, in fact, new wineskins.

But there can be a temptation to cling to those things that were a part of the way of life before we were baptized. Now many of us were probably baptized as infants, so I’m not suggesting that you or me or even Father Don was a difficult infant. Because infants are infants.

But the point remains, isn’t our life really one about deciding whether we’re going to focus in our lives on what we have been given, the gift we have been given by God through our baptism, which has brought us to this moment? It’s from this that our vocation arises. And ultimately, it’s from this that we can hope for eternal salvation. Let us ask the Lord to pour out to us today the power of his grace so that we might be the new creation that God made us on the day of our baptism.

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