In the Grip

Immediately Jesus reached out with His hand and took hold of him, and *said to him, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?”  Matthew 14:31  NASB

Took hold – “Hold on!  I’m coming!”  Rescue work.  That’s what’s needed.  Unfortunately, most of the time we don’t even know we’re falling.  We’re so caught up in the routine, the expected, that we don’t notice we’re slipping under the water.  We’re like the frog in the pot, adjusting to incremental temperature rise until suddenly it’s too late to escape the danger.  The Greek verb used in this story is epilambánō, from the root lambánō.  You’ll easily notice that the only change is the addition of the prefix epi, but that addition makes a big difference.  It’s as if suddenly a verb that means “to take,” or “to receive” has an exclamation point built into it, a deliberate intensity.  Now it means “to grasp,” “to seize,” or “to lay a firm hold on.”

Yeshua doesn’t just hold out a helping hand.  He grips sinking Peter.  He rescues him with a powerful grasp that won’t let go.  And that reminds me of another story of a grasp that won’t let go.  It’s in Genesis 32.

“I will not let you go unless you bless me.”  The Hebrew verb is šālaḥ, “to let go, to send away.”  In this verse it has the nuance of releasing a captive, but despite Jacob’s statement, he is the captive, not the “man” in his grasp.

Frederick Buechner’s comment about this story is powerful:

“He merely touches the hollow of Jacob’s thigh, and in a moment Jacob is lying there crippled and helpless.  The sense we have, which Jacob must have had, that the whole battle was from the beginning fated to end this way, that the stranger had simply held back until now, letting Jacob exert all this strength and almost win so that when he was defeated, he would know that he was truly defeated; so that he would know that not all the shrewdness, will, brute force that he could muster were enough to get this.  Jacob will not release his grip, only now it is a grip not of violence but of need, like the grip of a drowning man.[1]

Jacob and Peter, both drowning, like us.  Jacob grips in order to survive.  Peter is gripped in order to survive.  We lie somewhere along that scale of gripping and being gripped.  Once we know where we are, then we can enlist Paul’s use of the term in 1 Timothy 6:12:

Fight the good fight of faith; take hold of the eternal life to which you were called

Grip the life God provides like Jacob, refusing to let go.  And at the same time, cry out to be gripped by the Messiah who rescues.  Put an exclamation point behind your action.

Topical Index:  epilambánō, grasp, grip, take hold, Peter, Jacob, Matthew 14:31

[1] Frederick Buechner  Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons (HarperOne, 2006), p. 7.