I think the thing that bothers me most in these two chapters is that, for all his blessedness and bearing of the flame of righteousness and all that, Isaac is a pretty lackluster father. The two chapters here considered show over and over again the fruits of Isaac's failure to live up to his potential as a father and as a leader. This all starts, of course, with Jacob and Esau's choice of wives.
When it was time for Isaac to marry, Abraham commissioned the Servant (essentially the Holy Spirit Himself) to go out and find a bride, and he found Rebekah. There was love at first sight, and Rebekah continually acted decisively and prudently to bring about the Lord's promises. Jacob, on the other hand, is sent himself, blessed but also running from Esau. Isaac tells him not to marry a Canaanite woman, but apparently Esau wasn't given even this much instruction when he went out dating. Esau, on realizing that this was bad, tries to make it better by marrying an Ishmaelite woman, but that's not really much better, and it's clearly a "closing the door after the horses have escaped" solution. Isaac, though trying to do the right thing, is all too human, and the results are clear.
Jacob's attempts at a love-match, choosing a wife for himself on his own terms, results in several years of wasted time for him and a marriage based in deception with no basis in love. I see this happen so often these days. If Jacob were alive today, I'm sure he'd look to divorce Leah and marry his true love Rachel, putting the whole thing down as a "lesson learned the hard way" and a cause for some cynicism about love. Rachel is his love at first sight, which in the Bible seems to indicate a match made by Heaven, but his human failings lead to wasted time, strife in his family, and a dubious polygamy.
Another failing of Isaac is his seeming failure to properly introduce his sons to his God. Jacob, in the guise of Esau, referred to God as Isaac's God, not his own. In the desert on the way to Paddan-Aram, Jacob meets God himself, almost as though he didn't know Him before and wasn't taught about His promises. Perhaps the real lesson here is that being introduced to God and faith in your family isn't enough...you must learn about Him and become His child yourself. Jacob needed to see a set of ziggurat stairs leading to heaven with angels walking up and down to understand that God is always at work in our world and that He is intimately connected to it. But even after this, Jacob's faith isn't woven into the fabric of his being yet. He is still considering it, trying it on for size. If God helps him, he'll believe.
Jacob here is a lot like me, a lot like many cradle Catholics. Having been raised with the Faith, baptized before we knew it, entered communion when we were young, we find still that faith is a journey. We consider and reconsider whether Christ is who He said He was. We put him to the test sometimes, finding ourselves in a place where we need reassurance of blessings to believe. We don't have the zeal of converts, but find that we envy them. If only we could have stumbled onto this truth later, how much more convinced and convicted we'd be! Jacob was maturing in a faith that he was always around but was brand new to him at the same time. It isn't clear how good a "living Gospel" his parents were for him, but even if Isaac and Rebekah were perfect examples of godly living, Jacob had to claim it for his own.
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