Romantic Comedy
Romantic Comedy
Sermon preached by the Precentor, Canon Anna Macham
Sunday 6 July 2025- 4:30pm
Genesis 29:1-20 and Mark 6:7-29
One of the book and film genres that’s made something of a comeback in recent times is the romantic comedy, or rom-com, as it’s more popularly known. Rom-coms, like the ones I grew up with in the 1990s, films like “While you were sleeping” or “Sleepless in Seattle”, are humorous stories in which two people meet through some unlikely coincidence, then are driven apart through some horrible confusion, then in the end finally get together, supposedly proving that romantic love is able to surmount all obstacles.
Rom coms have been criticised for being light-hearted and predictable, But, as the author Daisy Buchanan pointed out this week, relaxing with one of the huge number of recent rom-com titles that have recently appeared in book form, so-called “light fiction” designed to appeal to the Book Tok generation, has real health benefits (Choose comfort, ditch boring and prioritise pleasure – how to find the perfect beach read | Books | The Guardian). Rom-com writers spend a huge amount of time and creativity on what film and book-critics call the meet-cute– the crucial scene where the guy and the girl- or guy and guy, or girl and girl- meet for the first time in a quirky, funny, or indeed cute, way. When we’re especially stressed, or struggling to switch off from work when we need to, the stock elements of a rom com, in their familiar form yet imagined in ever new and different ways provide valuable escapism.
Today’s reading from Genesis is the Old Testament’s version of a rom-com. It starts with the all-important initial meet-cute. In this opening scene, the couple- Jacob and Rachel- meet for the first time, by a well. The scene is full of comic elements, and clearly designed to entertain us. Jacob arrives in a hurry, and in a bit of a mess, having just fled from his homeland after he’s deceived his father Isaac into blessing him in place of his older brother Esau. First of all, he meets the shepherds, asking them where they come from and establishing that they are in fact his kin.
In setting up the scene in Genesis 29 in this way, the narrator enables us both to laugh with Jacob’s success in fleeing Esau but also to gently poke fun at Laban, Jacob and the Israelites’ Aramean neighbour who it turns out these Aramean shepherds know. Arameans were the Israelites’ antagonists, and Jacob proceeds to tell them off for being lazy and not watering the sheep with water from the well, and for not taking them out to pasture, which is where they should be by this point in the day. But the shepherds reply that they can’t water the sheep until they’re all there, and have acquired enough manpower to roll away the large stone off the mouth of the well. This is the cue for Rachel to enter with her father Laban’s sheep. Whether inspired by her beauty or enabled by God- or perhaps both?- Jacob singlehandedly then moves the large stone, which is clearly intended as an exhibition of his manliness to impress her.
This scene is one of at least three instances of a scene in the Old Testament where a man and a woman meet at a well, resulting in their betrothal. Other, later examples of Old Testament betrothal stories by a well include Moses and Zipporah in Exodus 2, and Ruth and Boaz, where the well is strongly implied, even if not explicitly named (Ruth 2:9). Each one of these scenes has its own distinctive features, but also stock elements, and today’s scene between Jacob and Rachel resembles an earlier example in Genesis where Isaac and Rebecca met, also by a well, possibly the same one.
Wells, in the bible, symbolise fertility and femininity. When, in the book of Proverbs, the author warns readers to “drink water from your own cistern, flowing water from your own well”, the meaning is euphemistic. “Should your springs be scattered abroad, streams of water in the streets?” the Proverbs author goes on. To drink water from a well or cistern refers to sexual relations; the “springs” indicating male anatomy, and the “well” and “fountain” seeming to refer to the physical features of the female (Proverbs 5:15-18).
In these stories, the future bridegroom journeys to a foreign land where he meets a girl or “maiden” at a well. One of the pair then draws water from the well. In the case of today’s story, it’s Jacob who draws the water, and then, like Rebecca before her, Rachel goes to tell Laban what’s happened, and Laban comes rushing back to seal his daughter’s engagement with Jacob. Then, in the section that follows today’s reading, Laban invites Jacob to a feast, a betrothal meal, which provides the final stock element of this type of scene.
Yet it’s a betrothal meal with a twist- because, it turns out, Laban has tricked Jacob into marrying not the beautiful Rachel who he loves but Leah, his first born. The agreement- negotiated at the end of today’s reading- is that Jacob has to work seven years for Laban in order to claim Rachel as his bride, but now Jacob the deceiver is faced with becoming Jacob the deceived- as he will have to work a further seven years to marry Rachel as well as Leah. This is a comic moment but, unlike the modern romantic comedies we started with, this Old Testament rom-com has a serious point. At its centre is Jacob- and his emerging identity as a man of conflict. In this story, the distinctive element is perseverance through adversity, faithfulness in conflict.
As the Genesis narrative develops into Exodus, the role of the female characters in the three well-betrothal scenes in this emerging patriarchal history gets less prominent; to hear more of Rachel’s voice and distinctive character and story, we have to imagine it, as Jewish author Anita Diamant has done in her incredible novel, The Red Tent (1997). We’ve already seen Jacob in conflict with his brother, and now there’s the conflict between Jacob and his father-in-law over which of the two daughters will marry him. In the part of the story that follows, this conflict will be perpetuated in the arguments and rivalry between Leah, who is fruitful but unloved, and Rachel, who is beautiful and loved by Jacob, but barren. Yet, in the perseverance of these characters, God is present; somehow, the purposes of God are at work amidst scandal and deception.
True love by the side of wells seems to undergo many different twists and turns, in its various Old Testament incarnations. But the genre is subverted most of all in the New Testament, at the Woman at the Well scene in John’s Gospel, where in this case the meeting at this well turns out in the end not to be romantic at all. Now the well has become the place where Jesus the bridegroom reveals himself as Saviour, as the living water whose love for humankind transcends all other forms of human love.
In the story of Jacob and Rachel, the overriding message is of God’s faithfulness. On the one hand, it’s escapism, just an entertaining, comic story of a scandalous deceiver, on the other, Jacob is held up as an exemplar of faith in adversity. Despite its happy conclusion with Jacob eventually winning Rachel, and returning home, now prosperous, with many sons in tow, the message is not one of the triumph and endurance of merely human, romantic love; ultimately it is God’s love that endures and that creates new life; new life that is the gift of God.