"Clutch Mercy" [A Homily based on Gen 32:23–33, and Mt 9:32-38]

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ear brothers and sisters in Christ,

Life brings us moments when everything seems to hang in the balance. In sports, they call it a clutch moment—that instant under pressure when something decisive is demanded. It's a high-impact segment of the play that can turn the tide of a match. But clutch moments aren’t just for athletes. Scripture shows us that they are also moments of grace.

In the first reading we meet Jacob, alone at night by the river Jabbok. He is on a journey back to his homeland—Canaan—after spending many years in exile in Haran, where he had lived with his uncle Laban. He is returning with his family, flocks, and possessions in obedience to God’s command to go back to the land of his fathers (Gen 31:3).

He has sent his family ahead and is left wrestling a mysterious figure until dawn. He doesn't even know who he’s wrestling. It is a moment of darkness, confusion, pain. But Jacob refuses to let go. He says, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.”

This is Jacob’s clutch moment. He’s not trying to win—he’s holding on because something deeper is at stake: his identity, his future, his very self. And in that struggle, God meets him. Jacob receives a new name: Israel, meaning “one who contends with God.” He is changed not because he overpowered, but because he did not let go.

Jacob has spent his life maneuvering—outwitting Esau, negotiating with Laban, building wealth. But now, at the edge of returning home, he can no longer rely on tricks or strength. In the dark, with no name for his opponent, he is stripped to the core—a man who can only hold on.

This is the grace of clutch: when you have nothing left but desperation, and you hang on not because you're winning, but because you're desperate not to lose yourself. “I will not let you go until you bless me.”

And the blessing comes. But not without pain. His hip is dislocated; he will limp forever. This limp becomes his wound of grace, the cost of encountering God.

Every person of faith has their own Jabbok moment—when the night feels long, the struggle is real, and the blessing seems distant. Yet it is in that clutch of wrestling, where we choose not to let go, that God draws close.

Like Jacob, we emerge changed—sometimes limping, but walking into the sunrise with a new name, and the deep conviction that God has been with us all along.

The second in our reflection is Jesus in the Gospel. God, too, has a clutch moment. In the Gospel, we are told that Jesus saw the crowds and “was moved with pity for them” (Matthew 9:36; also Mark 6:34, Luke 7:13). The Greek word is σπλαγχνίζομαι (splagchnizomai)—a gut-wrenching compassion, a deep stirring in the innermost being. It’s not just feeling sorry. It’s God’s whole being moved to act in love. “His heart was moved with pity for them, for they were like sheep without a shepherd.”

This is God’s clutch moment: not from the sidelines, but in the dirt, in the hunger, in the mess of human need. God does not just observe suffering—He enters it. And in that decisive moment, He heals, He feeds, He forgives, He raises the dead.

Jesus’s miracles are not cold demonstrations of power. They are acts of divine compassion under pressure, clutch interventions in people’s lives: when Jairus’s daughter is dying, when the bleeding woman touches His cloak, when the widow’s son is carried out for burial.

To conclude and this is the mystery: our clutch moment and God’s clutch moment meet. Our clutch moment is met by God’s clutch mercy. When we, like Jacob, wrestle in the dark, bringing our pain, fear, or longing—God does not recoil. His whole being is already moved. He already sees. And He draws near. When we say, “I will not let go until you bless me,” God says, “I will not pass by without healing you.”

Jacob limped away from that night forever changed. May we walk away forever changed too—not just healed, but loved. Fr JM Manzano SJ