On the Ladder versus the Tower

[Sermon delivered at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, Phoenix, Arizona, The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost, July 19, 2026. It's audio may be found on Spotify.]

✠ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, the Trinity, one in Essence and Undivided. Amen.

Genesis is, I believe, a storyteller’s dream. It is a storehouse of myth, legend, possibly even history, but with multiple vivid characters, gripping storylines, featuring emotions ranging from the highest exultations to the basest of impulses. There are great love stories, grudges and vendettas, great faith, and utter betrayal. Frankly, if you cannot get any entertainment value from Genesis, I am going to hold a mirror under your nose to see if you are still alive.

Genesis is more than entertainment, however. It is about the beginning of the great story of the relationship between God and His human creation, something he called good. It is the story of Him lovingly creating us, our estrangement from God and its messy aftermath, and the start of a subtle and great work of God to undo that estrangement. As part of that, Genesis introduces us to a small family of men and women with whom He brokers a special relationship to begin to undo the damage of that breach.

Enter in today’s story from Genesis.[1] Jacob is the third generation of this family of Abraham, the Friend of God. Abraham’s friendship lives on in this family. His son Isaac maintained that friendship despite the scare he received at Moriah. His grandson Jacob was poised to take up that friendship, but he did not as yet know it; and from all accounts his twin Esau could not be bothered. Jacob, however, like his father and grandfather, was different. We cannot say he did not have flaws, no, he had plenty of them (apparently honest and above-board dealing was not his strong suit). God, however, went out of His own way to cultivate a special relationship with Jacob. This was a good thing because Jacob was currently on the run. Remember that bit about honesty and above-board dealing not being his strong suit? Well, apparently, he neatly fleeced his brother out of a sweetheart inheritance deal, and Esau, perhaps understandably, was a bit upset. So, Jacob got out of Dodge in a hurry, hustling toward Haran where his mother’s family lived to lay low for a while.

Now, it would be a few millennia before El Al would be in operation, so Jacob had to content himself with foot transportation, and it would take more than a few days to get to Haran. Long distance hiking was as exhausting then as it is now, and close to a town named Luz, Jacob decided to camp out under the stars. Even though he laid on the hard ground with a rock for a pillow, Jacob was exhausted enough to fall asleep, deeply asleep, and dream a dream that has resonated through the centuries since.

In the centuries that followed, there have been many interpretations offered for that dream. In some, the ladder of the dream represents the successive rise and fall of the fortunes of the People of God, or the path of angels to and from Heaven and Earth on Divine business, or most famously the achievement of the virtuous life as shown in many works, most notably The Ladder of Divine Ascent by John Climacus,[2] a classic of Christian ascetic philosophy. Another one, one which I would like to explore with you today, is that the ladder represents the bridge between Heaven and Earth, the symbol of God’s bridging the gap of estrangement between Creator and His Creation.

A current rabbinical scholar, Rabbi David Fohrman, recently put together a six-part webinar on the interpretation of Jacob’s dream.[3] In it he makes several interesting points, which I will summarize here:

• The story of Jacob’s dream has various textual and structural parallels with the story of the Tower of Babel,[4] a notable one whose Hebrew phraseology appears only in these two stories, namely, “The top of it reaching to heaven.”[5]

• While both have the same purpose, to bridge the gap between Heaven and Earth, the Tower of Babel was built by humans, yet the Ladder is devised by God.

• The Tower’s purpose is for humans to wrest their own glory from the heavenly places,[6] but the Ladder’s purpose is for God to broker a relationship between Him and humanity, starting with the promise to Jacob that his descendants would become a great nation and a blessing for all the families on earth.[7]

These stories together become not just a neat story of wonder but a mile-marker in the history of God’s relationship with His Creation. For the observant, it becomes overwhelming Grace versus ongoing Hubris. It is the contrast of the futility of human scheming against the power of divine providence. In the face of fragmentation, division, and the sundering of humanity not only from God but amongst itself, the story is a beacon of hope that God Himself will repair the breach and through Jacob’s descendants bring honour back to a fallen Creation.

The Ladder is a bridge, not something we built of our own efforts but a gracious extension of God’s love across the divide. Here is where I build upon the foundation our Jewish brethren have built for us and further extend the allegory of the Ladder to encompass not just the blessing the People of Israel brings to humanity in general, but also the blessing one great-many-times-great grandson of Jacob brings to us, that great grandson being Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. God built the Ladder and, in that vision, told Jacob that from him would come blessing to all the families on earth. In the fulness of time, from the people of Israel, God built that Ladder so that He Himself could come down and dwell among us, to live among us, to die for us, and rise again from the dead so that the final chasm between us and God, Death, be permanently bridged over and no longer separate us from His love. The People of Israel, as the Apostle Paul, himself a Jew of the most exquisite training, bless us not only by being the guardians of the Oracles of God,[8] that is, the Law and the Prophets, not just by preserving and remembering for us the old teachings, but also by providing for us from among their number the wonder of God Incarnate, God with Us, the Word made flesh, according to the promises of God.

This is not a huge or blind leap of logic for us as Christians. Our Lord had said to Nathaniel and other disciples gathered around, “Truly, truly, I say to you, you will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.”[9] To His listeners, the concepts of angels ascending and descending would  immediately call to mind the story of Jacob’s dream and the promise contained therein. To His disciples wonder, they saw the blessing promised standing before them, God’s rebuttal to the Tower of Babel speaking clearly to them, the bridge over the gulf separating humans and God manifested in front of them.

So, unlike our forebears who tried to build a tower to ascend by their own power into glory,  God provides us a ladder by which he comes to us and by which we can come to Him. At first glance, they may look the same, extending from our realm to the heavenly places. The difference, however, is the fact that if we try to ascend by a tower of our own making, we shall fail in confusion. If by God’s Grace and trust in the teachings of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ we ascend by that ladder of His own making, the outcome will be much different. Our efforts to reach high miss the mark, but God’s work, extending from His very throne to our level, brings the heights to us. If we pick up The Ladder of Divine Ascent, or read The Dialogues of St. Catherine of Siena, or practice the counsels contained among the Saints of the Desert or any of the Christian mystics in the centuries that followed, our efforts cannot be for our own glory or our own profit, devoid of a real relationship with God, these efforts must be for the love of God Who first loved us. The first way ends in smoke and ashes, but embracing God and His Way in love and humility brings us to Him who awaits us with more love than we can contain or imagine.[10] Let us then embrace Jacob’s dream, and the blessing from God which Jacob’s children brought to us.

✠ Through the prayers of the Most Holy Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary, Holy Dominic, and all the saints, Saviour save us. Amen.

[1] Gen. 28.10-19a

[2] St. John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, Archimandrite Lazarus Moore, tr., Harper & Brothers, 1959 http://www.prudencetrue.com/images/TheLadderofDivineAscent.pdf

[3] Forhman, Rabbi David, “What Did Jacob’s Dream Mean?” Aleph Beta, 2026, https://www.alephbeta.org/content/jacobs-dream

[4] Gen. 11.1-9

[5] Gen. 11.4, Gen. 28.12

[6] Gen. 11.4

[7] Gen. 28.14

[8] Rom. 3.2

[9] Jn. 1.51

[10] Cf. Ladder 1.13