The scripture can be found here...
Let’s begin by talking about
jealousy. And when I say “jealousy,” I’m not speaking of a passing sense of
wishing you had what another person has… a great house, or pair of shoes, or
even, a relationship. I’m talking about the kind of deep-seated resentment that
stays with you, perching on your shoulder like a malevolent pet, or burrowing
into your gut, crowding out all other feelings. Jealousy, as in the feeling
that you have a rival, and while that rival has success, or advantage, or
superiority, or love, you can never have enough.
And jealousy is the force that
tips over the first domino in the story of Joseph. We are in a great transition
moment in the story of God’s people: that moment when they move into Egypt.
This sets the stage for what is surely one of the key stories of scripture. And for us to be in Joseph’s story
now we have sped past countless other remarkable stories. I commend them all to
you, but especially those of Jacob, the scoundrel. Joseph’s father Jacob, whose
name is eventually changed to “Israel,” the one from whom God’s people take
their name. I particularly commend to you the stories of Jacob’s particular
biblical model of marriage: First, his marriage to Leah, by the trickery of his
father-in-law, and then his marriage to her sister Rachel, his first and true
love. In addition to these two wives, Jacob takes as wives the two slave women,
Bilhah and Zilpah. By these four women Jacob has twelve sons and a daughter.
Why start with jealousy? Let us
count the ways.
The first line of our passage
tells part of the story: “Now Israel loved Joseph more than any other of his
children… and he had made him a long robe with sleeves” (Genesis 37:3). Imagine
being a son of poor Leah, the woman Jacob was tricked into marrying. Imagine
being a son of one of the slave women, used as surrogates and tangled up in the
rivalry between the two sisters. Joseph is none of these. He’s a son of Jacob’s
old age. And he’s the first born of Rachel, the love of Jacob’s life, the
favored wife. And that favoritism, now passed from mother to son, is openly
displayed. Jacob, whose early career included some time in the kitchen,
continues to show his domestic abilities by crafting an unusual and somewhat
royal garment for his favorite son, a coat with long sleeves. If you’re
wondering where we get the “coat of many colors,” this is what happens
sometimes with bible translations. In the era of the King James translation, as
today, coats with long sleeves were common, so to translate it literally would
have left the reader puzzled. “What’s so special about a coat with long sleeves?”
So the team of translators decided that a coat “of many colors,” would convey
the coat’s uniqueness, and the extravagance of Israel’s gift to his youngest.
Jacob was playing favorites. And when Josephs’s brothers saw that coat, they
hated him for it.
But that is not the only way in
which Joseph provoked his brothers. Those dreams! Joseph has this incredibly
annoying habit of sharing dreams with his brothers, dreams whose general theme
is that Joseph is in charge and everyone else must bow to him. The dreams are
pretty telling. In one sense, they betray a sort of cluelessness that we might
just chalk up to his youth—he’s seventeen, and a culture of bragging isn’t exactly
unheard of among teenage boys. In another sense, they show an arrogance, maybe
even a meanness of spirit that is kind of breathtaking. Even his father gives
him the verbal equivalent of a smack to the head after one of these episodes.
Just who does he think he is? His brothers hate him, we are told. They cannot speak
peaceably to him. Jealousy,
burrowing into the gut, crowding out even the ability to speak a word in peace.
But none of this—not the
favoritism, not the arrogance, not the hate, not the soul-consuming
jealousy—nothing can justify what happens next. In a scene we didn’t read this morning, the brothers first
discuss whether or not to kill Joseph. The plan is to return the beautiful coat
to their father covered in blood, pinning the death on a wild animal. Reuben,
the oldest and the child of the unloved wife Leah, has an attack of conscience,
and persuades the rest of them not to kill Joseph, but to simply throw him in a
pit. (His plan is to spirit Joseph back to their father at a later time.) They
agree. They strip the clueless kid of his beautiful robe, throw him into a pit
with no water to drink, and sit down to lunch.
When Reuben is gone, the brothers
see a band of traders passing by. Judah, the youngest of Leah and Jacob’s sons,
says, hey. We can kill two birds with one stone here: get rid of the dreamer
and get ourselves some cash at the same time. When Reuben returns and learns
that Joseph has been sold into slavery, he goes wild with grief and horror,
tearing his clothes, trying to imagine what on earth they will tell their
father.
They decide to go with the wild
animal story. Jacob is presented with the exquisite garment he made for his favorite
son, smeared with blood. He is told the boy is dead. In response, he tears his
own clothes, and puts on sackcloth (the traditional garment of mourning), and weeps
for many days.
And the brothers? Even though most
of the remainder of Genesis focuses, not on them, but on Joseph, it’s good for
us to imagine just how things go for them from this point on. The brothers have
done, if not the unthinkable, then something approaching that. What they have
done to Joseph, it is fair to say, will haunt them.
As for Joseph? His path is one of peaks and
valleys—literally, as well as figuratively. From his high position as daddy’s
favorite he is cast down into an actual pit, and sold as a slave. But he ends
up in the household of Potiphar, a captain of the Pharaoh’s guard, where he is
given a chance to shine. “The Lord is with him,” we are told—which is
interesting, because we never heard that God was with Joseph when he was being
coddled by his father at home. And for all his arrogance, for all his teenage
bravado, qualities begin to emerge in him we might not have imagined. The Lord is with him, and Joseph turns out to be
a man of talent and character. He rises to another peak in the house of
Potiphar, only to fall again after he spurns the advances of Potiphar’s wife. Once
again in the valley, Joseph finds himself in prison.
But even in prison Joseph manages
to land on his feet. The head jailer entrusts him with care of the other
inmates, and Joseph rises to the top of the heap there as well. And suddenly an
opportunity to truly distinguish himself arises: Someone has a dream.
Did you ever meet someone, and
upon first meeting them, you had, well, not the greatest impression of them? In
fact, you didn’t really like them at all? But then, you met them again… under
other circumstances. And you felt that maybe, just maybe, you had misjudged
them. I bring all this up because this is not the first time dreams have played
a major role in Joseph’s story. And that first time, everyone—Jacob his father,
all his other brothers, and, yes, we, the readers, thought. Hey. This guy is
kind of a creep. He’s annoying. Of course people want to throw him into pits
and worse. If he were in high school in Lima, Ohio, he’d be getting Slushies in
the face on a regular basis.
But when Joseph is in prison
interpreting dreams, we learn some key information. When it comes to dreams,
Joseph is a veritable Carl Jung. His knowledge and intuition are stunning. He
has a gift. And we begin to wonder… might those other dreams of Joseph’s have
meant something after all?
It’s dreams that finally bring
Joseph out of the pits and to the heights of power. When the Pharaoh, the
Egyptian king, hears about Joseph’s impressive abilities of interpretation, he
brings him out of jail and into the royal court to interpret a dream of his
own. Joseph correctly tells Pharaoh that his dreams are warning him of a time
of famine for which they will have to prepare. Three guesses who Pharaoh puts
in charge of the preparations! By the end of this episode, and forever after in
this story, there is no one in Egypt, save the Pharaoh himself, more powerful
than Joseph.
Meanwhile back in Canaan… the
famine hits. And after many years, during which Joseph has been making his
peaks-and-valleys climb to power, and the brothers have been living in guilt,
in daily contact with their forever grief-stricken father, the men’s paths
intersect again. The details of the story are less important than the big
picture: the brothers come, with their proverbial hats in hand, to the land
that has prepared well for the famine. And they have no idea whatsoever that
the very Egyptian looking overlord who is dealing with them is the brother they
sold away so long ago.
Joseph toys with them. Just a
bit. Joseph manipulates his brothers so that they are made to twist in the wind
with the guilt he can see they are still carrying. And so Joseph indulges his
desire, for a time, to exact a kind of emotional revenge on his brothers. But
in the end, in a scene that I dare you to read without weeping yourself, all is
revealed. The brother whom they sold into slavery makes himself known. And he
forgives them. “Do not be distressed,” he tells them. “[Do not be] angry with
yourselves, because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve
life” (Genesis 45:6).
And, in some storybooks, that
would be the end of the story. But the bible is not just any book of stories.
The bible, in many places, shows such depth of insight into the human psyche
that reading it is like looking into a really good, really well-lit magnifying
mirror. Ever look into one of those? And see, really see, all those things we
manage most of the time not to notice? Reading the bible can be like that. The
nature of the human being on full display, in all its glory and all its decay.
Joseph forgives his brothers. But… they don’t feel forgiven. Oh, they relocate
permanently to Egypt, which is a key moment in the Biblical narrative: How’
God’s Chosen People Get to Egypt. This is how. And there, in Egypt, all their
cares are taken away, and they are well housed and well fed and the family of
the very powerful and well-loved Joseph. But they carry with them the memory of
what they did to their brother because their father played favorites with him.
They carry it with them for years and years, and after Jacob’s death, many
years later, they turn to one another in certainty that the other shoe Still.
Might. Drop.
‘Realizing that their father was
dead, Joseph’s brothers said, “What if Joseph still bears a grudge against us
and pays us back in full for all the wrong that we did to him?”’ (Genesis
50:15). And all Joseph can do when the brothers, even now, even years later,
come to him begging for mercy, is to weep. When he can speak again, he says,
“Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order
to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing today. So have no fear; I myself
will provide for you and your little ones.”
If the story of Jacob, the very
flawed father of many children, and the story of Jacob’s children, including the
arrogant and annoying Joseph, can tell us anything, it can surely tell us this:
God works through the actions of flawed and broken people and actions. God
worked through Jacob’s misguided favoritism, endowing Joseph with the sure
conviction that he was all that and more, and sure enough, when the time was
right, he was. God worked through the jealousy and anger of Joseph’s eleven
brothers, making Joseph a stronger and better man in the process, and saw to it
that this chosen family had a safe haven in time of famine. And God worked
through Joseph, not only to provide food and shelter for his family, but also
to provide the unexpected blessings of grace and reconciliation.
God uses flawed people, broken
people. God uses us, even when we’re not at our best. God even uses us at our
worst, though the outcomes of those moments can be hard to foresee… they may
take years to play themselves out. Listen: I’m not saying God uses us like
puppets, I’m not saying that God made those brothers do their dastardly deed. I
do believe we have some measure of free will. But once the deed was done, even that
was not beyond God’s power to somehow redeem, reclaim and repurpose. God uses
us—in all our goodness and all our frailty—to bless the world. And God uses
us—in all our beauty and all our brokenness—to convey God’s message of grace
and forgiveness to one another. Thanks be to God. Amen.
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