The stories in Genesis surrounding Jacob’s son, Joseph, are so familiar that all of the morals and applications that can be made have already been formulated. What remains is to taste them.
Tasting requires remembering or imagining as clearly as possible what it feels like to be a son or a daughter who is NOT the favorite of your parents. You have to attempt to grapple with the enormity of jealousy and bitterness and hatred. Or you can think of being betrayed by a lover, passed over for a promotion, fired for a trumped up reason, sniped at and gossiped about by fellow workers.
These emotions, real or imagined, convey what Joseph’s brothers must have felt.
Joseph himself is more difficult to understand. It is easy to immerse yourself in the brothers’ jealousy. It is far more difficult to put yourself in Joseph’s place. Far from being depressed and rendered helpless by being a victim of attempted murder, then sold into slavery, he rises from trouble “like a tree straightens after the rain.” He is eager to help, to use his considerable talents for vision, leadership, and friendship.
He astounds his captors with his accomplishments. He rises to the top of the Pharoah’s household. Even after he is falsely accused of raping the Pharaoh’s wife—after he refused to smirch his benefactor’s hospitality by giving in to his wife’s lust for him—he picks himself up and plays an important role even in the dungeon! What a man!
On top of all this, he receives his brothers without rancor when they come to Egypt begging for food. He does toy with them a bit, but only to get his father and their whole family to come live near him where there is enough food stored up for the survival of them all. He forgives; he weeps with joy to see his father and his perfidious brothers, who can’t believe he’s not going to have them all killed for what they did to him. Joseph is very like the Prodigal Father in the Gospel parable.
Genesis keeps reminding us that “the Lord was with Joseph,” implying that’s why he was so successful. We forget that our belief is that the Lord is with us all, at every step. Joseph gives us a taste of what is possible. We might never realize that what comes naturally after you have been disregarded, passed over, shunned or even imprisoned is NOT the only possibility. There are other choices besides revenge, festering hatred, violence and despair.
Joseph chose to keep walking in the presence of God, relying on That Strength. Many others after him have done the same. We probably know some. They rarely make it into the evening news. But here is one of the first, in the first book of the Bible. It can encourage us—who may feel thrown into a deep well—to give up all that is weighing us down and rise to the light, and use the talents we have, and walk in the presence of God.
NEXT week: pages 43-50
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