The Joseph Story
By Pastor Judy Fitzgerald
Almost 1/3 of Genesis, establishes Israel in Egypt. These chapters are the linchpin of the metanarrative. God is out front, protecting the future and moving the promise forward. God continues to work through the youngest and weakest: Joseph instead of Reuben, Ephraim rather than Manassas. But God is more supporting cast than primetime player here. God is pulling all the strings, causing the story to unfold as it does (39: 3, 21; 42: 25-28, 43: 23, 45: 5- 8). But we don’t see God in action a la Sodom and Gomorrah. Rather the people in the story attribute what happens to God’s direct action. They believe in a God of causation, who imposes both good and evil. God brings the famine (41: 25-37) and then supplies the remedy.
These scriptures have spoken to me in the past. This reading was different. It left me puzzled and feeling flat. This was not Abba, the God revealed in Jesus. Abba does not bring famine. Abba heals and restores. The metanarrative was like a wall between me and meaning. The story has a particular function in Israel’s tale, but does it have a universal truth for all people for all time? Genesis was fundamental to Jesus’ understanding of who God is. How did he see through the wall? Spirit eyes! Yes! He read with his mind but saw with his heart. We find God when we seek God with the whole heart (Jeremiah 29: 13- 14). A God-seeking heart must lead the mind. Listen; then think. The Joseph story is more than meets the eye. It is the hinge on which the Exodus door will swing, but it is also a case study of the journey to which we are all called: personal transformation from self-centered to God centered, from self-serving to other serving.
So far, the story has unfolded in a nomadic, tribal context. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob live among their own, albeit in a foreign land. They have family resources and face minimal danger. The focus is on doing instead of being. The Law has not yet been given. Righteousness is less about morals and ethics and more about believing God and trusting in the promise (15: 1- 6). And so, Abraham (twice) and Isaac endanger their powerless wives to protect themselves. Jacob is a schemer and manipulator who steals Esau’s birthright and his blessing (25, 27 ) and lies to his brother to avoid conflict (33: 12- 17). God takes no notice of the promise bearers’ character flaws. Instead, God insists on obedience (22, 32) in service to the covenant, which seems to have a life of its own. God protects them and blesses them with material well-being as they live in anticipation of fulfillment of the promise.
Joseph, however, is removed from the family-community-covenant context and the promised future. Alone in a foreign land, God is his sole resource. Covenant is out the window. His relationship with God is now very personal and particular. This is about survival. Joseph has to grow up fast.
When his brothers cast him into the pit and sold him to traders, he was an arrogant kid, a daddy’s boy, a trouble-making tattletale, who tormented his family with dreams of lordship over them. He had about a 10 day to two-week journey to rethink things. He had several options. He could be belligerent and fight. He could go all In and become a “super Egyptian,” or deviously and self-servingly pretend to do so. Joseph, however, took another way, a high wire act that would require spiritual maturity and wisdom. By the time he was sold to Potiphar, he had chosen to be Yahweh’s man in Egypt, to live his best life before God and be a blessing (39: 7- 10). This wasn’t fatalism or going along to get along. The text indicates that he is sincere in his actions. He seems to have received the grace of acceptance. He finds purpose where he is, even as he suffers in prison. There is no hint of cleverness or manipulation. He sees opportunity, yes, but he turns to the task with integrity. When he became Pharaoh’s second in command, he was spiritually mature enough to live on the high wire, serving Egypt well while remaining true to his faith in Yahweh. Joseph was no longer that arrogant kid. He lived in a different reality, saw his life and the world from a different point of view. He was living life as it came to him. He had acquired a wife, family, position. He seemed to have accepted his fate when suddenly his world shifted on its axis. He saw his brothers bowing down before him.
He must have been dumbfounded, disoriented, uncertain of what to do. The past flooded in. His dreams unfolded in his mind’s eye. Unresolved grief over his brothers’ betrayal and fear of what this might portend cause the high wire to begin to sway in the emotional wind. Joseph’s anger spills out. He is cold to them, speaks harshly, impressing his power upon them. Their “confusion” (42: 21- 23) moves him but it doesn’t reassure him. He doesn’t trust them. But he wants to see Benjamin. Joseph knows they will have to return. The famine will last seven years. The returned money will make them fear the consequences if they don’t bring Benjamin to him. They are in his power. His dreams come true.
The game playing seems aimed at testing the brothers’ sincerity and trustworthiness. Perhaps it tested Joseph more. In the liminal time between the brothers’ departure and their return with Benjamin, he has had yet another opportunity to rethink. He could have doubled down on resentment. Perhaps he did. But the news that Benjamin was alive had shaken him (42: 18- 25). Benjamin must have been a baby when Joseph last saw him. Rachel was alive when Joseph dreamed (37: 10), but she died in childbirth (35: 16- 21). Joseph stood at a fork in the spiritual road, faced with what the mystics call “the little death,” to die before we die, to let go of old ways of understanding and to step into a new reality trusting God entirely. In the end, he “dies.” He dies to animus, resentment, anger, and vengefulness. He sees things differently from a wider point of view: God’s purposes at work in his dreams, his suffering, in his brothers’ betrayal. The dreams were not about lordship over but God’s call to service to the family. Power is responsibility’s helpmate. The one to whom family bowed was the one responsible for family safety and well-being. Joseph does the good thing. He mends the family fences, forgives them fully (50: 15- 21) and sees to their well-being. God’s dreams come true.
Joseph lived in a cause-and-effect context. God imposed the Divine will on people and events (39: 3, 21: 42: 25-28, 43:23, 45: 5- 8). In chapters 12-38 God tells Abraham to leave Haran, shows him where to go, tells him where to seek a wife for Isaac, tells Jacob to return home. God makes clear what God is doing. The Joseph story flips the script from a physical journey through a geographical location to a spiritual journey through a human heart. The critical moment comes when his brothers bow down before him. What an opportunity to claim the perceived promise of his dreams and use his power for revenge! The spoiled, self-aggrandizing Joseph might have done so. Now, confronted with an unresolved past, Joseph had to rely on spiritual discernment and a heart open to God to guide him.
If we read beyond the redactor’s ancient assumptions about God, we find in the Joseph’s story the God revealed to us in Jesus of Nazareth. Abba heals and restores relationships (Jacob’s family). Abba turns hearts and minds toward forgiveness and communal well-being (Joseph). Abba protects us from nothing but sustains us in all things (betrayal, false accusations, prison).
Abba brings blessing out of suffering. This is the God of Joseph’s experience. Through his suffering, God brought the blessing of survival for Israel and Egypt and redemption for Joseph. The Holy One works all things for our good (Romans 8 ). But only a heart broken open by love for love, as Joseph’s was, can see it.
Abba does not impose the future, nor does Abba change it. Time was born with creation (Genesis 1 ), and we are creatures of it. God is timeless; we are not. Past, present, and future are one to God (Saint Augustine), but not to us. God invites us, in the present moment, to live out our God image–to change outcomes, the future, by being changed ourselves. In Joseph’s case, the impact was writ large. One redeemed heart changed the future of a family, a people, and an empire.
Abba’s blessings are not manifested in wealth and power. Jesus warns us that these things deafen us to God’s call to relationship and blind us to the needs of others. God’s greatest gifts/ blessings are not what we can experience with our physical senses, but are those experienced through the heart, mind, and soul, those spiritual “senses” through which we are to love God entirely. Joseph was always on the lookout for God’s action in the world. God blessed him with the grace of acceptance of things as they are and the grace of awareness, of being fully in and with the present moment. Joseph’s riches were his spiritual gifts, his power in his life with God.
The story of Israel in Egypt is never ending. Today, politically, the metanarrative underlies all the violence in the Middle East. Spiritually, the human journey of transformation has no end. In this life we never reach the goal; we cannot be perfected. We may see the bigger picture, but never the whole picture. We see through a glass darkly. We will continue to do many things wrong, to do harm, to need forgiveness. Joseph, with the best of intentions, puts in place a pay- to-play food distribution system that results in enslavement of the Egyptian people and royal ownership of their land (41: 46-49, 55-59; 49: 13-26), but exempts his own family from being subject to it (50: 21).
God takes us as we are, but doesn’t want us to stay that way. The Holy One achieves the Divine purpose through flawed human beings whose hearts our turn toward God and who cooperate with God’s transforming love. God solved the famine problem through human cooperation. When we ask God, “why do you let children starve?” perhaps God’s response is, “why do you, when you have food in abundance?”
We are God’s partners in shaping the future. In the long term, God will redeem everything. Love will win. But in the short term, the lived-out inclinations of the human heart, for good or for ill, write the script. This is the universal truth of the Joseph story, the way things always are: unless we forgive each other, unless our hearts are transformed from anger, resentment, judgment, and hatred of the other to compassionate love, we will not serve God’s dream of creational well-being. Instead, we will forever seek our pound of flesh, insist on pay to play, assess blame, and impose punishment. Personal transformation is not about becoming better people, although we will be. Nor is it about earning God’s favor. Nothing can make God love us more or less. Personal transformation is about dying to self and claiming God’s dream as our dream. Joseph did that and saved a family and a covenant. Jesus did that and changed the future, changed the world changed everything.