Joseph and his brothers

The story of Joseph and his brothers ends the Book of Genesis on the poignant and moving idea of reconciliation. It is in that sense a wonderful illustration of what the poet George Herbert calls “the two vast and spacious things” which are most needed to be pondered and known, “sin and love.”

 

Joseph, as we saw last week, was hated by his brothers because he was the favourite son of their father, the problem of sibling rivalry, on the one hand, and the limitations of human love, on the other hand. How to love our children in ways that respect each in their own particularity? How to avoid the temptation to quantify our loves, our likes and our dislikes, about who loves who more than others? Do we need to let the love of one for another consume us with resentment and envy? Yet it so often does when love becomes a matter of competing for attention either on the part of children or for that matter, of parents, as in Shakespeare’s tragedy, King Lear. “Which of you,” he says, using the royal ‘we’, to his three daughters, Goneril, Regan and Cordelia, “shall we say doth love us most, that we our largest bounty may extend?”

 

Joseph, who was not killed by his brothers despite their intent, was thrown into a waterless pit, his coat taken by his brothers and smeared with the blood of a lamb to deceive their father, Jacob, about his death. Unbeknownst to them, he is sold into slavery in Egypt where he rises after various adventures to a position of authority in Pharaoh’s government where he stores up food in anticipation of a period of famine. Years later during the time of famine, his brothers came to Egypt seeking food. Joseph sees them but they do not know him. What will happen in that encounter? Will it be an occasion for Joseph’s revenge on them for their evil intent?

 

Marilynne Robinson notes that the Book of Genesis “is framed by two stories of remarkable forgiveness, of Cain by the Lord, and of his ten brothers by Joseph.” Cain who killed Abel is protected from being killed himself. Out of his lineage will come Enoch and Jubal, the one who will, like Elijah, be taken up into heaven, and the other, who is the father of musical instruments. While the concept of a life for a life, an eye for an eye, a kind of measured revenge as a form of human justice, appears in Genesis, it is constantly questioned. As Robinson nicely puts it, “Whoever kills a man will be killed by a man. Adam kills Adam for killing Adam, an image of God destroys an image of God for having destroyed an image of God,” suggesting that this is “the fundamental absurdity even of punishment limited by strict equivalence.” It is a human way of looking at things which contrasts with the sense of divine restraint that operates in so much of Genesis and which qualifies the simplistic view of divine retribution. Even the story of the flood ends not with the complete annihilation of the human world which has so abused creation but with a renewal of creation and the setting of bounds to human behaviour in the form of covenant and law. In this sense, Genesis as a whole acts as a check on revenge and violence.

 

Joseph makes himself known to his brothers, kissing them and weeping upon them. It is a touching scene. They have to confront their evil, to be sure, but there is more of a sense of reconciliation that looks beyond their evil intent. Why? Because Joseph sees something greater at work than our betrayals. He sees the movement of God’s Providential care and love. “I am your brother, Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt. And now do not be distressed, or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life.” It is not an easy thing for them to grasp and there remains in them a lingering sense of guilt and the fear of retribution. They wonder what will happen after their father Jacob dies. Will Joseph then seek revenge? Thus the story ends by making the theological point even more explicit and in ways which look beyond the sphere of families to our world of conflicts and violence.

 

“And Joseph said to them, ‘Fear not, for am I in the place of God? As for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today’.” The irony is that Joseph is in the place of God, so to speak, but chooses to act as God acts, that is to say, with restraint. As Robinson puts it, “Grace tempers judgment. In this way the text conceptualizes the justice of God together with His mercy or grace of His loyalty to Creation.” God, she says, “is interested in human beings, If they are to be granted individuality, agency and freedom, meaningful existence as human beings, then God must practice almost limitless restraint.” This is part of her crucial insight into “an important consistency to be found in Genesis,” namely, that “to put aside power is Godlike.”

 

These stories speak powerfully to the confusions of our times. They offer another perspective, another way of acting towards one another. It is grounded in the idea of the reconciliation of the darkest aspects of human experience with the overarching goodness of God and Being itself, the goodness of the whole created order and, thus, of ourselves within it. “To put aside power is Godlike.”