Do you know Joseph? He’s the youngest child by quite a few years, almost a different generation from his oldest siblings. He is the child of his father’s later years and he is doted upon. Some people would say spoiled . . . rotten. Unlike his many siblings, he can do nothing wrong. Everything he does is the best and his parents don’t mind making comparisons with the less than perfect achievements of their older children. The family has a little more money now and so Joseph gets special treats and favours that weren’t possible a decade or more before. His Mom never tires of preparing the food he loves and they often go out to his favourite restaurant. And of course the little darling could not wear hand me downs. Everything new for him and a very special coat from his father that makes him look like a little prince.
Of course all this special treatment makes Joseph believe himself to be a very extraordinary child. He is used to talking with adults and finds it a bit difficult to talk with other children. There’s no denying he is a very smart kid. Visitors are often treated to him reciting a poem or solving a problem that children twice his age would have trouble with. He has a way of looking at you when he’s finished one of these party pieces that seems to say, “So there. Am I not a very clever boy?”. And everyone is meant to say, “Well done. Hard to believe that you are only ten years old. Your parents must be very proud of you” while under their breath saying, “What a precocious little brat!”.
Joseph comes by some of this quite naturally in a family that has been, well let us say, less than perfectly functional over the past generations. We have been hearing some of their history of the past few weeks. His father and his uncle were twins who from the very time of their birth were at odds with each other, always struggling to outdo each other and gain the favour of their parents. His father, Jacob, was the younger by a few minutes and so in the system of inheritance of the time would receive less than his brother, Esau. Their mother, though, favoured Jacob and was often scheming to ensure that he would outwit and outmanoeuvre his brother to get what was not rightfully his. Together, they tricked the aged and blind father, Isaac, into thinking Jacob was Esau and he promised him the whole inheritance. Esau. of course, was not happy about all this and Jacob had to run for his life into the back country, where his mother had come from, and stayed there for many years.
Jacob’s relationship problems did not end there though. In his exile, he met Joseph’s future mother Rachel, his mother’s brother Laban’s daughter, and so his cousin, and fell in love. However, again, according to the custom of the day, her older sister, Leah, had to be married before her. Laban bargained with Jacob to work for him for seven years to marry Rachel, then tricked him into marrying Leah instead, then negotiated with him again to work for him for seven more years and then he married Rachel as well. Are you following this? Did I mention that this was all a bit dysfunctional? Of course neither Leah nor Rachel were particularly happy about this arrangement especially when Leah began having children and Rachel did not. Rachel had a plan. She offered her maid, Bilhah, to Jacob to have children for her. If you have read Margaret Atwood’s book, The Handmaid’s Tale, or seen the recent television adaptation, this is where the idea came from. The maid laid on Rachel’s knees while Jacob had sex with her. This, through some bizarre and twisted logic, meant that the child conceived would be Rachel’s.
Leah had four sons, Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah. Then Rachel’s maid Bilhah had two sons, Dan and Naphtali. Then Leah, thinking that she could have no more children, decided that Rachel’s plan was a good one and offered her maid, Zilpah, to Jacob and she had two sons, Gad and Asher. But then it seemed that Leah was able to have children and through some conniving she ensured that two more sons, Issachar and Zebulun, were born and a daughter, Dinah. And finally, Rachel was able to have children and she gave birth to Joseph, the focus of our story today. So, Jacob had eleven sons and a daughter by four women. A twelfth son would be born still later to Rachel but that was after today’s reading and when Joseph was out of the family picture. You may recognize that the names of the sons of Jacob were given to the twelve tribes of Israel.
That is the background to our story about Joseph today. You know Joseph. And you probably know his brothers and sister and parents and step-parents as well. They are not so different from us. It was, of course, a time that was very removed from ours and we find much of the overt patriarchal customs around marriage, inheritance, child rearing and slavery repugnant. But we can recognize the dynamics of human and family relationships at work in this complex and complicated story. We know about spoiled children. We know about sibling rivalry. We know about the tensions among the children of different partners. We know of the hatred and rivalry that can grow and fester between different partners. We know about covering up secrets in families and the consequences of not being truthful. We know about times when family tension and anger can boil over into violence and terrible acts of treachery.
In today’s reading, the already fraught family situation becomes more and more tense. We are told that Joseph brings a bad report about the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah from the fields where they were tending the sheep. Remember, they were already living with the stigma of having been born to the maids of Rachel and Leah although here their mothers are called wives of Jacob. We are told that Jacob privileged his youngest son Joseph among his other brothers and we hear, perhaps most famously, about the coat. With big sleeves. Possibly multi-coloured. Possibly an amazing technicolour dreamcoat. A gift unlike anything any of the other brothers had ever received.
In the part of the story that is left out of the lectionary reading for today, Joseph provokes his brothers more by recounting two dreams he has had. In the first, he has seen sheaves of wheat in a field. His is the tallest and when it stands, the other sheaves belonging to his brothers encircled it and bowed down to it. In the second dream, which is if anything even more blatant in its glorification of the young Joseph. He says simply that in the dream, the Sun and the Moon and eleven stars bow down to him. Even his father gets a little perturbed with this, wondering if in addition to his brothers, he and his mother will also bow down to Joseph. Put that into your own family dynamics and imagine what the consequences would be. And perhaps the most annoying part of it all is that Joseph does not seem to have a clue about how much his words and actions get under the skin of his brothers. He probably thinks he is cute.
In the final scene of today’s story, the brothers finally take action. Do you blame them? Well, of course we do. Nothing could justify what they did. Fortunately the oldest,Reuban, was able to stop them from murdering him directly when Joseph found them in the fields. But still, they stripped off the coat that offended them so much and threw him into a pit with no water in the blazing sun. Reuban thought their anger would pass as it had in the past but in another twist, Judah devises a scheme to make some profit and sell Joseph into slavery when he sees some human traffickers passing by. They take the money and put blood on Joseph’s coat and take it to their father saying that he was killed by wild animals. Of course his father was inconsolable. But the brothers had wreaked their vengeance and thought this was the end of the story. They had fixed the family. And at least they knew that Joseph was not dead or at the very least that they had not killed him. Problem solved.
Of course nothing was resolved and we know that there is much more to the story of Joseph – even if it is primarily through the eyes and imagination of Andrew Lloyd Webber. There is always more to the story. One scene takes us to another. The child or sibling that gets thrown out or runs away or disgraces the family does not just disappear. There is always another scene. Despite the worst we can do, the sun will come up in the morning and we will have to continue to sort through those complicated human dynamics that infuse our families and communities. We sometimes look to scripture for examples of families and communities that have it all figured out, whose lives are not like the mess ours can sometimes be, who do not make mistakes and who somehow avoid the difficulties and nastiness that we sometimes need to face. However, when we start to read, we find very real people. People not so different from us.
There was no mention of God in the story we read today. There would be no problem reading it in a secular setting or even, perhaps, using it as an example in a family therapy session. It is hard to see the gospel in this story. Where is the good news? Not very apparent. Why do we even read it as part of scripture? Yet perhaps we can say that the story invites us in. Invites us in to the bigger story and in some way invites us into our own story. Into those places we often do not want to go. To those things about us that we do not want others to hear about because we think we will be judged. But there we are. In all our human weakness and hurt. The story invites us to step in. To believe that even in our very real lives we can find a word of grace. Like the disciples in the boat on the stormy sea, we cannot believe that grace comes to us. It seems like a ghost. Not real. Yet there it is inviting us to step out too and to know that in the storms of life with the disciples, in the pits of abandonment and betrayal with young Joseph and in the pain of loss of someone beloved with Jacob, somehow grace is there.
Thanks be to God.
