Pit, Prison, Palace: Joseph and the Salvation Story [Proper 15A - Genesis 45:1-15]

 The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson

Genesis 45:1-15

 

Pit, Prison, Palace: Joseph and the Salvation Story

 

The brothers were speechless because they were afraid.  They were afraid because standing before them was a ghost, a ghost that they created.  A ghost that had haunted them for years, pursued them in their dreams and in their nightmares.  But only in dreams and nightmares, until now.  Now this one they could not forget was weeping before them.  Joseph: he finally caught them – and they could not escape because they could not wake up because this was not a dream.  

 

It had to be true; every word, every tear: it had to be true.  No one in Egypt knew their secret.  No one else in the world, not even their own father, knew the true story.  They never told anyone.  The real truth was too terrible to speak, what they had done – and to their own baby brother.  They had lived with that lie for a long time; they guarded it like a precious treasure; they kept it like a curse.

 

They had hated Joseph.  True, he was just a boy but also, to them, he was a spoiled brat – one that relentlessly absorbed all of their father’s adoring attention.  Joseph was clearly his favorite – he, Jacob, didn’t even try to hide that.  They hated Joseph’s stupid colorful robe.  They hated his stupid arrogant dreams.  In short, they hated everything about him.  And so when they saw him walking through the pasture, in their direction, with that stupid, carefree smile on his face, they decided to put an end to him and to his dreams, to put him into a dreamless sleep, a permanent siesta from which he would never awake.

 

Reuben, the eldest, talked them out of murder but not out of revenge, not out of violence, not out of their hatred.  The brothers threw Joseph into a pit, to live with the worms and the vols.  Underground.  Buried alive.  The older brothers, the ones Joseph admired: they didn’t kill him, but down in Sheol something in him, of him, did die.  The charmed life he enjoyed ended in that pit; he emerged a different person: born again as a survivor.

 

From beloved son to trafficked human.  His brothers sold him into slavery for twenty pieces of silver – ten brothers, a mere two coins a piece.  And they took his beautiful robe and soaked it in animal blood: their alibi.  They spared his life, but also they killed their brother and birthed a ghost – a ghost carried away in chains.  Then, when the deed was done, the brothers returned home to tear out their father’s heart and to crush his soul.

 

The lie became their truth.  And while the guilt ate away at their souls, the consequences never caught up.  They got away with it.  They buried Joseph in the past and moved on. 

 

Joseph was moved on by his new owners.  He was sold again in Egypt – like a flipped property.  And there, in that distant land, he lived as a slave – that is, until things got worse.  Not too long into his new life, he was sentenced to rot away in an Egyptian prison.  He spent years in that prison.  But, somehow, despite the immensity of his pain, he never lost hope.  Though his life became a nightmare, he never stopped dreaming.

 

Those dreams and his trust in a demure God preserved his unlikely future.  He rose from the pit to the palace.  And that is where his brothers found him.

 

The old customs called for an ending soaked in satisfaction.  An eye for an eye.  A tooth for a tooth.  These violent men deserved his wrath and Joseph, at last, had the power to pay it all back.  The way they ruined his life and took him away from his family and broke his father’s heart; he lived as a slave; he lived as a prisoner: they deserved to suffer for the immense suffering they had caused.

 

They show up in Egypt starving and desperate.  And Joseph recognizes them.  But to the brothers Joseph is a ghost.  And ghosts don’t carry flesh and bones.  They don’t rule nations.  They don’t sell grain to starving shepherds.  They haunt your dreams but not your days.  And so, they do not recognize him.  He was buried in their past.

 

They thought they were in the clear.  And then a cry shattered the house of lies in which they found cold comfort.  Joseph’s cathartic flood of tears put them off balance.  His confession rendered them mute.  His power turned them to dust.

 

The one who was dead was alive.  And like the Easter women of Mark’s Gospel, the brothers can say nothing to anyone, for terror and amazement had seized them.

 

Joseph calls them closer: the most terrifying moment of their lives.  This is the moment in the film when the slighted hero gets his revenge.  Prison gave Joseph time to plan this very moment.  The pit provided the soil for his impotent rage to grow wild with violence. 

 

This powerful man armed with justification walked slowly towards his brothers, just as he did so many years earlier.  He could feel their bodies trembling and the incessant beating of their hearts.  The tension built with each measured step.  He arrives close enough to feel their panicked breath.  This is when the knife is supposed to come out, when the hounds are usually released, when justice is served.

 

But this story is different.  This is not a revenge story.  The brothers never get what they deserve.  Because this story is about salvation.  And in the salvation story no one ever gets what they deserve.  Joseph kisses his betrayers.  He opens his arms to embrace them.  He stains their rugged clothes with tears of forgiveness, with an undying love that learned to survive in a brutal world.

 

Joseph finally caught them – and they could not escape because they could not wake up because this was not a dream.  It was much better than that.

 

The grace of God always finds us.  It always catches up.  And it finds us here: in this very imperfect but very real world.  It seeps from the scars.  It appears in the cracked places, like a delicate flower pushing through the pavement.  Grace is the ghost that stalks us through this world.  And finds us.  And holds us.  And loves us, much more than we deserve.