This morning I am wearing my stole of many colors in honor of Joseph, our main character, our hero for the day, or more precisely our hero for this Sunday and next Sunday. After that, we will be done reading through Genesis. I think it’s a little annoying that such a long, beautiful story has been cut short enough to be split between two Sundays but again, the lessons we read during worship are more meant to invite us to dive into our Bibles at home rather than replace personal study. So if you have time, I invite you again to read for yourselves the whole story.
Today we get to hear only the beginning of the “Joseph saga” and one of the first thing we may notice, that does not seem that important but ends up being a little important, is that Joseph may never had had an amazing technicolor dreamcoat, or as some versions of the Bible translate more soberly: a coat of many colors. Indeed, if you have noticed this morning, our text speaks of “a long robe with sleeves”. I will spare you the Hebraic technicalities, but I believe this translation adds some substance and good information about what’s going on in our passage. A long robe with sleeves is utterly unpractical to work in the fields or do any sort of manual work, and because of that it has often been associated with the garment worn by people in authority: King, Judge, Priest. And it would make sense if we notice another ambiguity of our passage, this one does not appear in our translation: Our version reads that Joseph was “shepherding the flock with his brothers” but the Hebrew says that in fact: Joseph was shepherding his brothers among the flock. That is: Joseph was in charge.
And I don’t know how you feel about it but to me, realizing that really changed my perspective on who Joseph was and I believe it makes it so much easier to understand what’s going on – even if sadly, we lose the coat of many colors in the process! Joseph, as many believe, wasn’t a “spoiled little brat” who “used to brag to his brothers”. We miss a few verses in our lesson today, and it’s too bad because these verses are about Joseph’s dreams he tells his family about: The eleven sheaves of his brothers bow before his sheaf, and then Joseph dreams that eleven stars, the sun and the moon bow before him (Genesis 37: 6-10). And it looks like those dreams are really responsible for Joseph’s brothers’ rage: Here comes the dreamer…Let us kill him they say in our passage. But the thing is: Joseph may not have been bragging, he may have been in charge all along and, as the rest of the story will prove that, in fact, he will be in charge of much more than anyone could have dreamed of. Moreover, the fact that he openly disclosed his dreams means that he probably didn’t understand them, yet the brothers got the message: He could become a threat to them. But for now, Joseph was young, he was naive and yet smart enough that his father favored him over them, and actually over one brother in particular: Ruben. If you remember from two weeks ago, Ruben was Leah older son, and so he was naturally called to be the heir and the leader. The problem is that he fell from grace pretty badly, having slept with his father’s concubine Bilhah (Genesis 35:22). Now we aren’t given a lot of context, but Ruben was probably not passionately in love with the woman. What we see several times in the Bible, is that sleeping with your father’s wife was an act of defiance, a sort of political claim to authority: Absalom will do the same thing to David (2 Samuel 16:21–22). Obviously, Ruben’s ‘little coup’ didn’t work, and now it was the older of the sons of Rachel, Joseph, was in good shape to become the heir, at least he had their father’s trust, who asked him to supervise them.
Now that must have been humiliating to have the little brother report to Daddy. And he made bad reports, says the story. This have added to Joseph’s bad reputation for many readers: he was a telltale, wasn’t he? Yet if we read the whole story, Ruben and his brothers weren’t occasionally doing excusable things like sleeping on the job, or have a little bit of wine while on the fields. As the story will prove later, they were dangerous people. Dangerous to others and dangerous to themselves. They were obviously adulterous, but also violent and murderers, having started a war after the rape of their sister’s Dinah. They massacred the inhabitants of Schechem by deceiving them, pretending they were looking for reconciliation to trap them (Genesis 34) And now they were back in the land of Schechem, and that’s why Jacob sends Joseph to see what’s going on with them. The place was 50 miles away from Hebron. So again, when Jacob sends Joseph to check on his sons, he isn’t sending “the little brat” to spy around the corner. Joseph has a real and a serious mission, to walk on his own for several days to make sure his brothers did not start another war.
So why am I saying all of this? Because yes, the brothers hated Joseph, and the text repeats it three times, and it’s even a hatred that seems to get deeper and deeper: They hated him and could not speak peacefully to him (v4), they hated him even more (v5) they hated him even more (v8). But this hatred is not just because Joseph had the love, that is the affection of his father, it is that Joseph had his father’s trust and was given authority. And so what we need to understand is that the sin of the brothers is the sin that has been present since the beginning of Genesis, their sin is the sin that is destroying families, relationships and nations, rotting away at the world, and it is the sin of rebellion. The brothers are rebelling against the favorite son, but more deeply they are rebelling against their father, trying to hurt the father by killing the son, and even more deeply they are rebelling against God and the order God seems to be creating. It is interesting that Ruben tries to save Joseph’s life, planning to bring him back to the father. He probably knows that Joseph has been put in charge not because he is the father’s pet, but because himself has lost his authority as the elder son through his very own fault, by rebelling first against Jacob. Now the brothers are united by their desire to do their own thing, bad things, letting loose all their evil desires and their rebellion brings us back not only to the garden of Eden, where rebellion started, eating the forbidden fruit, light rebellion to beginning with, more precisely their rebellion brings us back to the murder of Abel, the first brother. Cain, also killed out of jealousy and more deeply out of rebellion against God who seemed to favor his brother.
And if we want to go back even before that, the Book of Enoch tells us that the origin of all evil was the rebellion of the fallen angels.
And so the Scriptures are very clear that all the bad things that happen are due to the reversal, the upturning of God’s good order. Now it can be quite difficult for us to hear that today. In our culture, we may have justified or romanticized rebellion. After all, is it always good to submit to authority, to accept any form of power even if it leads to evil or suppress our rights and freedom? Yet the Bible does not say we have to submit to everything and everyone. A lot of authority is our world is already usurped, and not the order God wants for us. So we need to oppose that. Certainly, we need to resist authority when it leads to unethical or murderous acts. But this is clearly not what’s going on in our stories. There is rebellion in Genesis because people want to do whatever they want to do without consideration for others. They don’t rebel out of ethical concerns, they rebel against God’s order made of goodness, fairness and justice (Read all the prophets!).
And so, let’s not get it wrong, Genesis does not present us the origins of God’s people as a beautiful story of people who are a little bit broken at times. Genesis shows us terrible people, and all those brothers they are the fathers of the twelve tribes of Israel: They are adulterous, they deceive, they murder, they eat lunch while their little brother is calling for help from the bottom of the pit. They sell him to slavery. And these men are our fathers too. Nobody can fail to recognize Jesus in this portrait of Joseph. The beloved son in charge of the others, reigning over them not to hurt them but to defend them, protect them, keep them close to the father and then he is brutally rejected, hated and put to death. For us Christians it is a foretelling of Jesus’s story, down to details like the number pieces of silver Joseph was sold for, in case you missed it. It is a foretelling of Jesus’s passion but the good news is that it is also a foretelling of the way of salvation.
And so what is this way of salvation? Well, the story does not tell, but the story will show. To this broken, horrendous world sin and rebellion has created, the only response is obedience, humility and trust. This is all what Joseph’s story is going to be about. I think the fact that he has stuck with us as a man of many colors has more to do with who he was rather than what he wore. He was a man who had many experiences and incredible adventures happen to him. He is sold in slavery but ends up being in charge of a whole household. A powerful woman tries to seduce him but he resists and is thrown into jail. Yet in jail again, he ends up being in charge of all the prisoners, and when he is finally released he becomes Pharaoh’s prime minister. Because “God is with him” says the story each time. Not because God makes it easy for him, that’s often quite the opposite, but Joseph remains obedient to God, faithful. He is never the superhero, rather he often get crushed, and yet he keeps doing the best job he can, he keeps trying to be the best person he can no matter the circumstances. He ends up saving a whole country, and saving his whole family, not only physically (saving them from the famine) but mainly saving them spiritually, from their hatred and division – but that’s next week’s story, and the end of Genesis. The response to the mess the world has fallen into is the obedience of one man, his faithfulness, good will, meekness, diligence, the disposition of a soul and a life God can work with and work through.
Of course as Christians we can, and should, read Joseph’s story as as a foretelling of Jesus’s story, but more simply it also says to us that what we do everyday matters for the healing of the world: Our daily sacrifices, faithful work, random acts of kindness. We may think our small efforts are nothing compared to the vastness of the corruption of the world, and that they make no difference. And yet, actually they may be the only thing that makes a difference. The Babel tower didn’t make a difference. Noah’s ark didn’t make a difference. Pharaoh didn’t make a difference. All of Jacob’s scheming didn’t make a difference. But Joseph, he made a difference. This difference that will later be revealed in Jesus-Christ: All power and authority used in obedience, service and self denial, in restoration of God’s good order.