Epiphany 7C: Joseph and His Brothers

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark

Epiphany 7, Year C: Genesis 45:3-11, 15; Psalm 37:1-12, 41-42; 1 Corinthians 15:35-38,42-50; Luke 6:27-38

The Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Priest-in-Charge

These past few weeks, we’ve been exploring the theme of Christian discipleship together—what it means to drop our nets and follow after the one who all beauty, truth, and goodness that we might become beautiful as He is beautiful. It is in setting out in the deep waters, allowing ourselves to be drawn into the depths of God’s love for us that we begin to experience a peace that passes understanding—a peace that is not contingent upon the outward circumstances of our daily life. Rooted and grounded in God’s love for us in Christ through the Holy Spirit, our lives bear the fruit of love and our leaves remain green, even in the times of inevitable dryness and drought. Blessedness comes, not from a grinding program of self-improvement, but in the degree to which we surrender our lives to He Who Is. Our job is to open ourselves to Him that He might live his life in and through us in ways we can’t imagine.

This week, see another aspect of what it means to follow Jesus down the way of love, journeying into self-forgetfulness that sees not ourselves at the center of everything, but God at the center of everything. The story of the reunion of Joseph with his brothers is one of the most beautiful in all of scripture and highlights for us the centrality of forgiveness, of loving our enemies as one of the core practices of follow after Jesus down the way love.

Joseph, it must be said, was a little arrogant, and egotistical as a young man. He has two dreams which he promptly reports to his eleven brothers. One in which all the sheaves of gathered grain bow down to him and another in which the sun, moon, and eleven stars bow down to him. The prudent thing would have been to chalk these dreams up to indigestion from a midnight trip to the refrigerator and keep quiet, but Joseph tells his brothers about them. They get jealous, and plot to kill him, deciding at the last minute to throw him in a pit instead as part of a ruse to make it look like wild beasts devoured him. Joseph gets sold into slavery and eventually finds himself in the Pharaoh’s court where he rises to prominence as an interpreter of dreams. Now we read of the reunion of Joseph and his brothers—the moment where the breaches and fractures of their past relationship—are healed. From the pit of death, from the estrangement caused by arrogance and jealous rivalry, new life comes forth. The alienation, estrangement between Joseph and his brothers is transfigured and healed. His rises to new life and relationship is restored.

The story of Joseph is not just a family history, but the story of God’s presence and action in and amongst God’s people—the fitful, halting, error-prone saga of God working though fallible human lives to fashion for Himself a people who might embody love in the world, a nation where “justice roll[s] down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:24). Joseph, according to our normal, human, way of seeing things, would have had every right to visit his rage at his betrayal upon his siblings. But he does the unexpected thing, or rather, God working through Joseph, does the unexpected thing, the impossible thing—he forgives.

Instead of balling his fists at his brothers, Joseph tells them to “come closer” and falls down at their feet washing them with his tears. Instead of revenge, he provides for his brothers and their families. Joseph’s love for his brothers, his enemies, his persecutors, draws forth abundance from apparent barrenness, lack, estrangement, and famine. As it is with Joseph and his brothers, so it is with the nation of Israel—following after the living God, walking in his ways, means that forgiveness and reconciliation, not vengeance and never-ending cycle of violence begetting more violence, must hold sway. And as it is for Israel, so it is with us—the good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over is the fruit of living forgiveness, of living from forgiveness.

It’s hard, as Christians, not to see the Joseph story as prefiguring the love and forgiveness we see revealed most fully in Jesus Christ. It’s Jesus, who on the way to the cross—spat upon, mocked, scourged and beaten—forgives his captors: “Forgive them Lord they know not what they do.” It’s Jesus, who stepping into the Upper Room where the disciples have locked themselves away, breathes not vengeance and wrath, but peace. The disciples are said to have shuttered themselves up because of “fear of the Jews”—the authorities executed Jesus and now his followers are the next logical targets. But they are also shut up in fearful anticipation of retribution. They’ve just denied knowing Jesus. They’ve abandoned him. Spoken in fake accents to make it sound like they’ve even been to Galilee. So when he walks through the door and appears, it’s not unexpected that they would think Jesus is a wrathful avenging ghost who has appeared to extract his pound of flesh for their betrayal of him. The disciples’ minds think only in terms of the cycle of violence, of tit-for-tat.

But Jesus doesn’t come to wreak vengeance, does he? We see in his breathing of peace upon the disciples’ contracted, fearful huddling that has them locked in themselves a different way of seeing and being in the world. In James Alison’s powerful phrase, we see in Jesus the “forgiving victim” whose sacrifice has shown us, once and for all, the futility of all sacrifice—the attempt to secure our temporary, fragile, peace on the backs of innocent victims and scapegoated others. The disciples receive, literally, a breath of fresh air, something that breaks into their stuffy claustrophobic world. They breathe in the Spirit of love, forgiveness, and reconciliation that they might be healed of their limiting pictures of themselves—their shame and fear—but also that they might breathe that same peace, forgiveness, love, and reconciliation to those they encounter when the doors to that locked Upper Room are flung open. They receive the Spirit of reconciling forgiveness that they might be that same Spirit of reconciling forgiveness for others.

It’s easy to hear the exhortations in today’s Gospel as something we, if we were just better people, could accomplish under our own steam. Ironically, however, that notion—that we accomplish anything under our own steam—is exactly what prevents us from living out the shape loves takes in the world as described and enacted in the life of Jesus. Remember, Jesus is the one who is totally turned to the Father—“Not my will, but your will be done.” Jesus’ existence is wholly other-centered. He derives his strength, his life, his power, from God the Father. “Good teacher,” the young man says to Jesus, who promptly cuts him off—“Why do you call me good? Only my father in heaven is good.”

The implication for the life of discipleship, of working for freedom, peace, and reconciliation is clear. It is in letting ourselves be worked upon by grace, that we become instruments of God’s peace and reconciliation in the lives of others. The degree to which we turn, re-orient our lives, on Him and Him alone, is the degree to which we will give without expectation of reward, and forgive when vengeance seems most justified. That’s why our collect prays for the gift of the Holy Spirit to be poured into our hearts—all of the actions outlined in the gospel are accomplished only by grace, facilitated by our willingness to co-operate, to utter the mustard seed of our yes that God might tabernacle in us and live his life in and through the unique, unrepeatable lineaments of our fragile human frame.

Our gospel for today speaks quite powerfully of expectations. Most often, our expectations of ourselves, others, and indeed God, are unconscious. Part of the spiritual journey is having the courage to have these expectations, these demands, these unconscious requirements brought to light so that they can be clearly seen and let go of. It’s not that we’re bad people, or unchristian have having expectations—that is simply part of the human condition. But being on the spiritual journey means that we’re willing to have our expectations challenged, to have ourselves and our firmly clenched ideas about how things should be called into question.

For Luke, one of these expectations centers around giving in order to get something back. Of course, it’s nice to receive a thank you, or to see our service flower in the lives of others. But what if we don’t get thanked? What if our service bears no discernable fruit? Opening to the Spirit working in and though us means letting go of our human expectations and simply getting on with the work God has given us to do—loving God and loving our neighbor as ourselves. When we find ourselves judging it’s a sign to us that we are holding to an expectation that’s not being met and the problem is not necessarily with the other person, but consists of an unmet need within ourselves that needs to seen, acknowledged, and gently released.

That whole list of seemingly heroic self-denials is not some impossibly high bar to which we are to attain as a result of our own efforts, but the natural fruit of being rooted and grounded in Christ, being watered with the unconditional love of God and knowing in our bones our own belovedness. Joseph didn’t forgive and feed and wash those who had tried to kill him on his own. Left to his own devices, Joseph was actually rather insufferable. Joseph forgave because of the action of God in his life, because of his openness to what we as Christians recognize as the Holy Spirit.

Jesus has breathed upon us the means by which we can do the seemingly impossible—forgive without measure, give measure, love even those we persecute us. We don’t have to wind ourselves up, but let ourselves go. We need to breathe in the breath of the Spirit he has exhaled over us and take that impossible peace, that impossible love, that impossible turning of the cheek into the very center of our being and live from there. Veni sancte spiritus. Come, Holy Spirit, Come.