Genesis 45 – Relationalrealities

It’s Friday morning, a sunny but still bitterly cold morning. From my desk, I look out on the panorama of the houses and streets that, from North Main Street, climb College Hill to its apex crowned by the impressive verdigris dome of the Christian Science Church. I always think this an odd choice of architecture for a Christian Science church, yet like a great classical cathedral its dome dominates the horizon.

On this particular Friday morning, I am struggling to clear my head of the fog of the head cold – currently doing the rounds – that has laid me low since the previous Sunday. I’m daydreaming—casting around for inspiration to take me into a spiritual riff on the lectionary texts for the 7th Sunday after the Epiphany. This Friday morning feeling is familiar – the tension between despair at the task lying before me and a curiosity that stimulates my imagination sooner or later will provide the hook for my fresh engagement with the texts for the day.

Genesis 45 and Luke 6 address the tension between the golden rule of do unto others as you would have them do unto you and the law of retaliation do unto others as they have done unto you. A distinction lies in the inclusion or absence of four words that, insignificant in themselves, have the power to determine the course towards the promise of liberation from or the endless repetition of cycles of victimization and retaliation in individual and wider social relations.

From general observation, we can often see themes connecting the OT and the Gospel texts, which alert us to the particularity of God’s timely invitation. Between OT story and Gospel teaching, we find old themes reemphasized and given new impetus.

The experience of victimization – whether real or imagined – fosters the illusion that retaliation will provide satisfaction for past injury. This is the theme that the story of Joseph and his brothers and the teaching of Jesus in Luke’s Sermon on the Plain is timely – speaking into the dilemmas of our current time.

Joseph becomes an exemplar of the power of love – interpreted as the desire for reconciliation – to triumph over the impulse for retaliation. Joseph has every reason to hate his brothers for what they did to him. His brothers have every reason to fear his desire for revenge. Yet, having moved beyond his experience of being the victim allows Joseph to choose reconciliation over retaliation – thus breaking out of the repetitive cycle of victimization and retaliation.

Yet the story of Joseph and his brothers is nevertheless an ironic tale. At the heart of this story lies the irony that it is harder to be forgiven than punished for wrongdoing. The brothers are astonished and relieved having escaped Joseph’s retaliation. But this is not enough to free them from their expectation of retaliation – if not now, then later. Although they are seemingly forgiven, they are still left with the memory of having only narrowly avoided murdering their brother by selling him into slavery and deceiving their father with the lie of Joseph’s death in the claws and teeth of a lion. Until the end of the story, they remain in the grip of their expectation that revenge is the only response open to the victim. Proof that being the recipient of mercy -is, as Proverbs 25 says- akin to having hot coals poured over the head.

Jesus asks us to love our enemies and do good to those who hate us. He encourages us to turn the other cheek and to be self-sacrificial in our generosity – even at the risk of personal cost. He asks these things of us not because it’s the nice Christian thing to do – not to score some secret oneupmanship victory. Jesus is not exhorting us to the practice of a pious masochism that sentimentalizes turn the other cheek as the ultimate expression of passivity. He is showing us that this is the only way to step out of the cycle of victimization and retaliatory violence.

James Breech, in The Silence of Jesus, writes:

Jesus says, ‘…do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.’ And watch what happens. This is a recipe for destroying the little bundle of lies about myself and my society that came into existence the moment my tribe and I found somebody to hate. Following this injunction is not just a nice thing to do. It’s a matter of destroying the whole system of mystification which has been the womb in which [we’ve] lived and moved and had [our] social existence.

Love your enemies is the recipe for destroying the whole system of mystification – by which is meant the hatred of the other that forms the womb in which, to quote St Augustine, we live and move and have our being – that is, the culture of victimhood and retribution that permeates our social existence.

These days, many of us witnessing a severe attack on the Constitutional balance of power and the seemingly unstoppable descent into transactional authoritarianism with alarm and distress are asking the question, what does resistance look like? The unpalatable answer – unpalatable because it feels so unsatisfactory and so ineffectual- is Christian resistance. It means resistance shaped by Jesus’ teaching to love your enemies as the only way of breaking the cycle of victimization and retaliation – by which hatred of the other forms the womb in which we live and move and have our being.

Jesus calls us to follow him – to live lives well lived as the response to living under the weight of a coercive regime. Jesus calls us to embrace the power of exemplary actions undertaken by ordinary people – as opposed to fantasizing grand schemes of formal political action. He calls us to the resistance of the heart – the refusal to be coopted by feelings of powerlessness into responses of passivity and compliance. Likewise, he calls us to turn away from the path of countering violence with violence. In addition to legitimate steps of political and legal protest, Jesus calls us to love our enemies as a reminder that –there are no small acts of resistance; any act by anyone has the potential of reverberating – of being absorbed and replicated, leading to meaningful change (Delia Popescu writing about Vaclav Havel the great Czech dissident and later President of a post-Communist Czechoslovakia).

Translated into our current political context, Jesus calls us to love our enemies as the primary form of effective resistance, requiring us to undergo a transformation of the human heart. This alone breaks the cycle of victimization and retaliation – the cycle of repetitive violence that has captured our social consciousness. In effect, when we cease seeing ourselves as victims, we not only take back our power but also break the grip that the desire for retaliation holds in our hearts.

At the deepest level, Jesus is asking us to give up being afraid – to give up seeing ourselves as helpless victims and, in the words of the late John O’Donohue, to have the courage today to live the life that we would love and to waste our hearts on fear no more (John O’Donohue, Morning Offering).

Image Jaymi Hensley in Joseph and his Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat

The OT readings from both last week and today focus on Genesis’ story of Joseph.

Last week I offered a 30,000 ft overview of the book of Genesis – the first book of the both the Torah, and Christian Old Testaments. It’s part of what is known as the Deuteronomic corpus composed sometime between the 7^th and 6^th Centuries BCE. In a way we might think of the Deuteronomists as the equivalent of our Founding Fathers, whose writings laid out the constitutional framework for the new nation emerging after victory in the Revolutionary War. Similarly, Deuteronomists wrote a history of Israel to cement the transition from a loose tribal confederation into a centralized monarchy through the central theological filter of Israel’s covenant with God.

The Deuteronomic history follows a pattern with Genesis accounting the stories of origins. The book of Deuteronomy retells the Exodus experience with the books of Joshua, Judges, focusing on the period after Israel’s conquest of the land. Samuel 1 and 2 and Kings 1 and 2 cover the period of political transition from tribal confederation to monarchy – and the period of the Monarchy under David and its eventual fragmentation after the death of Solomon. A major theme in the Deuteronomic history is the explanation of God’s punishment of Israel when it ignored God and the covenant. Thus it was later re edited into its final form by the priestly scribes seeking to explain the reasons for the Babylonian Exile.

As the the written synthesis of older oral stories predating by centuries the written text – Genesis comprises two great narrative sweeps. The first begins with the creation stories, detailing the fall, the flood, and other myths – stories from before the beginning of recorded history. The second narrative sweep in Genesis brings us into human history with the personal stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph. These story cycles are the result of a weaving of originally unrelated oral traditions into a family story of father, son, grandson, and great grandson. The Joseph story epic is truly a family saga in the vein of the recent HBO drama – Succession.

Who is Joseph? The short answer is he is Jacob’s next to youngest son – born to him in his old age by Rachel his first and most beloved of his four wives. Put politely, Joseph is something of a teenage brat, who plays on his father’s favoritism to really piss his older brothers off. To add insult to injury, as a sign of his favoritism Jacob weaves Joseph a coat of many colors – the inspiration for Tim Rice & Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s musical Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. The sight of Joseph preening and prancing around in his coat – the reminder of Jacob’s favoritism – must have been a daily provocation to his brothers. As Rice & Lloyd-Webber’s title hints at Joseph was not only a prancer, but he was also a dreamer – more precisely the receiver and interpreter of what Carl Jung called big dreams.

To cut a long story short, consumed with jealousy, his brothers intending to murder him threw Joseph into a dry well. But after second thoughts they pulled him up to sell him to Midianite traders who in turn, sold him on into slavery in Egypt. Through a series of events Joseph’s gift for dream interpretation enables him to climb out of slavery and up Egypt’s political ladder. He eventually comes to the notice of the Pharaoh himself – as the one to interpret a very troubling dream Pharaoh had about seven fat cows who devour seven skinny ones. Joseph interpreted the cows as seven years of good harvest followed by seven years of famine. He so impressed Pharaoh that he made Joseph prime minister with responsibility for putting the dream’s interpretation into practice. Joseph confiscated seven years of good harvest and stored the grain away in barns to ensure survival during the seven years of famine. Egypt’s continued abundance of grain during the famine years compelled Jacob to send a delegation of his sons – all except the youngest Benjamin – down to Egypt to buy grain.

The brothers come before the Prime Minister as bedraggled supplicants. Of course, Joseph recognizes them, even though they have no idea he is their long lost brother. Joseph, the inveterate joker, plays on their ignorance – manipulating them into returning home with gifts for their father and a request to return with the youngest brother, Benjamin.

On their return, Joseph can’t keep the charade up any longer. He breaks down in front of them. Today’s reading opens on this scene when Joseph reveals himself to the extreme consternation of his brothers. He cries:

I am Joseph, is my father still alive? But his brothers could not answer him, so dismayed were they at his presence. And they came closer, and he said, I am Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt.

But instead of savoring the moment – revenge being a dish best served cold – seeing their distress Joseph allays their fears of retribution. He explains to them that God planned all this – sending him ahead so that he might be in position to save them from dying of famine. There is much weeping, kissing, and hugging – to the puzzlement of all in Pharaoh’s household.

With the Patriarch epics and esp. the Joseph story cycle – the Deuteronomic compilers objective was to construct an account of origins. With the Joseph saga the stage is set for the next installment in Israel’s history with Moses and the Exodus.

We have the advantage of psychological curiosity. For us the patriarchs are stories speaking to the enduring human nature of personal and family tensions. Looked at from this angle, the spiritual value of the Joseph story lies in its study of conflicting human emotions – favoritism, jealousy, rivalry and hatred, betrayal, revenge and the complexities of forgiveness.

Joseph – the visionary trickster – is not above playing with his brothers and making them squirm. But this is the extent of his desire for revenge. As a dreamer and interpreter of dreams, Joseph has always been able to penetrate the thin space between human perception and divine intimation. He’s had time to meditate with gratitude on God’s larger purpose for him – with the arrival of his brothers, this purpose is given ultimate meaning .

In today’s portion we see him abandoning his game-playing to reveal himself as someone who responds to memories of betrayal. He meets the impulse for revenge with forgiveness. The brothers are relieved and yet continue nevertheless to feel disquieted because they remain stuck in a more primal stage of emotional development in which one bad turn always deserves another. In Joseph’s self-revelation, they are confronted with having to process the hitherto unprocessed unconscious legacy of their jealousy and murderous intent toward their younger brother.

Today’s portion ends with a scene of tearful reconciliation. The youngest brother, Benjamin, has joined them in Egypt and their ancient father Jacob will soon do so. It seems all’s well that ends well. But emotions are never so simple.

With Jacob’s death in the final chapter of Genesis, at chapter 50:15 we read:

Realizing that their father was dead, Joseph’s brothers said, “What if Joseph still bears a grudge against us, and pays us back in full for the wrong that we did to him?”

Learning from experience seems not to have been a skill Joseph’s brothers had acquired. They once more concoct a lie to ward off what they imagine is Joseph’s desire for revenge – in reality their own projections of unresolved guilt. They tell Joseph that Jacob’s dying intention was to beg him to forgive his brothers.

Without the benefit of a modern psychological analysis, the 6^th-century BCE Deuteronomists knew that it’s easier to forgive than to be forgiven – or more specifically, to forgive ourselves through the transformation of being forgiven.

Tag: Genesis 45

An Unsatisfying Teaching

What’s the Hardest thing of All?