Scripture (Genesis 45:1-15) can be found here…
To really understand what is going on here, we have to know the whole story.
The story of Jacob and sons… the second to youngest of whom is Joseph.
Second-to-youngest, but firstborn of Jacob’s favorite, beloved wife, Rachel.
Rachel, who dies giving birth to the youngest, Benjamin.
The story of Joseph as his father’s obvious favorite, so much so that his father crafts him a coat so beautifully unusual, the only way the King James Bible could help its readers to understand was to call it, “A coat of many colors.” (It actually says, robe with long sleeves).
The story, too, of Joseph’s proclivity to dreaming and interpreting dreams. At age 17, the boy is cocky and, let’s admit it, obnoxious.
When he tells his family of dreams that they all bowed down to him, his father Jacob is not happy. But his brothers—for whom it is the last straw—are murderously angry.
They decide to kill him, but relent.
They sell him into slavery. They tear the beautiful coat and put goat’s blood on it, hiding their crime but convincing their father he is dead.
Jacob is devastated.
The story of his slavery in Egypt: Joseph soon finds himself in prison, on a false charge. There his love of dreams and interpreting them comes in handy, and he interprets dreams for Pharaoh himself. He tells the Pharaoh that seven years of good crops will be followed by seven years of famine. Suddenly, Joseph is not only out of prison, but has earned a position in the government overseeing food production and famine preparation. Second only to the Pharaoh in power. Joseph marries. He has children. Life is good. “Whatever he does, God makes it prosper.” (Gen. 39:23).
The story of how, years later, his brothers come to Egypt, because there is famine back home, too, and they are hungry.
They don’t recognize Joseph, so he puts them through their paces. He demands to meet their youngest brother… Benjamin, the last surviving child of the beloved Rachel. Joseph frames him for theft, and tells his brothers that he plans to keep Benjamin as his slave.
Jacob’s fourth son, Judah, offers himself as a slave instead, saying, “How can I go back to my father if the boy is not with me? I fear to see the suffering that would come upon my father.”
And that is the story that brings us to this passage.
All is revealed. With stormy emotions and weeping, Joseph reveals himself, and the brothers embrace.
But this is a story of family trauma, trauma that travels through the generations. Jacob and Rachel and Leah suffer in ways that lead to this unique constellation of family. There are deaths and disappearances. There is guilt and regret. There is great success for Joseph, of course, but imagine the emptiness that comes with memories of the life from which he was torn.
But everything happens for a reason. That’s what we tell one another, and ourselves.
This seems to be the perfect story to back up that notion. Let’s look at Joseph’s words.
Joseph’s brothers, are, at first, speechless. They are not happy to hear that this second-in-command to Pharaoh turns out to be the brother they threw into a pit, sold to a passing caravan, and whose beautiful coat they tore up and covered with blood. Regret. Guilt.
But Joseph turns storyteller. Don’t be distressed, he says. Don’t be angry with yourselves. Yes. I am your brother. Yes. You sold me into slavery. But God sent me ahead of you to preserve life.
What an interesting thing for Joseph to say. Note: he doesn’t say, “To preserve your lives.” Not immediately. But for Joseph the dreamer—Joseph whose father’s unbridled favoritism probably gave him his whopping ego—it wasn’t at all hard to believe that God sent him to save all of Egypt. That is, after all, exactly what he did.
But then, he admits the personal stakes in his rise to power in Egypt: “God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth...” And Joseph adds, not just a remnant—many survivors. Joseph is saying that, yes, it was God’s intention that you, that we, God’s covenant people, would survive, and that is why I was sent ahead of you—not as slave, but as savior.
This is a powerful interpretation of what has happened. Joseph has created meaning out of his life story, out of his own suffering—being betrayed by kin, being thrown into a pit, being sold to random passing strangers, being unjustly thrown into prison.
And it may well be that God sent Joseph on this journey of suffering and achievement for just this reason. But whether or not that is true, is up to Joseph. People who have suffered may ultimately be able to find meaning in their experience. Or they may not. (The phrase “senseless killing” exists, indicating that, on some level, we do understand that some things don’t make sense.) We people of faith have a God to whom we may pray, or weep, or rage about our suffering—and in that faith-filled conversation, we may find some good that came of it, an unexpected bloom in the refuse of destruction. And we get to testify to that, if it’s our experience. Or, we may not come to that understanding. That is our right and our privilege as human beings—to come to an answer that seems right, or to try to rest in the limbo of knowing there is no answer.
What’s not our right and privilege, though, is to interpret someone else’s suffering. To tell them, everything happens for a reason. Kate Bowler’s husband answered, “I’d love to know it,” when a neighbor said that, handing a casserole through the door. Bowler, a professor at Duke Divinity School and the mother of an infant son, had just been diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer at age 35, and I guess the neighbor thought it might be an encouraging thing to say. Bowler includes “Everything happens for a reason” in a list of things one should never say to people experiencing terrible times. She writes,
The only thing worse than saying this is pretending you know the reason. I’ve had hundreds of people tell me the reason for my cancer. Because of my sin. Because of my unfaithfulness. Because God is fair. Because God is unfair. Because of my aversion to Brussels sprouts. I mean, no one is short of reasons… When someone is drowning, the only thing worse than not throwing them a life preserver is handing them a reason.[i]
It’s awful, isn’t it? Loving someone who is suffering, and not having a life preserver you can throw them? That’s the crux of the problem. We want to help. But love does not require that we throw a life preserver—especially if it’s in the form of well-intended words that can hurt, because they imply either that they are responsible for their suffering, or that we know the will of God. God, too, makes meaning, but in God’s own time. On the other hand, we can say something else, something like, “Let me bring you some dinner this week,” or “This sounds so hard.” Or we can even allow for silence, honoring the terrible in the midst of life which can also be so beautiful.
We humans long for order, for harmony, for reasons. Sometimes we even get them! But when those we love are suffering, the truly loving thing to do is to let them, like Joseph, find meaning on their own timetable. We can show them our love in ways that don’t interpret their lives to them. And we can be with them—just be with them—in the beautiful and terrible thing that is living. And God, in God’s infinite wisdom and love, will be with us.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
[i] Kate Bowler, Everything Happens for a Reason (And Other Lies I’ve Loved) (New York: Random House, 2018), 170.