Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.
By verse 15 of chapter 50 in Genesis, the patriarch Jacob has died. His son, whom he had thought dead for decades, is now second in command in all of Egypt. Joseph’s brothers were now fearful that Joseph will turn the power of his high office against them and take revenge on them for the evil that they did decades earlier. The brothers said to themselves, “What if Joseph holds a grudge against us and pays us back in full for all the wrong that we did to him?”
There’s a lot of Hebrew grammar going on in this statement, and a couple of statements that follow thereafter. Our translation compacts it all into the word “grudge.” A more literal translation would be: be it enmity with, or be openly hostile toward, or have animosity towards. So, Joseph will be openly hostile toward us and pay us back for evil. In the Hebrew text, there’s also a doubling of the word in Hebrew that means to return or to pay back. It is said twice. So the doubling indicates an emphasis and an intensification. That is, there’s real animosity, they believe, in the heart and mind of their brother Joseph, who’s going to do something terrible to them. Surely, is how it should be translated, surely he will return, certainly he will return, certainly he’s going to pay us back. They have no doubt in their minds that Joseph is going to do to them what they had done to him earlier.
All this indicates that the brothers think that Joseph thinks like they think, believes as they believe. Joseph, since the moment his brothers threw him into the pit, sold into slavery, had one bad thing after another, with a few points of highlights throughout his life. Once sold into slavery, just think about that, Joseph’s life was no longer his own. It belonged to his Egyptian masters: first Potiphar, second to the prison warden, and then third, ultimately to Pharaoh himself. But his life was no longer his own, it was in service always to someone else. That’s an important note, we’ll return to it. His life belonged to them. And Joseph also belonged to his heavenly Father. He also belonged to the people of the promise.
The events included the rising of his influence in Potiphar’s house, only to be falsely accused by Potiphar’s wife and wrongly imprisoned for years. There he was forgotten, even by his fellow prisoners who could have helped secure his freedom. But yet this day, as short as it was, in a couple of years, it was still a bit longer than it needed to be. To all appearances, to Joseph, the Lord God, the God of his father Jacob, Abraham, and Isaac, had forgotten him, and was somehow disciplining him, paying him back for some great wrong.
Joseph was around 17 years old when he was sold into slavery by his brothers. He lived in Potiphar’s house as a slave for about 11 years. He was in prison for probably two years, or a little bit longer than that, before he was finally sprung because he could interpret the Pharaoh’s dream. He was about 30 years old when he was made overseer over Egypt, and he was 39 years old when the brothers first came, their first trip to Egypt to secure food because of the famine. Nine years later, they appear a second time before him. Remember, seven years of abundance and seven years of famine. So Joseph was about 41 years old when his brothers came to Egypt a second time, and moved finally to the land of Egypt. And that’s also where his father Jacob dies, in Genesis 49, at the age, by the way, of 147.
So they sent a message to Joseph, saying, “Your father has charged us before dying to say, ‘Thus you shall say to Joseph, please forgive, I beg you, the transgression of your brothers and their sin, for they did wrong to you.'”
The brothers thought they had a problem, the big problem, and they thought they had a solution to their problem. The brothers thought that the best way to handle this was yet to deceive once again, this time not Jacob their father, but Joseph their brother. They tell Joseph that their father gave a command before he died, literally before the face of his death.
The plan and its execution is somewhat problematic, though, for the brothers. It’s an obvious lie by the time you examine the facts. It’s problematic because they claim that this is what the deathbed wish was of their father Jacob, but the Bible tells us that it wasn’t simply the brothers present at Jacob’s death. Joseph was there as well. He was there. Had there been such a command given at the deathbed of Jacob, obviously Joseph would know.
But the brothers believed that Joseph had been waiting for their father to die so he could exact revenge on them without hurting or causing any more strife within the family, and thus within Jacob. The brothers believed that once Jacob was dead, Joseph would then bring the full weight of the punishment of the Egyptian government against them. They attempted to trick him into forgiving them. So they sinned in an attempt to earn forgiveness from Joseph for the original sin of throwing him into the pit and selling him into slavery.
They’re like children, or quite frankly like most of us adults, who concoct a lie in order to avoid punishment for wrongdoing that has already been done. When it comes to forgiveness, you see, we human beings always want to have wiggle room on either side of the forgiveness equation. We always want to be able to have a little reason to justify why we did what we did. We want some wiggle room. I did wrong and I asked for forgiveness, but I had good reason. You made me mad. I had good reason. I meant well. At the end of the day, we try to acquire forgiveness by multiplying our sins, just as the brothers did here.
On the wrong side of the equation, the one who is wronged, forgiveness isn’t really forgiveness, not in the biblical sense. Forgiveness is granted conditionally. It’s one of the problems that we have in forgiving people. If you promise never to do it again, I will forgive you. If you undo what you did, if you fix what you broke, then I will forgive you. If you pay me for the transgression, then I will forgive you. Take care of, quote, reparations, paying back to the one who’s allegedly wronged, from the one who wronged. Although that doesn’t work so well either these days.
We also forgive with reservation. I will forgive you, but I will never trust you again. You can never borrow my tools again, because you keep breaking them, right? We forgive, but we put a condition on it. There’s the forgiveness we want to grant in name only. We say we forgive, but we do not. What we do is tell somebody they’re forgiven, and then we file the incident away in the offense file, so that we can pull it out later in life, down the road, when it becomes useful for us to use that sin to justify our sin, or to defend ourselves against it.
See, we are in fact sinning machines. So even when we’re caught in sin or confess to sin, we often try to find a way, via sin, to get out of the punishment or the risk of punishment from the one against whom we sinned. It’s just how human nature works. Just ask a little child, and they’ll tell you it was their brother or sister, not them. That’s how it works.
The brothers of Joseph understood the fickle nature of human forgiveness. And while on the other hand adding sin to sin to acquire a more sure forgiveness, they seek to wall Joseph in by their sinful lie and deception, so that he can’t come back at them at some other point.
So the brothers sent a message to Joseph, saying, “Your father gave us this command before he died. Say to Joseph, ‘Please forgive the transgression of your brothers and their sin, because they did evil to you.’ And now please forgive the transgression of the servants of the God of your father.” And Joseph wept when they spoke to them.
The brothers sent a message, they don’t deliver the message in person. Exactly like when they sent the bloody coat of many colors to Jacob decades earlier. They wanted to find out what their father’s disposition would be to the death of Joseph. Concocted a lie, sent the lie in the form of the, quote, message, covered in blood, to their father Jacob, so that he would look at it and conclude himself, not be told, that his favorite son Joseph had been killed by a wild animal. Now they do the same thing. It worked once, it’s going to work again. They send a message, they don’t go in person. They want to determine what’s going to happen, what’s Joseph’s response to the message, and then based upon his response, they will either go to Joseph directly, or they’ll come up with an alternative plan.
In both cases, the brothers desire a reaction, first from Jacob, and then Joseph, in order to determine whether or not they will be okay in their present situation. Though they misjudge the situation. They think Joseph thinks as they do, and they believe the countermeasures that they’re taking will mollify Joseph.
His brothers also came and fell down before him and said, “Behold, we are your servants.” But Joseph said to them, “Do not fear. Am I in the place of God?” Joseph dies to self, and he lets the Lord God have the last word on the disposition toward the brothers. In essence, he takes hold of the Christian theology of the cross, the theology that God allows and inflicts suffering for the purpose ultimately of good, even though we don’t see it. Joseph is one of the few people that gets to see it.
Thus he says to them, “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.” He lays the whole thing, the previous decades and the years to come, the things done and the lies told, all in the hands of the Lord God, Yahweh Elohim. He sees what God has done in his life, and what God is doing in the very moment, for his Hebrew people.
St. Paul echoes the lesson of Joseph and his brothers in Romans 8:28: “We know that God causes all things to work together for the good, to them who love the Lord, and who are called according to His purpose.” Joseph was called according to God’s purpose. He was called to slavery. He was called to servitude. He was called to prison. And he was called to second in command, to serve the Egyptians.
Imagine what life had been like for Joseph from the moment he was thrown into the pit. Imagine all the grievances he could have piled up against his brothers. Sold into slavery, falsely accused by Potiphar’s wife, thrown in prison, until finally his rise in power. Imagine the physical, emotional, spiritual trauma that he suffered. Now think of the worst times in your life, and can you look upon it in the same kind of way that Joseph looked upon his? No doubt there were times when Joseph wondered if the God of his father Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had abandoned him, to leave him in prison, leave him as a slave, leave him powerless and in service to other people. I imagine he prayed time and time again for vindication and freedom, and to be returned home to his father Jacob.
Joseph looked back at all that had happened, and he looked forward to the preservation and growth of the nation, and most of all he looked forward to the promised Messiah who would come from the bloodline of the Hebrews, assuming of course that the Hebrew bloodline survived. And that’s where his part came in. He came to understand that all things happen in the life of a Christian, and that they are redeemed by God and put to good use for God’s purposes, even though while we’re going through them, we don’t see them.
He said to his brothers, “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, in order to bring about the present result, to preserve many people alive. So therefore, do not be afraid. I will provide for you and your little ones.” So they comforted them and spoke to them kindly.
Joseph forgave without conditions, without reservations, without a file cabinet of offenses in which to put their sins. Joseph had no right to withhold the forgiveness of sins. “Am I in the place of God?” He understood it with a rhetorical question. The answer is, he is not. He can’t overrule, he can’t trump that which God has done. If God had forgiven them and used their evil deed to save the lives of many people, the Hebrew bloodline, for the sake of the promised Messiah, who was Joseph to stand in the way?
Most people, inside and outside the church, tend to forget their place in the world and in life. Joseph did not. Christians forget that they’re children of God, and children of His Word, and that all things that happen in life, somehow, in some way, in the latter day, are all redeemed for our good and for the good of our neighbors. They don’t understand it each and every time they ignore or override what God has said and done and taught and commanded and forgiven. We usurp God’s authority when we do not abide by all of those things.
Joseph, on the other hand, says personal hurt and history aside, and he yielded to the will and to the ways of the Lord God, Yahweh Elohim. He had come to learn that what God ordains is in fact always good. In that moment, Joseph got to see what most of us never get to see in our lifetime. He got to see the why of his sufferings. He got answers to his questions. When Joseph looked at the past, he saw hardship and suffering. But then he looked to the future, and he saw a Hebrew nation, and the coming of the promised Messiah, and the forgiveness of all sins in the promised Messiah’s sacrifice, including his very own sins.
The arrogant boy who once boasted in front of his brothers that they would bow down to him, who took pride in being his father’s favorite son, the arrogant boy who thought that he was untouchable, was now the second in command in Egypt, nearly untouchable by no one, second in command only to Pharaoh. He humbles himself before his ethically challenged brothers, and speaks kindly to them, and pledges to take care of their little ones, their children and their grandchildren.
So also, when Judas meant for evil there on Good Friday, the Father used for good. That is, He redeemed the betrayal, and the service of the crucifixion resulted in the atonement of the sins for the world, and ended with the resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ.
By the way, that’s how it ends for you too. Jesus tells His disciples to forgive, not just once, but seven times seventy times, 490 times, which is a way of saying don’t stop forgiving your neighbor. Don’t stop loving your neighbor. John said it this way, a little differently: “We love because He first loved us.” And we pray in the fifth petition, “And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
So we too, we forgive and we forget. That’s what we’re supposed to do. No grudges, no animosity, no envy, no plans to get even. We forgive without conditions or guarantees, for that’s how we’ve been forgiven. We forgive over and over again, as many times as necessary. So too, sincerely forgive and gladly do good to those who sin against us. Small Catechism, meaning to the fifth petition.
Thus Joseph’s act of forgiving his brothers prefigures the acts of Jesus forgiving us. Joseph forgives his brothers, and Jesus forgives His brothers and sisters even more. Jesus doesn’t require great deeds. He has forgiven and forgotten everything, as if they had never ever happened. He forgives without holding a grudge. He forgives over and over again, 490 times. He sacrificed Himself so that He could forgive the sins of the whole world.
To that end, Christ gave His church the public office of the ministry, the pastor, father, minister, elder, whatever you want to use as a biblical title. He gave the church the office so that the man would stand before the children of the heavenly Father and declare to them, time and time again, no matter how grievous the sin, that their sins are forgiven.
I’ll end with Psalm 103:12: “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not His benefits. For as far as the east is from the west, so does He remove our transgressions from us.” Your sins are forgiven, unconditionally, no file cabinet, no reservations. Amen.
May the peace that surpasses all understanding keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.