The Payback of Grace

The story of Joseph and his brothers always blows me away. I remember as a tween—that odd age between childhood and adolescence—when my parents dragged me to see a community theatre production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Even though I tried to not like the story because I had all those pre-teenage hormones making me extremely irritable, I could not help but love the show. I was so impressed with it that I made my sister burn me a CD copy of the Broadway production’s rendition. “It was red and yellow and purple and gold…” those words still get stuck in my head occasionally.

Well, today we find ourselves a little further along in the story of Joseph and his brothers than the bit about the coat of many colors. A famine persisted everywhere in the known world. Joseph’s brothers were sent to find food if they could. Joseph had been set over all the food as a trusted advisor and governor appointed by Pharaoh himself. Strangely though Joseph did not immediately show himself to his brothers, but at first he made them wait in anticipation. Did they actually get food to survive? Did the brothers save their people? Were Joseph and his brothers reconciled? All of these and more questions unfold as this story from Genesis climaxes. Something from today’s reading though stood out to me as odd.

After Joseph’s brothers had agreed to leave one brother—Joseph would eventually choose Simeon from among them—the brothers said something that we might simply pass on by without another thought. “They said to one another, ‘Alas, we are paying the penalty for what we did to our brother; we saw his anguish when he pleaded with us, but we would not listen. That is why this anguish has come upon us.’” If you do not recall the other brothers were jealous of Joseph and so they threw him in a hole, took his coat, and made it seem as though he was dead. In fact, they really did leave him for dead, but he was rescued and taken off as a slave to Egypt. Rueben wanted to defend his own actions, but in the end all of them were guilty. However, what stands out as strange comes in that these brothers attribute their current lot in life to something they did years ago—something horrible, yes, but still an event from deep in their pasts.

Perhaps you do not find this moment peculiar. The brothers linking one event in their lives and a current misfortune does not actually sound unlike what many people often do. I have heard friends, family, and even sometimes my own inner thoughts, which say, “You are getting this [positive or negative thing] because you did this [positive or negative thing].” Is this not a natural human tendency? Do we not all struggle sometimes with this belief that all of what we get in life is a result of what we have earned for ourselves in some form or fashion. Well, God’s love and life in the reality of that love does not work that way.

In the person of Joseph we see the compassion and love of God exemplified in this moment. As his brothers insist that they deserve their fate of famine, Joseph turns away from them to weep for he cannot stand to hear these words. Even though they abandoned him Joseph gracefully yearns for them to be made whole. We may think he could have revealed himself immediately, but to get his whole family back to him he felt that he must enact the rest of his plan. Still, what strikes me is that Joseph even then could see that life was not about getting what we deserve. God does not wish to punish us for what we have done.

Human beings may be inherently flawed in a multitude of ways, but God’s overwhelming love as exemplified in Joseph and ultimately represented in the person of Jesus helps us to see that true life is not an eye-for-an-eye endeavor. We may very well do awful, terrible, no good, very bad things to one another and to ourselves, still God’s grace points to the truth that the One who creates, redeems, and sustains all does not want to punish us. God wants us to be forgiven, released, reconciled, and redeemed! This is the story of Joseph, the story of Jesus, and this is our story too. May we feel the payback not of past events, but of the grace of God!

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