Joseph and Jacob's Story

A few years ago we were getting ready to have VBS and we asked Dr. John Fortner to come and help prep our adults with a theological understanding of the story we were going to work on—the Joseph narrative. One of the best insights for me that came out of that story was how the Joseph story really fits into the larger narrative of the patriarchs, and particularly into the story of Jacob.For most of Jacob's life, he is an absolute control freak, scheming for control over virtually everyone in his life. He lies cheats and steals his way to the top. Even though God appears to him, and promises to be with him, he seems to believe that life would be much better if he (Jacob) were in control, and he consistently resists God's initiative.Now, I think most people would see and agree with that. Unfortunately, we tend to atomize the text—we separate out the stories of the Bible into individual tales, and lose the intergenerational narrative that Genesis (and the rest of scripture) is telling.  When we do that we lose some insights—for instance, the significance of the Joseph saga.The Joseph saga is not just about how things worked out for Joseph. It's about how things worked out for Jacob. It's about how things worked out for God's people.  See, the Joseph story is really just a long stretch within the story of Jacob—it's the definitive blow to Jacob's mentality that he is in charge. He can't manipulate God. He can't micromanage the promise of God. It seems like he's in control until Joseph (he thinks) dies. That concept completely rocks Jacob's world, and since he's not in control, he basically gives up on life and waits to die. He seems to think God has abandoned him.However, after he learns Joseph is alive, Jacob has another theophany, where God appears to him, reassures him that he is still with him, after all this time. Jacob turns loose of all the control, and it seems to me like he actually reinterprets his life through that insight.  Now he can (for the first time!) tell Joseph about the promise of God. (Joseph will later tell the rest of the brothers.) Now he can refer to God as the one who "has been my shepherd all my life to this day." Jacob can finally affirm the promise of God and the continual working of God, even in light of his own impending death! Reading Genesis 48 with this insight has been a powerful adjustment to the way I've read the Joseph saga before, and indeed the way I see my own life.Think about the deeper lesson here about reading the scriptures: Anytime we read a text, we need to remember to pull back and see it from a perspective of the broader story of the mission of God. Each story is unique and important on its own terms, but becomes even more incredible when viewed in terms of a longer context. Reading a text like the Joseph saga with a missional perspective allows us to pick up different layers of what's happening in the moment of the text as well as how that text contributes to (or complicates) the larger story of God and the world.It's not just Joseph's story. It's not even Jacob's story. It certainly isn't simply my story. These are all moments in God's story.[bctt tweet="It's not just Joseph's story. It's not even Jacob's story. It isn't my story. These are moments in God's story." via="no"]  

Overlooking the Plain of Sodom—Advocates of Righteousness and Justice

The Bible's story hinges on what God wants to do and what God can do with Abraham's descendants—and neither is particularly clear in the early chapters of the saga. God and Abraham seem to both be feeling their way through the new relationship, and I'm beginning to take more seriously the language of Abraham as God's friend—it's kind of easy to read the story almost like Abram and God are pals, traveling around together just for the sake of it.There are of course moments when something else shines through all of the odd episodes of Abraham's story. The narrative reaches outside of itself and shows itself to be more than a story about one man's weird relationship with God. In these moments, the Abraham saga becomes a critical piece in the story of God and Creation. One such moment takes place in Genesis 18.Here is a well-worn story of Abraham bargaining with God, negotiating on behalf of Sodom and Gomorrah, or at least on behalf of his kin who live there. I won't retrace the story here, because I want to focus in on one particular facet of the episode—the terms of the negotiation. We'll pick up with God's internal monologue (dialogue?) regarding whether or not he'll let Abraham in on what's about to happen:

 The Lord said, “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do, ¹⁸ seeing that Abraham shall become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him? ¹⁹ No, for I have chosen him, that he may charge his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice; so that the Lord may bring about for Abraham what he has promised him.”

Here God opens up, just a smidge, about the long-term plan for Abraham and his descendants. They are to become a great nation which will bless the world, (just as God promised Abram in Genesis 12. But also, catch the important added note here:  What kind of nation will they be? What does God want to become the characteristic mark of Abraham's children?  They are to be a people who keep the way of the Lord by "doing righteousness and justice".This is a pair of Hebrew words, Tsedakah and Mishpat, (צְדָקָה וּמִשְׁפָּט ), which become particularly important for the prophets and which are loaded with meaning, most of which I'll leave you to unpack on your own (big hint: as a pair, they almost always connote social justice concerns for the poor). This little aside by God is the first time we really meet them in the Bible, and that would be remarkable enough in its own right, except note further how the words actually function in the story that follows. While God intends for Abraham to teach his children about Righteousness and Justice, they actually become the critical words that Abraham leverages to bargain with God:

²³ Then Abraham came near and said, “Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked? ²⁴ Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city; will you then sweep away the place and not forgive it for the fifty righteous who are in it? ²⁵ Far be it from you to do such a thing, to slay the righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked! Far be that from you! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?”

Abraham is even more shrewd than we give him credit for: he effectively uses God's own words and intentions against God, holding God to a standard.  Abraham takes his vocation as an advocate of righteousness and justice so seriously that even God has to own up. In this story, Abraham becomes a force for Righteousness and Justice, even with God. The implications of this are tremendous, even if the story won't do all the work to unpack it for us. What might it mean for us to enter into such advocacy? What might it mean as people who act and pray, people who have become children of Abraham?The end result of the story is the sad destruction of the two cities, and while the narrative certainly paints this as justified, even within Abraham's bargain, there is a final haunting image in the Genesis 19 I'd like to point towards:

²⁴ Then the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the Lord out of heaven; ²⁵ and he overthrew those cities, and all the Plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and what grew on the ground.²⁶ But Lot’s wife, behind him, looked back, and she became a pillar of salt. ²⁷ Abraham went early in the morning to the place where he had stood before the Lord; ²⁸ and he looked down toward Sodom and Gomorrah and toward all the land of the Plain and saw the smoke of the land going up like the smoke of a furnace. ²⁹ So it was that, when God destroyed the cities of the Plain, God remembered Abraham, and sent Lot out of the midst of the overthrow, when he overthrew the cities in which Lot had settled.

That image of Abraham, alone, looking down on the burning wasteland is a poignant image, one that stands in my mind as both mourning the brokenness and wickedness of creation, as well as pointing towards the unfinished business that God and Abraham have with each other. If God's intent is to bless the world through Abraham's descendants, and we are willing to accept that mantle ourselves, then the end of this story calls us to look around us, smell the sulfur, and dive into the work left to do. 

The Broken Earth in Genesis 1-6

Tonight, in my class on the Torah, we wrapped up by observing the tight connection between the moral responsibility of humanity, the human descent into wickedness, and the effect on the earth itself in chapters 3-6. Hearing the church's common conversations, you could get the impression that the problem with the "fall" is simply the rift human sin and pride creates between people and God.  In reality though, the consequences of humanity's fall is multifaceted. For instance, as demonstrated in the Cain and Abel story (and the Lamech one that follows), relationships between humans break down due to sin and violence, and we may easily observe the conflict that arises between the sexes on the heels of the tragic episode in the garden.One of the too often ignored facets of the human fall is the curse that it brings on the earth itself. Although God's initial directives to humanity were to "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it", as the story plays out, it's as if the earth itself suffers the sin of humanity in the early chapters of Genesis. Read chapters 3-6 with a ready eye, and you'll see the motif show up repeatedly. It's in the original garden fallout scene, and the language that contains the motif in the Cain and Abel saga is some of the richest in the Old Testament:

⁸ Cain said to his brother Abel, “Let us go out to the field.”^[b] And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and killed him. ⁹ Then the Lord said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?” He said, “I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?” ¹⁰ And the Lord said, “What have you done? Listen; your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground!¹¹ And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. ¹² When you till the ground, it will no longer yield to you its strength; you will be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth.” ¹³ Cain said to the Lord, “My punishment is greater than I can bear! ¹⁴ Today you have driven me away from the soil, and I shall be hidden from your face; I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, and anyone who meets me may kill me.” ¹⁵ Then the Lord said to him, “Not so!^[c] Whoever kills Cain will suffer a sevenfold vengeance.” And the Lord put a mark on Cain, so that no one who came upon him would kill him. ¹⁶ Then Cain went away from the presence of the Lord, and settled in the land of Nod,^[d] east of Eden. (Gen 4:8-16, NRSV)

See how the motif functions here? It begins simply enough, with "the field" being the site for the murder. But as the story develops, the ground or soil is almost a character in the story, bearing testimony against Cain, even cursing Cain. Cain's punishment involves being hidden from the face of God, and social exclusion as well, but note that this layer of being driven away from the soil itself seems to be Cain's most agonizing consequence.The motif continues to develop in the early chapters of Genesis, perhaps culminating in the flood saga. In the build up to the Flood story, Noah is introduced by a reference to the curse upon the land: "[Lamech] named him Noah, saying, “Out of the ground that the Lord has cursed this one shall bring us relief from our work and from the toil of our hands.”(Gen 5:29, NRSV)  In the next chapter, God's actions in the Flood are repeatedly attributed to God's observation of how the wickedness and violence of humanity has corrupted the earth:

¹¹ Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence. ¹² And God saw that the earth was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted its ways upon the earth. ¹³ And God said to Noah, “I have determined to make an end of all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence because of them; now I am going to destroy them along with the earth.                             (Gen 6:11-13, NRSV)

On the other side of the Flood, the focus shifts a bit, returning to the original command to "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth...". God returns to the project of filling the earth with rich human life, scattering humanity across the world. This eventually leads to the strategy of blessing the scattered peoples of the world through the people of Abraham, but that's a subject for another day. For today, it is enough to not how tightly God's purposes for the earth were connected with God's purposes for humanity. Perhaps this shouldn't be that surprising, unless we have forgotten that God indeed made the man (hebrew 'Adam') from the dust of the ground (hebrew 'Adamah'), and that we are connected to the earth through our work until the moment that we are returned to the ground. "By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return." (Gen 3:19, NRSV). given this, how could our sin result in anything but estrangement from the very earth which is our perpetual context?