Walter White’s story is told in the AMC series entitled Breaking Bad, and begins with Walter standing in the middle of the New Mexico desert without his pants on. It’s quite dramatic, and the viewer is wondering how in the world he got there. The next scene flashes back to three weeks earlier to tell us how Walter made it to that desert. We learn in the first episode of the first season that Walter is a high school chemistry teacher with a wife, a special needs son, and a baby on the way. He’s lived a rather non-descript life. A life we might call average. Living on a teacher’s salary is not always easy, so Walter takes a second job at the local car wash to make ends meet. One day, he begins to struggle with a nagging cough, passes out at his second job and ends up at the hospital where a battery of tests are run. The discovery is made that he has terminal cancer. Fearing that he’s made no provision for his family, he turns to making drugs to make fast money. I know, not a great story line for a sermon series, but AMC does a masterful job telling Walter’s story. Each episode of the series begins at the end of the story, and then goes back to tell the story. Oh, and the tag line for AMC? Story matters here.
With this sermon series Breaking Bad, Chris and I wondered what it would be like to follow AMC’s model. After all, the Bible is all God’s story, and it’s filled with great men and women who lived amazing lives…as amazing as they were, they were incredibly normal people. Over the next four weeks, we’re going to look at some of those lives. We’ll start at the end of the story then go back and discover how each one got to where they were. We’ll learn some valuable lessons for ourselves along the way because when it comes to the Bible, story matters here.
We begin with Joseph. The passage we read in Genesis 50 is the end of Joseph’s story. We read that Joseph’s father has died, and he is returning from the funeral with his brothers and families. His brothers are afraid that Joseph is going to take revenge on them now, but Joseph, moved by grace, forgives his brothers for all they’ve done. So, what have they done? I’m glad you asked. We go back to the beginning of the story to discover how Joseph breaks the bad blood between he and his brothers.
Joseph’s story begins in Genesis 37. Joseph is the 11th son of Jacob, the great patriarch of the Hebrew nation, but he’s the first son of Jacob’s treasured wife Rachel, and that makes Joseph very special in his father’s eyes. Not so in the eyes of his 10 older brothers. They see him as the spoiled, tattle tale younger brother. Of course, their father hasn’t helped matters much. He did give Joseph as “coat of many colors” to signify their special relationship with each other. It wasn’t necessarily the coat that sealed the deal for his brothers, but the fact that he would go out to where his brothers were working and then go back and tell his father all that is brothers were doing—both good and bad. It might also have something to do with the fact that Joseph had a couple of dreams, and he thought it necessary to share the content of the dreams with his brothers. Long story short—both dreams showed his ten brothers and his father bowing down to him. Well, that just sent them over the top.
One day, Jacob sends Joseph, who is around age 17 at this time, to check on his ten brothers. They see him coming and concoct a scheme to kill him. “Let’s take care of this day-dreaming tattle tale right now! We’ll kill him and tell dad he died, eaten by a wild animal.” His brother, Rueben, speaks up and says, “Wait. Don’t kill him. We don’t want his blood on our hands. Let’s throw him in that pit over there. He’ll die on his own.” The brothers agree and take Joseph, strip him and throw him in the pit. After a little while, they look up and see a caravan of Egyptian traders passing by. Joseph’s brother Judah speaks up and says, “Hey? Let’s sell him into slavery. Otherwise, he’ll die in that pit and we’ll still have a guilty conscience.” They cut a deal with the slavers, and Joseph is on his way to Egypt.
Fast forward to Egypt. Joseph is sold to Potiphar, an officer of Pharaoh, who served as captain of the palace guard. That’s an important position. Throughout Genesis 37 – 50, we hear that “the Lord was with Joseph and blessed him,” and other people noticed this, too. Potiphar noticed it, and it wasn’t long until Potiphar trusted Joseph to be his chief steward. He was in charge of Potiphar’s entire household. Joseph’s story gets even more interesting as Potiphar’s wife notices how handsome Joseph is and decides she wants to sleep with him (I tell you, The Bold and the Beautiful have nothing on the Bible). Joseph repeatedly resists her advances proclaiming, “How can I do such a thing against my master and my God?” Potiphar’s wife persists until finally she captures him alone in the house, approaches him suggestively and encourages him to come to bed with her. He resists again, but this time she has his shirt in her hands. He jerks away, tearing the shirt literally off his back, and runs out. She claims he tried to rape her and Potiphar has him thrown in prison. Bummer!
The story gets worse before it gets better. I’m not going to tell you all of it. There simply isn’t time. Let’s just say the Lord was with Joseph and blessed him. Two years pass with him in prison before he’s finally released. He’s released because he’s able to interpret a dream Pharaoh had that no one else in Egypt could interpret. His interpretation of that dream led to Joseph’s ultimate promotion to become Prime Minister of Egypt, in charge of the collection and distribution of food throughout the entire kingdom during a fourteen year period of abundance and then famine. It’s during the famine that his ten brothers show up in Egypt.
Not only is there a famine in Egypt, there’s famine across the ancient near east—including Canaan, where Jacob and his sons live. Jacob sends the ten brothers down to Egypt to procure food, and who do they encounter but their long lost brother, Joseph. They don’t recognize Joseph, but he recognizes them, and he remembers the dreams he had a long, long time ago—yes, the ones where his brothers bowed down before him. He decides to have a little fun at their expense.
“You’re a bunch of spies!” he exclaims.
“No, way, my Lord. We’re brothers and honest men (ha! Ha! Ha! Joseph thinks). We just came to buy food.
“No, you’re spies!” he persists.
“No,” his brothers respond. “There are twelve of us. Our youngest brother remains at home with our father, and one brother is no more among us.”
Joseph says, “Prove it to me. One of you go get your younger brother and bring him here. I’ll keep nine of you in prison here (probably the same prison he was imprisoned in—oh, the irony!), while one of you goes back to Canaan to fetch the youngest.”
Joseph has them all put in prison for three days to let them think it over. They lament this is all happening because of what they did to Joseph about 17 years earlier. It was the law of karma at work. Not really karma, but rather a guilty conscience. They still hadn’t dealt with the guilt of what they had done to Joseph. That’s what guilt does to us. It eats at us until we deal with it in a healthy way. Edgar Allen Poe’s epic short story “The Tell-tale Heart” reflects the depths to which unresolved guilt can lead us. Poe’s narrator has murdered an old man and hidden his body under the floor boards of his home. The police come, and all the narrator can hear is the beating of the old man’s heart. Louder and louder it grows, ringing only in his ears, until he breaks down and confesses to the police. That’s where Joseph’s brothers find themselves.
As fascinating as Joseph’s story is, let me offer the Reader’s Digest version of the rest of the story. The brothers eventually bring not only their younger brother, but their father and all their families to settle in the Egyptian area of Goshen. Joseph reveals himself to them all. They have a grand family reunion, and Jacob and all his progeny flourish under Joseph’s watchful care. Then, Jacob dies. That’s where today’s text picks up the story.
Returning from the funeral, the brothers fear that Joseph will now take his revenge. Though they’ve been living in Egypt for 17 years, and Joseph has cared for them, the brothers believe the bad blood still exists. Joseph had forgiven them. Seventeen years earlier, the brothers stood before him and he revealed who he was and said, “Don’t worry. God sent me here to save you and many others. Don’t be mad at yourselves for selling me into slavery. It’s all good. It’s a God thing” (Genesis 45 paraphrase). The problem was they couldn’t forgive themselves. Their guilt kept them from receiving the very thing that would reconcile them to Joseph. Guilt kept them from accepting their own forgiveness. Guilt kept them from experiencing grace, and grace is the only thing that can break bad blood.
Forgiveness is a gift that must be both extended and received. Joseph’s story foreshadows the story of Jesus Christ, who came to extend God’s forgiveness to us. Forgiveness is grace, and as such, can never be earned. It is a gift from the heart of God, and it must be a gift from us to others. Joseph showed grace, and for us, being graceful means forgiving, even when we have every right not to forgive. The situation doesn’t demand it, the world doesn’t expect it, and the guilty don’t deserve it, but we do it anyway. Because that’s what Christ has done for us. But, there is also the matter of receiving the gift of forgiveness. We have to believe we’re really forgiven. Until we come to the point that we accept forgiveness, we’ll run away from that which will give us peace—and that’s our reconciliation to Christ. Rick McCarley tells the story of an attorney, who after studying on several scriptures, decided to cancel the debts of all his clients that owed him money for more than six months. He drafted a letter explaining his decision and its biblical basis and sent 17 debt-canceling letters by certified mail. Sixteen of the seventeen letters were returned, unsigned and undelivered. Why? Because the clients refused to sign for them and open the envelopes. They were afraid the attorney was suing them for their debts. In their fear, they ended up running away from his forgiveness.
There are two challenges we need to face as we survey Joseph’s story. First, we need to check our list. What list, you ask? The list we keep with the names of those we have yet to forgive. It’s our own “naughty or nice” list…with those who have been bad to us and those who have been good to us. We all keep one, right? There’s bad blood, and the only thing that will break that bad blood is forgiveness. Joseph didn’t keep a list. He let it go because he saw God working even in the bad parts of life, and that takes grace. We need to offer our list to the Lord this morning, and we need to go to those persons and offer our forgiveness. Why? Because God has forgiven us.
Second, we need to accept forgiveness. Some of us need to accept the fact that God has forgiven us in Jesus Christ, and others need to accept the forgiveness that someone else has attempted to extend, but for whatever reason, whether we can’t forgive ourselves, or we can’t get past the pain, we’ve not accepted the gift that’s been offered. So, the bad blood festers, and it will eventually destroy us. Is it so hard to believe that God loves us unconditionally? For 17 years, Joseph’s brothers couldn’t believe they’d been forgiven. How long have you been holding out accepting your own acceptance?
The oldest Christian site in Ireland is said to be St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. Inside this beautiful edifice, is a door known as the “Door of Reconciliation.” There’s a rectangular hole hacked out of the door’s center. In 1492, two prominent Irish families, the Ormonds and Kildares, were in the midst of a bitter feud. As the feud grew and turned into a fight, the Earl of Ormand was besieged by the Earl of Kildare. The Earl of Ormand and his family took refuge in the chapter house of St. Patrick’s and bolted themselves in. As the siege wore on, the Earl of Kildare concluded the feuding was foolish. He thought, “Here were two families worshiping the same God, in the same church, living in the same country, trying to kill each other.” So Kildare called out to the Earl of Ormand, and pledged that he would not seek revenge or indulge in villainy — he wanted the Ormands to come out and the feud to be over. The Earl of Ormand was convinced that it was a scheme and refused to come out of the cathedral. Kildare grabbed his spear, chopped a hole in the door with it, and thrust his hand through. There was a tense moment until his hand was grasped by another hand inside the church. The door was opened and the two men embraced, thus ending the family feud.
The Scottish have a saying, maybe you have heard it, “Chancing one’s arm.” It came about from the incident at St. Patrick’s – it means to "take a chance" especially in reaching out to someone in reconciliation. We have to take a chance if we want to break bad blood.
