13th Sunday in Trinity
Genesis 43:1-5, 11-16, 26-34, Hebrews 13:1-21
"Joseph Foreshadows Jesus"
The parallels between Jesus and Joseph have been cataloged many, many times by innumerable Bible teachers over the centuries. Jesus, like Joseph, grew up in a home where "his brothers did not believe in him." Both Jesus and Joseph were rejected by their own folk who made an attempt on their lives, in Jesus’ case by aiming to throw Him over a cliff rather than into a pit. Jesus was sold for thirty pieces of silver, Joseph for twenty. Jesus and Joseph, both, were taken down to Egypt. Like Joseph to his companions in prison, Jesus too "preached to spirits in prison!" (I Peter 3:19) Like Jesus, Joseph was ’highly exalted’ by God; Joseph might almost be said, in his time, to have been "given a name above every other name" save that of Pharaoh. (Genesis 41:38, 41,43 and Philippians 2:5, 10,11) Joseph, like Jesus and the thief on the cross, had a hand in the elevation of a companion who shared his condemnation with him.
The Nineteenth Century English Baptist preacher F. B. Meyer said this about Joseph:
"Rejected by his brethren (John 7:5), refused by those to whom he was sent (John 1:11), falsely accused and condemned (Matthew 28:18, 26:59-60), thrust into prison (Luke 22:63), rescuing one of his poor associates (Luke 23:43), and called to a throne (Luke 20:41-44) ... it would be possible in almost every particular to substitute the name of Jesus for that of Joseph."
That is what I propose to do today: to take a glance at Joseph in today’s Old Testament lesson, and substitute Jesus for Joseph in what we see.
The first thing to jump out of the passage from Genesis is the neediness and the vulnerability of Joseph’s brothers. They are not only needy because of the famine, they are vulnerable to the power and disposition of this Egyptian magistrate who controls their access to food. Worse yet, they have attracted this man’s attention. He has inquired about them, their father, the brother who did not accompany them into Egypt when they previously came.
But, the bigger liability these brothers face is the knowledge that on their last visit to Egypt they came away not only with the food they sought, but also the money which they were supposed used to pay for the food! So far as they know, they can be – and will be – accused of theft, fraud, and deceit when they return. In a word, their consciences are guilty with respect to this powerful Egyptian official. And, their consciences are guilty for another reason. As you can read in the previous chapter of Genesis, the old sin they committed against their brother Joseph is haunting their consciences. When it looked to them as if this powerful Egyptian official was about to destroy them, we read this:
21Then they said to one another, "We are truly guilty concerning our brother, for we saw the anguish of his soul when he pleaded with us, and we would not hear; therefore this distress has come upon us." 22And Reuben answered them, saying, "Did I not speak to you, saying, "Do not sin against the boy’; and you would not listen? Therefore behold, his blood is now required of us."
Now, this is their situation when they return again to Egypt – needy, vulnerable, guilty of an old, old crime, and even though they do not realize it, that old crime was committed against the very man whose wrath they now rightly fear.
I do not know any Christian who has not at some time – many times, usually – felt just as vulnerable and needy as these sons of Israel in Genesis 43. Paul must have felt this way when he heard a voice from heaven saying, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” The Apostle John, in 1 John 3:20, speaks of the occasion when our heart condemns us. The author of Hebrews paraphrases God to say, “If anyone draws back, my soul has no pleasure in him.” Peter must have felt this way when the cock crowed the third time. And that sting of a guilty conscience came again on the shores of Galilee after the resurrection when Jesus pointedly asked Peter three times, “Simon son of Jonah, do you love me?”
If you have never felt the way these sons of Israel feel in this passage, that time will probably come before you die. And for most of us, it has already come more often than we ever wanted, and it will come again. The SALVE for that troubled spirit is FOUND HERE in the passage before us, in the example of Joseph, who shows us centuries before the life of Jesus how Jesus even today relates to those whose consciences are troubling them.
John wrote, “For if our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart and knows all things.” Joseph knew all things – there was nothing about his brothers and their guilty consciences that Joseph did not already know, far better than they did. But consider what we see in Joseph – it is not a man bent on revenge, but one whose soul is stirred at the remorse and dismay his brothers are experiencing. Joseph is NOT relishing payback time; he is, instead, working carefully, steadily toward reconciling his brothers to himself. And, if THIS is the heart of Joseph who foreshadows Jesus, then it is the heart of Jesus as well toward us when our consciences trouble us.
Consider again the amazement of these sons of Israel. Expecting to meet wrath and judgment from this Egyptian official, they find, instead, a feast. With deliberate purpose, Joseph arranges their seating in a way to signal to them, if they could only see it, that he knows them intimately – he seats them in their birth order, and delivers five-fold extra portion of the banquet to Benjamin, his closest brother among them. JESUS DOES THIS all the time – bestowing grace upon grace upon grace to those who know only too well that they deserve something other than grace. That is why it is grace, of course. The sheer, unmerited blessing from the one from whom we have earned something other than blessing.
What should we think of these things? What is the proper response when we receive from Jesus what these sons of Israel received from Joseph?
The first response is found in the very last words of Genesis 43: “So they drank and were merry with him.” No, this isn’t a homily on the acceptability of drinking, except I would point out that nothing in Genesis 43 is opposed to drinking, especially drinking as a part of merry-making. But my point is this: joyful acceptance and enjoyment of the blessings God bestows is always the first, the most immediate, and the indispensable mark of gratitude.
A second response is shown by the examples of Peter, when he was finally reconciled and restored to Jesus along the shores of Galilee. Each time Peter replied, “Lord, you know I love you,” Jesus said, “Feed my sheep.” If Peter had received grace and blessing from Jesus, then a rightful way to show his gratitude was to turn around and become the source of blessing and grace to others. It was the same with Paul: after becoming reconciled to the Jesus whom he had persecuted, Paul threw himself into a life-long career of spreading those very blessings to others.
And, this same response – the one we see in Peter and Paul – is, I think, summarized quite nicely in the reading we heard a while ago from the 13th chapter of Hebrews. If you don’t pay much attention to it, it reads as if it were a laundry list of do’s and don’ts. But the words which introduce this chapter of Hebrews, the last verse of Hebrews 12, reads like this:
28Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom which cannot be shaken, let us have grace, by which we may[10] serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear. 29For our God is a consuming fire.
And how do we serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear? Well, the very next words tell us: “Let brotherly love continue …” And what follows this is not a sundry list of moral odds and ends, it is a catalog of the various ways in which brotherly love is to continue:
Show hospitality to strangers. Keep praying for those in prison – these were Christians who were already suffering imprisonment for their faith. Keep your marriages pure. Put away covetousness. Stop being greedy. Pray for and support those who rule over you in the Church. Avoid being carried about with various strange doctrines. Do not forget to do good and to share.
In short, if we have received grace where we know all too well that we deserved none, our response is to become channels of grace ourselves. This is, after all, what it means to be conformed to the image of Christ: to repent of those things which estrange us from him, to receive the grace he freely offers to us in the forgiveness of our sins against him, to happily enjoy the blessings he piles on our plates, and finally to find ourselves doing as He does, living as He lived, blessing others because we have been blessed.
In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
