Sometimes a familiar story becomes unfamiliar simply because we finally slow down enough to notice it. That has happened to me with the story of Joseph.
I’ve known the broad outline for as long as I can remember. Joseph gets the special coat. His jealous brothers sell him into slavery. He winds up in Egypt, interprets Pharaoh’s dreams, rises to power, and eventually saves his family from famine.
There’s even a musical, although I’m reasonably certain Joseph in Genesis didn’t perform like Donnie Osmond.
But over the past several weeks, as we’ve taken our time with Joseph’s story, I’ve begun to realize how much gets lost when we reduce it to that outline.
Part of the difficulty is the way Genesis tells the story. The narrator seldom takes us inside anybody’s head. We aren’t told what Joseph thought while he was lying in the pit. We don’t know what Judah told himself after abandoning the brother he had helped sell. We aren’t given pages of inner reflection explaining what Joseph felt when his brothers appeared before him in Egypt. Instead, we’re shown what people do, more like a good screenplay than a novel.
Judah proposes selling Joseph instead of killing him. Joseph tests his brothers. The brothers begin talking about their guilt, not realizing Joseph can understand them. Joseph turns away and weeps. Judah offers himself in Benjamin’s place. Joseph finally sends everyone else out of the room and reveals who he is.
The narrator gives us actions, words, silences, and tears. Then we have to pay attention.
Maybe that’s one reason the story feels so much richer when we stay with it. We begin to see that Joseph’s family isn’t made up of simple heroes and villains. These are complicated people. They hurt one another. They carry guilt for years. They change, although not always quickly and not always neatly. In other words, they are humans.
Even Joseph is more complicated than the version I remembered from Sunday school. He isn’t superhuman. He adapts to real life happenings.
He learns how to survive in Potiphar’s household. He learns how to function in prison. He learns the language and customs of Egypt. He becomes skilled at administration. He becomes a husband and a father. By the time his brothers arrive, he looks and sounds so thoroughly Egyptian that they don’t recognize him.
But adaptation isn’t the same thing as forgetting. The young man they sold is still there. We can hear him in the names Joseph gives his sons. We can see him in the way he keeps turning aside to weep. We can feel him wrestling with the question of whether these brothers are still the men who once threw him into a pit.
Joseph has grown, but growth hasn’t erased what happened to him.
That matters because Genesis gives Joseph’s story an astonishing amount of room. It takes up roughly as much space as the story of Abraham. That suggests this isn’t merely a bridge explaining how the family of Israel wound up in Egypt.
It is that, of course. But it’s also a long, careful exploration of how God works among people whose motives are mixed, whose families are messy, and whose choices have consequences that can last for decades.
Maybe that’s part of what we miss when we encounter Joseph mainly through the lectionary.
No criticism of the lectionary. It has to make choices. Otherwise, somebody would need to pack a lunch before the Scripture reading on Sunday morning. So we hear selected scenes: the coat and the pit, the reunion in Egypt, the brothers’ fear after Jacob dies.
Those are important scenes. But when we skip from one to another, Joseph’s life can sound almost effortless. Trouble happens, Joseph remains faithful, and everything works out for the best.
After spending time in the whole story, I don’t think that is quite what Genesis says. Everything does not work out for the best.
Joseph loses years with his father. Jacob spends years believing his son is dead. Joseph grows up apart from his family. The brothers live with guilt and fear. A famine still devastates the region. None of those things becomes good simply because God brings life out of them.
The story doesn’t tell us that everything that happens is part of some tidy plan in which every painful event was secretly necessary. It tells us that God works with what actually happens.
I’ve begun to think of the difference as something like driving a car and sailing a boat.
When I drive a car, I can pretty control every movement. I turn the wheel and the car goes there. Basically, you can steer a car.
Sailing isn’t quite like that. You can’t steer a boat. You can only helm one.
A sailor may know the destination, but the boat is moving through changing conditions. The wind shifts. The current pulls. A storm develops. You adjust the sails. You change your angle. Sometimes you have to travel in a direction that doesn’t look anything like the destination because that’s the only way to keep moving toward it.
Sailors work with the wind that is actually blowing, not the wind that they want to blow.
Joseph’s story has begun to show me God’s faithfulness that way. God doesn’t approve of the brothers’ cruelty. God doesn’t pretend slavery, false accusation, imprisonment, famine, or grief are good things. But none of them places Joseph or his family beyond the reach of grace.
God keeps working with what’s actually there. And so do the people in the story.
Joseph adapts. Judah changes. The brothers finally tell the truth. A family that has spent years hiding from its past begins, however imperfectly, to face it.
Perhaps that’s why this familiar story has felt new to me. I used to see it mainly as the story of one remarkable man whose faithfulness carried him from a pit to a palace. Now I see a story about a whole family learning, very slowly, that the past is real but doesn’t have to dictate the future.
I see a story in which growth doesn’t mean becoming untouched by pain. It means becoming capable of responding differently because of what we’ve lived through. And I see a God who remains faithful without requiring ideal conditions.
That may be good news for us, because ideal conditions seem to be running a little behind schedule.
We don’t get to choose every wind that blows into our lives. We can’t undo every decision, recover every lost year, or make every relationship simple.
But we can pay attention to the conditions we’re actually in. We can adjust. We can grow. We can tell the truth. We can choose differently than we once did.
And we can trust that God is still at work, not only on the clear road we expected to travel, but here, amid the shifting winds, helping us find our way toward life.
Let’s pray.
Father, thank you for meeting us in the lives we actually have. Give us courage to face what has happened without pretending that every painful thing was good. Help us recognize the ways we have grown, and show us where we still need to change. When the winds shift and the way forward is unclear, teach us to trust your faithful presence and to respond with wisdom, grace, and love. Amen.
