Summer Sermon – Joseph.
There are a few occasions when comments from Jesus are so harsh they almost seem impossible to bear. I always find his response about family one of those.
His mother and his brothers turn up. His brothers are thought to be the sons of Joseph by a previous marriage. When he married Mary he could have been a widow, so these could have been step-brothers. However – this doesn't really matter. What immediately pierces our hearts is the way this family is dismissed.
Jesus points to the people gathered to hear him teaching and says that these are his family. This must have caused discord within his family. And elsewhere Jesus emphasises the discord within families, when he says that his life, his words, will cause sons and father, brothers and sisters, in-laws etc to fight against each other.
The church is often referred to as the family of Christ. It is not an image strongly promoted in New Testament theology, but is is there. The new family that gathers around Jesus, his church, should surely be a model family, but the truth is, as we know all too well, that the family of Christ is constantly in disunity, and dysfunctionality, constantly in need of reforming itself on the Christ who is at its heart.
In a naïve sense we expect the family of Christ's church to be better than normal human families – to rise above rivalries, jealousies, and broken relationships. Yet we are prone to all of this. In so many ways the church is like any other family, with both the strengths of the family and the weaknesses. In our own families, when there is disunity, we hope for unity; where one member seems like a black sheep, we seek to try and understand why this has happened by analizing what we have done to contribute to this. We all love stories that illustrate families being restored – old wounds healed, and love overcoming division and hatred. We are all moved by it, because we either know the pain of it personally, or we know families where it has happened. Our desire is for a good outcome, and resolution to the problem – in a way it is a type of what Christians might call 'atonement'' or a redemption, when reconciliation and goodness emerges triumphant over hostility. It is all very deep human stuff. It is all very much human experience.
So we have in the Old testament book of Genesis quite along story about a family. It is the family of Jacob otherwise known as Israel, who fathered 12 sons who went on to be the founders of what we know as the twelve tribes of Israel. The youngest of his sons was called Joseph. Israel loved Joseph more than the other sons, and he probably showed it. He was what his brother's might call a 'daddy's boy'. Israel was old when Joseph was born. We can imagine what it is like in a family when one child has the habit of 'snitching' on a sibling – we see it in some children who going running to tell mummy or daddy everything and the brother or sister end up in hot water or being punished.
When he was just an adolescent Joseph snitches on his brothers to his old dad. As a sign of his love for the favourite boy, old Jacob makes him a special robe with long sleeves. We know it nowadays as Joseph's techni-coloured dream coat, because of the musical. His brothers' hatred for him intensifies and the jealousy becomes irrational. To make it worse Jospeh has a knack for dreaming that he will be greater than his brothers – that they will bow down to him to honour him. Ironically this is what happens.
The brothers conspire against the little 'goody goody' brother. They sell him to some passing Ishmaelites, rip up the cloak and smear it with goat blood to deceive their father. The other's would have killed the boy, but Reuben was the brother with a conscience. The boy is taken away to Egypt in slavery and sold on again to Potiphar, one of the Egyptian Pharoah's officials.
When the old man Jakob is told that a wild beast had killed his beloved youngest son he is beside himself with grief and goes into a deep mourning.
All would now seem to be lost. In the story of family relationships jealousy seems to have triumphed, and the plotting of those who were deprived of their father's equal love have won – they conspired and like the cuckoo they have turfed the chick out of the nest.
Meanwhile down in Egypt the boy is becoming a man – becoming a man of some influence, mostly because of his dreams. He has made quite a reputation for himself and pharoah favours him. As a famine strikes the land of Canaan where his old dad and jealous brothers live, so in Egypt thanks to Joseph's influence, the barns are full of grain. The brother's have to go cap in hand to their brother. This is where the family begins to get reunited, but the story is not resolved straight away because Joseph's identity is hidden; Joseph plays some pranks on his brothers to get some justice back for their cruel treatment of him. In the end he divulges his identity in a scene packed full of emotion and tears and family drama. To cut a long story short – and it is a long story – all is made well again, and the family reunion happens.
The Joseph narrative in Genesis is a story of homecoming, reconciliation and unification – the moral point of it is not too dissimilar to the parable told by Jesus about the prodigal son returning to the father; and the final denouement of Joseph and his family is like an early forerunner to the way Christ atones for us on the cross so that we can once again be in paradise, and united to God our Father. This is why those harsh words of Jesus about his family seem so unpalatable – and what must his mother and brothers have thought, what must they have felt. Surely it shows that human relationships are fragile, full of failure, and that to follow Christ is hugely demanding in a world of brokenness. He demands that we deny ourselves, take up our own cross, then we can follow him.