The Murdered Brother

Faith of Joseph, by eikonik

Propers: The Seventh Sunday after Epiphany, AD 2022 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

4000 years ago, give or take, a group of brothers did something horrible, something that would haunt them for the rest of their lives. There were 12 of them, all told, by four different mothers yet all with the same father. And I’m sorry to say that daddy played favorites.

The youngest two boys, Joseph and Benjamin, were dearest to their father’s heart, for they were his sons by Rachel: the only one of his four wives whom he actually loved. There are indeed polygamous marriages in the Hebrew Bible, but none of them happy. Now, by rights, the eldest brothers should have held the most sway, received the lion’s share, but not in this family, not amongst the sons of Jacob.

While the elder brothers were out busting their humps in the fields, Joseph was pampered with fine clothes and easy living. He had a gift for the interpretation of dreams, and boasted that his visions prophesied he would one day rule over his siblings. Now, an annoying younger brother would be trying for any family, but in the honor-shame culture of the Ancient Near East, this proved downright intolerable. So the brothers concocted conspiracy to rid themselves of this troublesome dreamer.

At first they planned to murder him—yet the squeamish among them chickened out. Instead, they threw him down into a pit while they tried to figure out what to do with him. And then what should appear upon the horizon but a traveling caravan! What luck! Here they could rid themselves of Joseph without all the messiness of fratricide. So they sold him into slavery—which is so much better, right?—sold him to that caravan, then cut up his coat and spattered it with goat’s blood, so that they could tell their father he’d been eaten by some random wild beast.

And you thought your family had problems.

Yet this is the beginning of Joseph’s story, not the end. That caravan of Ishmaelites—or Midianites, depending which version you read—resold him to Egypt, the great superpower of the ancient world. Here he found favor, at first, as a trustworthy servant, only then to be falsely accused of assault and tossed into jail. That gift of prophecy, however, his interpretation of dreams, eventually brought him to the attention of Pharaoh, King of Egypt, who had been troubled by nightmares.

Long story short: Joseph the prisoner, Joseph the slave, ended up being promoted to vizier of the Egyptian Empire, second only to Pharaoh himself. He had wealth, power, influence, and the favor of his king—not to mention the Spirit of God. Through dreams Joseph prepared Egypt for a coming famine, storing up grain in time of plenty not only for the Egyptians themselves but to sell to everyone else. Time passed; the famine came; the hunger spread.

And Egypt shared their surplus grain to all the other nations, preserving them, saving them from starvation—for a price, of course. You got to live, but Egypt got paid. Then one day, who should come calling, hat in hand, but the sons of Jacob. Here were Joseph’s long-lost brothers, who had kidnapped him, thrown him into a pit, sold him into slavery, and faked his death. They came now to Egypt because they were hungry, they were desperate, and their families were starving back home.

And they don’t even recognize this man on the throne: shaved, painted, done up in finery in the Egyptian style, speaking to them through a translator. They have no idea who he is. And he has them now! They are completely within his power. Joseph could do to his brothers everything they’d done to him and oh, so much worse. All it would take is a word. All it would take is the wave of his hand.

And he looks down at them, and says to them—in Hebrew, mind you, which they had no idea he could speak—“I am Joseph. Is my father still alive?” And they are struck dumb. I mean, absolutely flabbergasted. They were already terrified of this vizier. And now he speaks to them in their own tongue and claims to be the brother they’d betrayed, back from the dead? This is about the worst thing that they could possibly imagine. This is surely, they think, the vengeance of God.

Who wouldn’t fear a murdered brother come back to extract his revenge? We write horror stories about this. Little wonder that they freeze like deer in headlights.

So he tries again: “I am your brother, Joseph, whom you sold into slavery. But do not be afraid. God sent me here to preserve life, to save all these peoples from famine, and my own family too. You tried to do me evil, but God has turned it into good.” And Joseph is better than his word. He not only forgives his brothers, but brings them all and their households, along with their aged father, to settle in the best land of Egypt, there to prosper for all of their days. It’s one of the great twists of the Bible: the brother betrayed, back from the dead, offering only grace.

We all love a good revenge story, don’t we? But forgiveness we find truly divine. Forgiveness requires the strength of a god.

The parallels should be obvious enough. Generations later, another descendant of Jacob would be betrayed by His brothers: both by His closest friends and Apostles, and by humanity as a whole. We will sell Him for silver. We will throw Him in a pit. We will tell His Father He is dead and other people did it. But we will know, and will be haunted, by the blood upon our hands. Peter will weep. Judas will hang.

And then, just when all seems lost, here He is back from the dead! Not as a weak little brother but as the King of Heaven and Conqueror of Hell, with all the power of God in the palm of His pierced hand. And what will He do to us now? We who betray Him, we who fail Him, we who murder Him. What will He do, now that the scales have fallen from our eyes to reveal Him in His true glory? We know what we deserve. We know what we would do.

Yet He is not us. Rather, He is who we were always meant to be. His countenance is gentle, His power absolute. “Do not fear,” He tells us “Do not fear, O my brothers. You meant this for evil. You nailed Me to that Cross. But God has redeemed what you’ve done. In Me, He has healed your sin. What seemed to you My great defeat was victory without end. All things are in My power, all Creation has been given over to Me, and I now say unto you:

“Come and live here. Live in My land. I am your brother and I am your Lord. Come down to Me now and do not delay. Settle in this good country, you and your children and your children’s children. You shall be near Me, and you shall know peace, and I shall provide for you all that I have. All is forgiven. All is made right. And all now must come home.”

Thus is our fear undone; our pain relieved; and all our guilt burned up to nothing, in the white-hot fires of grace.

To turn the other cheek is not weakness. To go the extra mile is not to surrender, not to evil. To love those who hate you, to give without thought of reward, to tell the truth and never flinch, knowing that all lies shall be dragged from the shadows and sterilized in the light of the day—this is not the work of a puling or a weakling or a coward. This is power that comes only from God. Any idiot can destroy something, but only the Spirit of God can seize what is evil and broken and fallen and twist it back into its intended good.

We must not submit to evil. That is the way of the coward, and cowardice leads to cruelty, always, always, always. Yet evil must be resisted not with more evil, not with more violence or inhumanity, but only with goodness and beauty and truth. You cannot destroy sin by hitting it with a rock. You can only destroy sin with the truth. The only way to kill the devil is to turn him back into an angel, to bring him to repent. And that’s the thing what scares him most.

There will come a day, my brothers and sisters—there must come a day—when we will realize the utter impotence of our weapons and our wealth, when we will hole up in the last refuge of hell, and rage and rage and rage against God until we have nothing left, until our last farthing is spent and our last missile fired. And we will scream at Him through our tears, “Just do it! Just punish us! We deserve it!”

And then at last we’ll be ready to hear what He’s been telling us all along, and we could never quite dare to believe: “I am your brother,” He will say. “I forgive you. I love you. Come home.”

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.