Canter Bridge

Positions of large responsibility rarely allow one to follow his feelings. Like Michael Corleone in the Godfather movies—though hopefully with more redemptive outcomes—stewardship over the lives and fate of others requires us to become reasonable men or reasonable women.

Elevated to improbably sovereignty over the famine-time life of Egypt, the biblical Joseph is in many ways a model of self-control. The wife of Potiphar, for examples, finds her charms useless to her attempts to seduce Joseph. His discernment of dreams and the courage to articulate their meaning to people whose lives will be enriched or cut short in consequence show Joseph to be a man who knows who he is, what truth is, and how to reconcile the competing demands of each.

Yet he is not always so rational. When the brothers who sold him into slavery show up penniless and hungry in Egypt, Joseph wrestles mightily with conflicting emotions. On his way to one of the Bible’s most quotable declarations of YHWH’s sovereignty over human designs, Joseph wrestles with the desire to return great harm to his blood-stained siblings.

Explanations that trace a grand strategy, clinically executed, in Joseph’s words and actions seem forced. There is passion here, and a lust for vengeance:

When Joseph saw his brothers, he recognized them, but he treated them like strangers and spoke harshly to them. ‘Where do you come from?’, he said. They said, ‘From the land of Canaan, to buy food.’ Although Joseph had recognized his brothers, they did not recognize him. Joseph also remembered the dreams that he had dreamed about them. He said to them, ‘You are spies; you have come to see the nakedness of the land!’ They said to him, ‘No, my lord; your servants have come to buy food. We are all sons of one man; we are honest men; your servants have never been spies.’ But he said to them, ‘No, you have come to see the nakedness of the land!’ They said, ‘We, your servants, are twelve brothers, the sons of a certain man in the land of Canaan; the youngest, however, is now with our father, and one is no more.’ But Joseph said to them, ‘It is just as I have said to you; you are spies! Here is how you shall be tested: as Pharaoh lives, you shall not leave this place unless your youngest brother comes here! Let one of you go and bring your brother, while the rest of you remain in prison, in order that your words may be tested, whether there is truth in you; or else, as Pharaoh lives, surely you are spies.’ And he put them all together in prison for three days.

Joseph is no plaster saint. He is, arguably, an iconic and deeply human face standing in for all who bear great challenges on their shoulders and a measure of injustice in their personal history. His trust in YHWH’s ways is, by almost any measure, remarkable.

Yet for the moment he despises these hypocritical murderers, brothers or not.

In this he is also like us.