Justice and Injustice for Joseph
NL103 for September 18, 2022
The Text
Last Time on ‘The Story’
We have had a few generations since last week’s reading. Abraham and Sarah’s son Isaac married Rebecca (a cousin from Haran). Isaac continues the story of Abraham in many ways, and actually does a pretty good job (for instance, he is the only Patriarch who only bore children with one woman!). Isaac and Rebecca had twin sons, Jacob and Esau, and a whole lot of drama. Jacob is a trickster character, he tricks his bother out of a birthright and blessing, and runs away to Haran to get himself a cousin-wife. There, he meets his match in a trickster uncle, Laban. In the end, he leaves Haran with not only one wife, but two, Leah and Racheal (drama indeed); along with their enslaved handmaids, Bilhah and Zilpah, and twelve sons and one daughter. There is a remarkable reconciliation between Jacob and Esau; and Jacob gains a new name, Israel (one who struggles) after wrestling with God(?). Jacob/Israel continues unhealthy family patterns with his children, and highly favors one son, Joseph, because he is the first born son of his favorite wife, Racheal (drama indeed). The other sons do not take this favoritism well (surprise surprise) especially when Israel/Jacob gives Joseph a Gucci coat. Joseph piles onto the resentment pile by telling his brothers the [Checkoff’s] dreams where they all bow down to him. At a certain point, the brothers have had it and end up enslaving Joseph, and selling him to Ishmaelite traders on the way to Egypt.
The Story for This Week
Joseph is sold to Potiphar’s house, and put to work. While he is there he receives the notice of his master, and the notice of his master’s wife. Long story short, he is thrown into prison. Here are a few themes that this story brings up:
Dominion: Genesis 1 and 2 introduced the idea that humanity is called to exercise dominion over creation as beings bearing the image of God. For ancient hearers, this concept of image would most often be used for idols (most of the time that ‘image of God/god is used in the Hebrew Scriptures, it is used for this very purpose), or for the king of a city or kingdom who is seen to be the image bearer of the local deity. Scandalously, the Storytellers of what would become the Genesis account use this ‘image’ language for all of humanity. However, humanity is really bad at being image bearers. Throughout the rest of the Genesis scroll we get lots of examples of humans that are called to bear the image of God, and yet in various ways fail to do so.
Joseph, aside from being a bit of a punk in the first part of his story (we might condemn his brothers for enslaving him, but we can also see their point), is actually bearing the image of God fairly well. Starting with this story and continuing through the end of the scroll, Joseph exercises the wise dominion of an image bearer of God. He seemingly is in right relationship with God, with those around him, and all of creation. Finally, we have a picture of what humanity was created for. It seems that everything that Joseph touches turns to gold. Also, a sign of his blessing…
Blessing: Joseph is also displaying the life-giving blessings granted to Abraham by God. Specifically, those who bless Joseph (Potiphar and the chief jailer) are blessed by God. Everything that Joseph touches flourishes, so much so that both of these men are able to leave all the responsibility up to Joseph, and do not need to worry about anything in their household/prison other than what they eat.
Interestingly enough, there is no passage where either the father or God pass on this blessing, as with Isaac and Jacob, but we as astute readers of Scripture are to glean through meditation on this and other passages that the blessing of Abraham has been passed onto Joseph, even though he has also experienced great hardships.
We might also note that overall, this story does not provide a Pollyanna or simplistic view of blessing (so again, our Prosperity Gospel siblings will be disappointed). Joseph absolutely has blessing, and those who bless him are blessed, but that does not mean at all that everything goes his way. Nor does it mean that the things that do not go his way are some divine punishment.
The Test: The test is a major motif throughout the Genesis Scroll, Torah, and all of Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. Eve and Adam were tested with fruit, Abraham was tested with the sacrifice of Isaac, The Israelites will be tested many times, and Jesus will be tested in the wilderness. Joseph here is presented with a major test. The language makes it clear that this is a testing narrative when it says that Potiphar’s wife ‘sees’ Joseph, and wishes to ‘take’ him into her bed. The twist is, however, that Joseph does not give into the temptation. He is presented with a willing partner (unlike several other extra-marital couplings that we have seen in the Genesis scroll), but has an amazing sense of decorum. Even after multiple attempts, Joseph refuses to have sex with her. He passes the test, but there are consequences.
Justice: Justice is a major theme in this story. We are struck by the injustice of this story in particular. He is in the right, he does the right thing morally, and he is still sent to prison. This directly goes against our innate sense of justice, especially the simplistic justice of ‘good things happen to those who are righteous, and bad things happen to those who are not’ that we see throughout Scripture and American culture.
The writings of the Hebrew Bible explore some of the facets of justice. The Book of Proverbs, tends to have that simplistic view of justice and blessing. Those who do good are blessed, and those who are wicked are cursed. In the end, this is the world that we want to live in. It is the reason that the Prosperity Gospel (gee, I have been talking about them a lot lately), is one of the fastest growing sectors of Christianity. It tells people what they want to hear, and gives them a hope that if they would just do the right thing, then they will experience God’s blessing. This is the way we wished the world worked, and when we encounter evidence to the contrary it disturbs us. The hard truth is that we encounter this world, a world of injustice, all the time. Things do not turn out the way that they are ‘supposed to.’ We experience injustice when something terrible happens to us, or to a loved one, or even to someone we have never met. To this world, a world full of injustice, the book of Ecclesiastes steps in. “Vanity” (literally smoke or vapor) is the way that the Teacher describes all of human achievement. In a diatribe rivaled only by a Dashboard Confessionals album, the author bemoans the fact that the simplistic pairing of righteousness and blessing has no bearing on the real world, and never will. That is not the way that the world works, everything that you thought was solid is in fact smoke and mirrors, so you better get used to it. After Ecclesiastes, Job enters the conversation with a “hold my potshard” and relays the story of an objectively ‘righteous’ man who experiences horrendous pain and suffering for no reason given other than a divine bet. Job looses in short succession his house, family, and health, and his so-called friends insist that it must be because he was not righteous. In the end, Job demands that God come down and explain these actions. God obliges and gives a withering speech from a whirlwind asking where Job was when God created the world, or how much Job knows about what happens in the badger’s den, or what happens beyond the stars. In the end, Job comes to the humbling conclusion that he does not know enough to demand an answer from God, and he never will.
The Christian Scriptures also wrestle with this hope of justice compared to the world we see before us. in John 9, Jesus’ disciples ask about a man blind from birth whether his blindness was due to his sin, or the sin of his parents. Jesus refuses to get drown into such a simplistic view of justice (and maybe even questions their ableist assumptions) when he tells them that neither the man nor his parents sinned, but that God’s work would be shown through his life.
In a similar way, the story of Joseph plays with the assumptions and implications of justice and injustice. Joseph is at the mercy of others, first his brothers, then Potiphar and his wife, then the jailor, and so on. The injustice that he experiences, especially in this story, is not earned, and yet God makes good out of these bad situations. In the end, Joseph says (multiple times) that while his brothers (and everyone else) had meant these actions for Joseph’s harm, that God meant them for good.
Side Note: Programed Injustice: We should also be warry of falling into another trap of justice-thinking which sees the work of God as an excuse for continued injustice. Joseph does, in fact, look at the pattern of his life and sees that “God meant it for good”. However, this does not mean that his brothers were right to enslave him and send him off to Egypt, or that Potiphar’s wife was right in wrongfully accusing him. We can sometimes fall into the trap of ‘militant predestination’ where we see everything as God’s will, and therefore could not have gone any other way. Joseph does indeed end up in a position to save his brothers, and all of Egypt, from a great famine, but was the only path really imprisonment? Could we use our prophetic imaginations to tell a different story, one where Joseph finds his way to being second in command to Pharaoh through Potiphar’s high praise, rather than being dragged out of prison after two years at the remembrance of the chief cupbearer? I am becoming increasingly uneasy around the theological stance of substitutionary atonement, which states that Jesus died in the place of sinners to ‘appease an angry God.’ While there is certainly evidence of this in Scripture, it is just one way that early Christian authors sought to make sense out of the brutal death of Jesus. Did Jesus have to die by crucifixion in order for us to have grace, or is it that God gives us grace even though we crucified Jesus? I am more and more convinced that we receive God’s grace despite this heinous act, rather than because of it.
The simple fact is, that we feel very different about injustice when we are the recipient of it, than if we are not. There is something very human about finding the silver lining in a story, and using it to flavor all of the rest. We can hear horrible stories about abuse and mistreatment, but as long as it ‘all works out’ then all is well. One profound example of this ‘programmed injustice’ can be seen in the state of racial justice in America. We as doting white-skinned people are perfectly happy to perpetuate generations of systemic injustice, because, ‘look at [insert well-to-do BIPOC individual], they did alright.’ As long as we can find exceptions to the poverty and trauma experienced by our black and brown-skinned siblings, or better yet those who rose above the expectations of their community (bonus points if they did so by adopting white cultural norms), then in some way we contributed to their success by perpetuating the systems from which they were forced to rise above. In this feet of mental gymnastics, those who are plowed under by these systems of injustice are just getting what they deserve. The fact that one in five Black males are currently or have been imprisoned is just a sign of our justice system at work. We perpetuate systems like cash bail, even though it disproportionately effects prisoners of color and those who are poor. We get all worked up about the rise of crime in our cities (I hear this about New Orleans constantly) but we don’t care at all about the economic forces that raise the feelings of desperation that leads to such crime. Last month Latoya Cantrell, the Mayor of New Orleans, made news for actually comforting those accused of car jacking rather than comforting the white tears of the victims, and people lost their kriffing minds.
Joseph was an enslaved person, and in that institution it would have been perfectly reasonable for Potiphar’s wife to use him in any way that she saw fit. The fact that he refused was an affront to the whole system of slavery. From Potiphar’s perspective Joseph was either uppity or not-compliant. Therefore, it did not matter whether the accusation was true or not, either way he would be imprisoned for the safety of the system.
Prophets, Apostles, and Jesus himself call us to seek both justice and compassion, to care for the plight of our fellow human beings, and to dismantle the systems in ourselves and culture which perpetuate injustice. One of the greatest challenges that we are facing in the church is taking a hard look in the mirror, and seeing the colonization, racism, sexism, and all the other ‘isms’ that make up the very fabric of our institutions. In the end, we have to do the work, we have to own our individual and corporate biases, and do something about them, or there will be nothing left.
The Rest of the Story
We all know this one pretty well. In prison, Joseph interprets the dreams of Pharaoh’s chief baker and cupbearer (bringing in the thread of dreams from the beginning of his story arc), and they come true. The cupbearer remembers Joseph after two years when the Pharaoh has a dream about cows and wheat which no one can interpret. Joseph tells Pharaoh that the dreams mean that there will be seven years of plenty, and seven years of famine, and suggests that Pharaoh appoint a wise person to take advantage of the situation. Pharaoh thinks that Joseph is just right for the job, and he becomes vice-Pharaoh. Joseph stockpiles the extra grain from the Egyptians for seven years, and then when the famine starts, sells it back to them and those who come to Egypt for food. Among those who come to trade for food are ten sons of Israel/Jacob who do not recognize the brother that they enslaved in Act 1. Joseph messes with them for a little bit (can you blame him), but eventually reveals himself as Joseph, and makes the first proclamation that while they meant this for evil, God meant it for good. Jacob/Israel and the rest of the family move to Egypt and are well taken care of, and then Jacob dies. Joseph once again has to reassure his brothers that he will not take revenge on their actions (can you blame them?) and once again proclaims God’s good intentions despite his brother’s evil ones. At the end of the Genesis scroll, the children of Abraham are the beginning of a great nation, but are outside of the land that God had promised. Dun-dun-Duuun!
Pop Culture References
For temptation and not giving into it, some of the best illustrations that I can think of are from the Lord of The Rings. The best, in my opinion would be Galadriel being tempted by the One Ring, and resisting (?) becoming “not dark, but beautiful as the dawn.” This reference is even more relevant and meaningful for me with Rings of Power giving a view of Galadriel as a younger warrior.
For things going bad, but turning out good, I submit just about every Act 2. To be specific, I submit Avengers: Infinity War when Doctor Strange glimpses one chance among over twelve million possibilities that they win, and gives the Time Stone to Thanos. This results in Thanos ‘snapping’ half of the universe’s population out of existence, but ultimately leads to his defeat. Side-note, the Marvel Cinematic Universe does pretty well with dealing with the negative effects of this option especially throughout Avengers: Endgame and Falcon and Winter Soldier.
You do not have to look far for illustrations of Injustice, the question is more about what are you willing to bring up, and what are your folks willing to hear.
Presbyterian Hymn Suggestions
Arise, Your Light Has Come (GTG 744, PH 411)
Precious Lord, Take My Hand (GTG 834, PH 404)
All Who Love and Serve Your City (GTG 351)
My Soul Cries Out With a Joyful Shout (GTG 100)
There’s a Wideness in God’s Mercy (GTG 435, PH298)
Come! Live in the Light! (GTG 749)
O God of Every Nation (GTG 756, PH 289)
Today We All Are Called to Be Disciples (GTG 757, PH 434)
Called as Partners in Christ’s Service (GTG 761, PH 343)
Special: Author of Justice by Lloyd Larson
Prayer of the Day
Author of Justice, help us to seek your justice both for ourselves and all those around us. Help us like Joseph endure hardships, and see your hand seeking good even when others seek evil. Help us to seek justice for others, so that all may live in freedom and grace. Amen.