Message.

I’ve never seen Shakespeare’s play “Othello”, recently described as a “tragedy of shattered passion, revenge and psychological warfare”. It is considered one of his finest plays. Three of its key characters are Othello himself, Desdemona his wife, and Iago, a soldier who has fought beside Othello for several years. However he believes that Othello has unfairly passed him over for promotion and seeks ways of getting revenge. Matters come to a head in the final act which is full of violence: Desdemona is smothered by her husband, Iago is injured and Othello commits suicide – and that’s by no means the whole story!

The reason I’m telling you all this is because of a famous line which comes earlier in the play. Iago – who is not a nice person – tries to manipulate Othello by suggesting that his wife is having an affair. He deliberately plants the seeds of jealousy in Othello’s mind and says, ““O beware, my lord, of jealousy; it is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on” – a sentence so full of meaning that we remember, study and revere it centuries later. Iago is saying that jealousy is an emotion so powerful that it will eat up Othello and drive him mad if he allows it to take over his life. And he’s proved right.

Jealousy and complicated family relationships lie at the heart of today’s story about Jacob, Joseph and his brothers. Strangely enough, this was one of the first Bible stories I was taught at primary school – I remember not only Joseph’s dreams about the sheaves of wheat and the sun, moon and stars but also (of course) his so-called “coat of many colours”. This was of course many years before Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd-Webber made the story so famous!

I’ve said that Jacob’s family was complicated; we find out just how complicated if we go back to chapter 35. There we read that Jacob had no less than twelve sons (there don’t seem to be any daughters). The first six were all the sons of Leah, the plain daughter of his uncle Laban; you’ll remember Laban tricked Jacob into marrying he when it was Rachel he really wanted. The next two sons, in fact the youngest, were the children of Jacob’s beloved Rachel – we can imagine that, for that reason alone, they received preferential treatment in the family home. Finally we have the sons of Rachel and Leah’s servants, Bilhah and Zilpah, two apiece. This was not a happy family; although ten, at least, of the sons seemed to get on with each other, favouritism and differences in social status were always likely to hang over and disrupt it.

So we come, at the start of the story, to Joseph. We tend to think of him as a young boy but he’s not: he’s 17 years old which means that he’s thought of as an adult and of marriageable age. One rather feels that Jacob tends to baby his youngest sons, Joseph and Benjamin, treating them as younger than they really are; perhaps he doesn’t want them to grow up as that will show him how old he himself is getting. That may or may not be true; but it’s clear that they are his favourites. Doing the arithmetic also suggests that it took quite a long time for Rachel to conceive so their arrivals were a source of great delight to them. All this means that that Joseph, favoured even over his younger brother, has become something of a spoiled child who feels he’s a cut above the others. He also knows that his father will believe everything he tells him and has become something of a spy or a teller of tales. For our story begins with him leaving them watching the sheep, coming home and saying to Jacob, “You’ll never guess what they’re getting up to”. Whether what he has said is true or not is immaterial; Joseph has become a tell-tale and a sneak. That in itself has become sufficient reason for his brothers to detest him.

But, of course, there’s more: and this is where we come to his famous coat. No-one knows why the King James Bible translates this as “a coat of many colours”; the Hebrew is apparently unclear and we could more accurately looking at an “ornate” or “long-sleeved” cloak or robe (but those don’t give Sunday School children the same opportunities for using all the coloured crayons in the box!). The precise meaning isn’t actually important, though as the robe is saying one thing and could be saying another. It’s definitely singling Joseph out as the privileged one, the apple of his father’s eye; it may also signify that Jacob has given Joseph the job of managing or bossing his older brothers: “What, we have to do what that little whippersnapper tells us? That’s not right; how can we take him down a peg or two?”

But there’s worse to come: we have Joseph’s two dreams, remembering that dreams were taken very seriously in Bible times as messages from God. We recall, for instance, how crucial Peter’s dream of a sheet full of non-kosher food and Paul’s dream of the Macedonian man in the development of Christianity and the Church. So Joseph has his dreams; his big mistake is to tell his father and brothers about them – perhaps he felt that he had a duty to do so. The consequences are predictable; not only does Jacob gruffly tell him that he’s over-reached himself, his brothers also simmer with resentment. They’ve got to do something about this loathsome youth before things get even worse. It’s time to do some plotting; where better then when they’re away from home, looking after the sheep? The stage is set for Joseph’s comeuppance.

The opportunity arises when the family flocks are at Shechem – about 50 miles from Jacob’s home at Hebron. Not unsurprisingly, Jacob wants to find out how things are going and, in an age without modern communications, there’s only one way to do it. So Joseph is sent off northwards on a journey of about 50 miles; but, when he arrives in Shechem, he searches in vain for his brothers. We can imagine him dashing hither and thither, possibly more concerned about returning to Jacob with no news than about his brothers, who are well able to look after themselves. And then he bumps into a man who tells him, “Oh, you’ve missed them. They were here, but they’ve gone on to Dothan” – about another 15 miles further north. Some commentators suggest that the man Joseph met had been set up by his brothers to lure him, but I can’t see any reason to believe that. Flocks did have to move, if only to find fresh new pasture. So Joseph plods on.

Well, you know the rest of the story: how most of the brothers decide to kill Joseph and throw him into a pit, to later tell his father that he’d been the victim of an attack by wild animals; how Reuben dissents from this plan and convinces the other to strip him of his robe and throw him into the pit alive; and how they then sell Joseph as a slave to foreign traders, pocketing their ill-gotten rewards. They cannot know how, years later, their cunningly-contrived plan will be exposed in the most unlikely of ways as they are thrown upon their brothers’ mercy in Egypt – nor that Joseph himself will get his own back by playing a trick on them.

I wonder if you noticed who was never mentioned in our two readings? The person who hasn’t come up once in our story is in fact God. So does that mean that he is not interested in what is going on, that he doesn’t understand the tensions which have caused such a rift in this family? That can’t be the case, surely – after all, we’re only a couple of generations on from Abraham, to whom God made the promise that he would be the father of a great nation. This must mean that, although we cannot see or hear him in this story, God must be there, lurking in the background.  

In any case, we believe – as did the ancient Hebrews – in a God who sees and knows everything. We wonder if the author of Genesis, for reasons best known to themselves, intentionally left God out of this part of Joseph’s story. It’s only when the whole family finally gets together in Egypt that Joseph says, “Don’t worry; God was at work in all the things you did which have brought us to where we are”.

All this begs the question of how we think God works. Do we believe that he has a plan for everything which, in its most extreme form, leaves us puppets being controlled by his strings, with no free will whatsoever. Or do we believe that God set the ball rolling by creating the world, and then left us to our own devices and choices? Somehow neither of those ways of thinking about God seem to tally with what we read in the Bible. There’s something here about God making sure that his promise to Abraham would be fulfilled, but also something about those brothers deciding to have their wicked way with Joseph. Somehow – do we want to call this “divine providence”? – everything worked out in the end.

Of course this raises some very real questions, not only in small-scale family disputes, but in the affairs of nations. For there are times when evil leaders act in horrific ways or take their countries to war; there is no way in which we as Christians can condone their acts, yet at times the long-term consequences turn out to be good. We see this in the Old Testament where we read that Cyrus, the king of Persia, “fulfilled the word of the Lord” by sending Jewish exiles back to their homeland with orders to reinstate worship in the Temple. Cyrus – a relatively humane ruler for the period but someone obsessed with growing his empire – seems to have been a pagan. As far as we know he had no sense of being guided by God; his tolerance for people of other faiths must have been a political act. Yet God used Cyrus to fulfil his plan.

Similarly we can think of the story of Jesus himself. How would our salvation have worked out if the politics of first-century Palestine had been less febrile or if Pilate had not given in to the crowd’s demands to crucify Jesus but had stood up for justice? To what extent were the priests who plotted against Jesus, the soldiers who arrested Jesus and nailed him to the cross, even Judas himself, unwittingly doing God’s will? If they had behaved differently, would God have had a Plan B? Those are questions we cannot answer; but God was surely present at Gethsemane, Gabbatha and Calvary, even if Jesus himself felt abandoned in his hours of need.

So what we have here is more than a story of favouritism, jealousy and family tensions, more than the tale of a deadly plot moderated by the moral authority of one brother, more than an insight into near-Eastern life thousands of years ago, preserved for posterity. For, once we start digging beneath its surface, this story asks deep and uncomfortable questions about the ways in which God fulfils his plans – questions as relevant to us today as they ever were. Even though we struggle to answer them, these questions deserve our thought.