Today and tomorrow, we hear the finale of the Book of Genesis. It is a rather grand finale to a family story that did not always go well. First, Jacob and his mother Rebekah deceive Jacob’s father Isaac, the only son of Abraham and Sarah, to secure from Isaac his blessing on Jacob, cheating Jacob’s brother Esau out of his rightful inheritance. Then Jacob was deceived, tricked really, by Rachel’s father Laban into working for Laban for fourteen years before he could marry Rachel, a kind of payback for cheating his brother Esau. Finally, Rachel’s only sons, the first born Joseph and the youngest Benjamin, would be Jacob’s favorites causing great jealousy and tragedy among their many half-brothers, all sons of Jacob also.
It culminates in Joseph being sold into slavery in Egypt by his heartless brothers. But in the two final chapters of Genesis, it is all set right as Joseph triumphs in Egypt, secures food in famine for his father’s family and reunites with (and forgives) his brothers and his father and buries Jacob with his wife Rachel, his parents and Abraham and Sarah. The brothers and their families all move to Egypt with Joseph as their savior and benefactor for life. Thus, Genesis ends on an “all’s well that ends well” note.
It's more than a little contrived, we have to admit. The point is that God can turn seemingly tragic events around somehow. It would be nice to see God as orchestrating all the good outcomes in Genesis if, by doing so, we didn’t have to ask the difficult question: then who orchestrated the tragic ones? If God is understood as causing all that happens, then how do we make sense that God is causing terrible, awful things as well? It is difficult to avoid making God into something of a monster in that understanding.
Better, I believe, to say that we do not know why bad things happen, things like earthquakes, tornados, floods and fires. Or things like poverty, famine, ignorance, injustice and war. Nor do we understand what they mean. But we believe that God can somehow, through grace, be found within everything. We do not know where what seems to be definitely a tragedy will finally take us. If we seek to accept it all, with God’s grace, then we can better come to defeat our fears and instead learn to trust that God will somehow, like a good shepherd, lead us through any pain, any loss, to find the promised land flowing with milk and honey. But the Promised Land is a completely spiritual reality. It is all within. A spiritual reality does not depend on what happens around us. It only depends on God and if we believe that then, no matter what happens, we come to depend only on God too and that is to find within us the true Promised Land.