Friday of the Second Week of Lent

"The Assurance of Things Hoped For, The Conviction of Things Not Seen"

The first reading today from late in Genesis, chapter 37, the story of Joseph and his brothers, is, of course during Lent, meant to be a direct allusion to Jesus’ being betrayed to his enemies by one very close to him. But the story has many connotations and implications. It is primarily a story of jealousy and pride as well as hatred and cruelty. It is also a story of great folly. It is also one of Karma, if you will- what goes around, comes around. And finally, it is a story of the great hiddenness of all that will be, of all that is behind and beneath what we think we see and understand.

Jealousy and pride are certainly at the forefront here as well as cruelty. Joseph’s own brothers (or half-brothers, since of Jacob’s twelve sons, only Benjamin, Jacob’s youngest and the second and last son of Rachel, was Joseph’s full brother), so consumed in resentment that their father Jacob so obviously preferred Joseph to them all, conspire to murder him. They cruelly throw him into a dry well and then callously turn to their lunch while their young brother’s wailings must have filled their ears as they filled their mouths. Reuben, the eldest, manages to prevent Joseph’s death but not his destiny.

It is a story of folly, in that Jacob foolishly broadcasts his preference of Joseph over all his other children. Every parent has a favorite. It is virtually impossible not to. But that should be the most precious, the best kept secret that it is every parent’s sacred duty to keep from ever being revealed.

It is a story of Karma in that that folly of Jacob, along with his great deception of his father Isaac years earlier, will haunt his waning years and bring immense sorrow and suffering upon his aged head (as well as the brothers’ suffering for their misdeed). We can indeed repent of our sins and God will forgive them completely, but we cannot escape their consequences. Once something is done, once it is said, it cannot be undone or unsaid. It is released into the universe and will go where it will, causing what we do not know. It's like the story attributed to St. Philip Neri where he gave the woman who confessed to viciously gossiping, the penance to open a feather pillow on the top balcony and then told her to go and find every feather.

But most of all it is a story of hiddenness and of how we so profoundly do not know. How could Joseph’s brothers have possibly known that out of what seemed the complete tragedy and cataclysm that they had caused through their sin would come great success and a nation’s transfer to Egypt to then be followed by slavery and finally God rescuing God’s people from that slavery and bringing them to the Promised Land? How could the Apostles have known that out of Jesus’ betrayal and death on the cross would come the resurrection and the salvation of the whole world?

The next time we are very tempted to say, this is the worst, this is the most awful thing that could have happened, let us pause and pray and remember Joseph and his brother’s and his father Jacob. Let us remember Jesus on the cross who cried out in the first words of Psalm 22 before he died, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” Let us remember that the end of that Psalm says, “All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the LORD, and all the families of the nations will bow down before him, for dominion belongs to the LORD and he rules over the nations forever.” For we simply do not know. We believe. We trust. We hope. And we recall Paul who spoke to the Romans saying, “For we know that all things work together for good to those who love God and are the called according to God’s purpose.”