Sold
Genesis 37:1-36

August 10, 2008


One good story begets another, or perhaps the first story doesn’t end, it just keeps the story going. Jacob’s saga, in fact, has not finished, it just has become younger - another case of the younger generation that has lost its way and gone terribly wrong.

Let’s keep in mind that the twelve sons of Jacob - and he did have some daughters as well, most sadly Dinah, the tragic subject of Chapter 34 - are the founders of the twelve tribes of Israel, the idea behind the 12 disciples of Christ. The story will belong to Joseph, the eleventh son of Jacob, the first child of his favourite, but not first wife Rachel. The Biblical authors loved numbers as symbolic digits, but I have never come across 11 being a significant number for anything, and perhaps that is significant in itself. Joseph is a prime number, for those mathematically inclined.

I have a friend who has spent considerable time collecting stories of Joseph told by various early Christian and Jewish writers. Some of us have an odd sense of fun. The Joseph tale is the longest story told in the Bible and it is full of delightful twists, so throughout religious history people have put their spin on it and asked questions the Biblical author never asked, the story not being that neat and simple with all loose ends tied up. In other words, it’s like most families which defy logic and reason, yet make perfectly good sense to those who know the people involved.

One would think with twelve sons you had to be careful how you distributed favours and benefits, but was Jacob getting so old that he was blind to this, bestowing most of his favour and love upon Joseph? Rachel, Jacob’s first love, had just died in child birth to the 12th son Benjamin, so perhaps it was a sentimental attachment to Joseph, the son of his old age. Jacob loved him more than his other sons. A dangerous move as before with Rachel and Leah, but Jacob does not seem to learn and throws in a coat with long sleeves to dress his devotion. “A coat of many colours” is the familiar description though that is taken from a minor version. It was a long coat with sleeves that made it a very luxurious robe, even royal in appearance - the typical coat was sleeveless and only down to the knees. It was a coat that one could not work in. Joseph’s work early on was to spy on his brothers and report their deviant behaviour back to Jacob. No wonder they hated him. A fellow like this shouldn’t dream, but Joseph dreamed in technicolour.

People then believed dreams were not Freud’s subconscious emerging, but a vision of God to the dreamer, unveiling a deeper truth that sometimes was not pleasant. None of Joseph’s brothers found his dreams pleasant and to them what he was dreaming was intensely self-serving. Chalk up one more reason to despise this young kid. Even his father Jacob thought Joseph had dreamed a little too much. Dreaming that everyone would be bowing down to him one day was hard to imagine, yet it was God’s revelation, not Joseph’s ego, that filled him with so-called illusions of grandeur. They weren’t illusions.

All of this was background, now the story reaches the present. The brothers have taken the family herd way down to Shechem so Jacob commissions Joseph to go take a look and bring back word of what he finds. By the time he arrives in Shechem the brothers have moved along, but finally Joseph catches up and the brothers catch a glimpse of him on the horizon.

These are the men who are the origin of all that is best about Israel and the disciples of Christ. When they saw their brother far far away from home, their immediate thought was this is our chance to kill him and be done with his spying and dreams. Reuben knew they were better than that and brow beat them into a lesser sin, throwing him into a pit. They stripped off that special coat, the symbol of Joseph-ness now and then. Reuben knew that would give them time to cool off and think, so with murder and jealous revenge on their minds, they did what we all naturally do, they sat down and ate.

Everything happens around a meal, even with your brother at the bottom of a dry well. Along comes a caravan heading down to Egypt, a little confusing whether it was the Ishmaelites or the Midianites, and a bright idea comes to the brothers. Actually, it was Judah, the guy who is the namesake of the southern kingdom and all of all Jews: Let’s make some money off this kid, no sense in killing him for nothing! They dragged him out of the pit and hey, 20 shekels was a pretty decent price. Down to Egypt went Joseph, and a footnote at the end of the chapter says that the traders sold him to a certain Potiphar, captain of the Pharoah’s guard. That’s another story.

Reuben came back, greatly distressed at Joseph’s disappearance, a virtual death in that age. That fancy robe came in handy, dipped in goat’s blood, and presented to Jacob as proof of Joseph’s fate. It did almost break Jacob’s heart. Nevertheless, instead of the end of the story, it was merely the beginning and the best was yet to come.

Still, this episode can stand by itself in infamy. Christian readers did not see a simple old tale, but one that retells from behind the future story of Jesus and therefore of the church and you and me. What that means is the story of Jesus Christ is the first story, maybe not the original in our sense of the word, but the primary tale, and all other stories tell it in a similar yet different way - even if the other stories were told before the Gospels. We always begin with our story because as far as our lives are concerned, our story is primary, the one that matters most. Then our ears pick up other stories that sound like ours. It is a paradoxical reality best stated in Jesus’ declaration, “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58).

Joseph was tending his father’s sheep at the age of seventeen, just as David, son of Jesse of Bethlehem of Judah, at the same age. At that juncture both were plucked out of the pasture to be something different and special. His own people knew him not, so it was said about Jesus, that they could not comprehend what he was doing and saying to have any value. All they heard and saw was an affront to their way of life. The brothers of Joseph knew him not as well and did not comprehend what his dreams were really signifying. All they could imagine was his desire to be greater than them.

Joseph was thrown into the pit as Jesus was placed in a tomb; both were brought out of the dark holes to a life of glory and power. Judas Iscariot, one of the Twelve, sold Jesus for thirty pieces of silver, maybe the same value as the twenty shekels one of the Twelve haggled with the Ishmaelite traders as the price for his brother. Joseph went down to Egypt into slavery; Joseph, the assumed father of Jesus, took him down to Egypt to escape death at the hands of Herod.

Usually, we look upon all these literary allusions and fanciful retellings of an old story with a detached amusement. Quaint stuff at best. You don’t get it. Just as here Joseph’s tale becomes intertwined with Jesus’ tale, so your story becomes intertwined with their story and David’s story and probably with Joseph, Mary’s husband, as well.

Anybody worth anything has been sold. Let’s be clear - being sold is never good in the first instance. It is a betrayal of the worst sort and it appears to be absolutely the end, and normally would be, except that God is silently involved. God is not mentioned much at all in the Joseph episode, and how much do you think God was perceived as an actor by the eleven disciples - there is that number eleven again! - in that night and day of betrayal and arrest and trial and crucifixion and death and burial?

Everyone of us is sold at some point, usually at the hands of people we love and trust, sold into despair that you are abandoned and alone, that you do not have the future you dreamed of. Sold when you fail at school, are fired from your job, are rejected by a loved one, even divorced from a spouse, have lost a child or a parent. Stop the story at the end of Genesis 37 and there is nothing redemptive, but God kept the story going. You did too, so don’t stop telling your story, about how you were sold - and how you were bought back.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan