Niwano Peace Auditorium below Church of the Sermon on the Mount by hoyasmeg
Our last reading left things open-ended – this shows full and dramatic reconciliation, an explosion of emotion from Joseph, and a clue as to what made the difference between last reading and this one. It makes so much difference to how we live if we really recognise what is going on, and Joseph can give us a clue too…
In these chapters we see again very strongly that we are not told by the text how to understand people’s actions, in these chapters we have to judge Joseph and his brothers, using the knowledge of good, evil and everything in between that is part of our experience as children of Eve and of Adam. And in this reading motives are far from clear cut!
Once again there is more going on than meets the eye! And this chapter is a fine example of the way Bible stories are told so that we have to interpret and judge people’s actions and words for ourselves (as we do in everyday life) rather than being told what to think. So as various Joseph and his brothers keep up appearances and pretend, we have to decide what we think their motives are. There are also tensions between parts of the chapter that allow different sorts of scholar to notice different things in the story.
So though it has no deep theological or moral point to make, on its own – clearly as part of Joseph’s story as a whole it does, this is a really interesting chapter to read :)
As we get intgo the body of the Joseph story the dramatic episode with Mrs Potiphar (surely another candidate for soap-opera treatment) has lots of interesting features in its telling, today I’ll focus on one, and then make sure to notice also the big theological message these chapters hammer home. In doing this we’ll notice the dramatic change in our hero between his teens and twenties, is it just “growing up” is is there something more profound going on?
This is another story of a dysfunctional family, Kuniholm in the E100 notes picks up on some of the causes of this mess, and we can certainly learn some things to avoid from Jacob’s family life. But let’s notice what came between the dreams (37:1-11) and the nightmare (37:18-36).
In Gen 37:12-17 we have a neat example of the way the tellers of the Bible’s stories, putting lots of weight, and in this case not a little theology into few words. This is what makes biblical narratives great story-telling, and also superb theology!
