Sarah Drummond and Joel Baden discuss forgiveness and the sibling dynamics at work in Genesis 45:3-11,15. The text is appointed for the Seventh Sunday after Epiphany, Year C of the Revised Common Lectionary.
Forgiveness and Agency (Seventh Sunday after Epiphany)
Voiceover Voice 1:
Right? I think that’s weird. I think that’s actually, like…
Voiceover Voice 2:
It’s weird, but it might be wonderful. It might be wonderful.
Helena Martin:
This is Chapter, Verse, and Season: a lectionary podcast from Yale Bible Study. I’m Helena Martin, your host. Welcome back!
Every week, we bring you a casual conversation between two of our Yale Divinity School faculty about one of the readings appointed by the Revised Common Lectionary for the coming Sunday.
This episode, we have Sarah Drummond, Founding Dean of Andover Newton Seminary at Yale and Joel Baden, Professor of Hebrew Bible and Director of the Center for Continuing Education. They’re discussing Genesis 45:3-11, 15, which is appointed for Sunday, February 20, the Seventh Sunday after the Epiphany. Here’s the text.
Genesis 45:3-11, 15.
Joseph said to his brothers, “I am Joseph. Is my father still alive?” But his brothers could not answer him, so dismayed were they at his presence.
Then Joseph said to his brothers, “Come closer to me.” And they came closer. He said, “I am your brother, Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt. And now do not be distressed, or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life. For the famine has been in the land these two years; and there are five more years in which there will be neither plowing nor harvest. God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth, and to keep alive for you many survivors. So it was not you who sent me here, but God; he has made me a father to Pharaoh, and lord of all his house and ruler over all the land of Egypt. Hurry and go up to my father and say to him, ‘Thus says your son Joseph, God has made me lord of all Egypt; come down to me, do not delay. You shall settle in the land of Goshen, and you shall be near me, you and your children and your children’s children, as well as your flocks, your herds, and all that you have. I will provide for you there—since there are five more years of famine to come—so that you and your household, and all that you have, will not come to poverty.’
And he kissed all his brothers and wept upon them; and after that his brothers talked with him.
Sarah Drummond:
So Joel, as I look at this story about Joseph, what I want it to be about, what I want it to signal, is: mission matters more than ego, and doing the right thing is more important than getting revenge, and that forgiveness makes life better.
Tell me that’s what’s really going on here.
Joel Baden:
Okay, Sarah. That’s what’s really going on here. Enjoy that.
I mean, it’s not that that’s not going on here. Right? Obviously, there’s a lovely message in here about forgiveness.
Though, to be clear, by chapter 45 here we are, like, four or five chapters deep into Joseph seriously messing with his brothers, right? We’ve got to the point where he has gotten his revenge, as it were. He’s made them uncomfortable and miserable, and put one of them in prison, and sent them the back and forth to Canaan multiple times, and thrown them in jail. He’s been messing with them. He’s finally gotten to the point where he’s like, “Okay, it’s fine. It’s me.” So it’s not that there’s not messages here about about forgiveness and all of that.
But to my mind, one of the main features of the story—but certainly one of the main elements in what we’re looking at here—is in verse five: “Do not be distressed or angry because you sold me here. God sent me before you to preserve life.”
Which takes a story that I think we love because it’s such a sort of personal human family story, right? This is true of much of Genesis. One of the reasons we really love Genesis is because it’s recognizable to us, right. We could be one of the people in Genesis in a way that we can never be Moses. Do you know what I mean?
Sarah Drummond:
Absolutely. You could imagine yourself to be any number of different characters.
Joel Baden:
We all have siblings. We all have parents. We all have kids. Right? Like, so, and all of the dynamics are constantly at play. And this story is a story about siblings and parents-child relationships, all of those things. So we love it for that. But the higher level of this has to do with how God works in the world.
For Joseph to say, in what is a moment of incredible forgiveness, to say, “You did something truly terrible to me, but I know that it was all for the good…” As I say it out loud now, is an actually deeply problematic thing, right? Like, forgiveness is lovely. But do they bear no responsibility? Do we say things like, “Yeah, you literally sold me into slavery. It was God’s will.” Like, that’s messed up, isn’t it?
Sarah Drummond:
I’ve heard it said—and I don’t actually know who said it—that a preacher could preach on forgiveness every Sunday for their entire career and never run out of stuff to say.
Because just the whole concept of forgiveness is so complicated. So I’m not going to say that’s not what I’m seeing, because I do think that there is an important message and lesson in this text about setting aside differences and focusing on what’s really important. And setting aside the differences sometimes means returning to them later, you know, by imprisoning people (your brother), or taking vengeance and sending them on wild goose chases. Later, you know, after the famine that was imposed by the same God who is now authorizing Joseph to rescue the family from.
So when we think about what is edifying in this text, like, what is the kind of positive takeaway from this text for somebody who maybe is trying to preach on it in a setting where there’s lot of division, or a lot of families that are struggling not to kill each other in their community. I wonder if you see in this some—even a message of what not to do.
Joel Baden:
The Joseph story is such an interesting space in the text because it really— It exists, in a sense, only to get the family from one place to the other. You know what I mean?
Sarah Drummond:
It’s like Expedia.com.
Joel Baden:
[laughs] Right. But like, it moves us— It takes us from like everyone’s in Canaan to, oops, everyone’s in Egypt. Right? And that’s what it’s here for. But along the way—you could have done that in three verses—it’s this incredibly expansive discourse on how we understand human action.
And sometimes it feels like it’s humans going along with the will of God unknowingly. Sometimes it feels like it’s God sort of tweaking things a little bit here and there to make them end up the way that God wants. When you say, “Is it what to do or what not to do”… How much of the story is anybody doing anyway?
If Joseph’s claim is when you sold me into Egypt (which at the time, I think they thought they were doing of their own free will), he was like, “Nah, God planned that.”
Sarah Drummond:
“That was meant to be.” Yeah.
Joel Baden:
When Joseph find himself in Egypt, and he ends up being the person who’s in prison with the guys, the baker and the butler and the ones who need their dreams interpreted… It’s chance?
It’s not chance, right? Everybody Joseph comes in contact with, it says, “And God made them favor Joseph” or “God made them look kindly on Joseph.” What to do or what not to do… Are any of us doing anything? I have questions about where the lines of human agency are, according to the story.
And I have questions about the lines of divine agency. You said a few minutes ago, you know, “God ordained this famine.” And yeah, like in the broad picture of “it’s all divine puppetry” in a sense, then yeah, sure. The brothers did the thing. But God made them sell Joseph because God must have known that there was going to be a famine. That’s the only way that makes sense. Because they sell Joseph before the famine.
So, you know, all of this stuff like has God doing puppet string pulling. But it doesn’t actually say anywhere that God created a famine, which we know God can do. Right? There’s plenty of other places in the Bible where God makes a famine happen.
This one feels more like… God being like, “Well, there’s going to be a famine, I guess.” Right? So, I don’t know where the lines of human agency are. I don’t know where the lines of divine agency are. All I know is that the place where those two things meet in the middle is the passage we’re reading right now.
Sarah Drummond:
That which falls on either side of the line. Another way to frame just exactly what you said would be on one side of the line is providence, and then the other side of the line is forgiveness.
And that’s a line where I fear to tread. Reason being that, when a person’s asked to forgive, the person seeking the forgiveness really needs to take full responsibility for what has gone wrong. To say, “The devil made me do it” is bad enough. To say, “God intended me to do it…” I don’t think.
So, in a way, you’re making me less hopeful about this text and it’s possible redeeming qualities. Because somehow, in the interest of self-protection and confirmation bias, I kind of missed the fact that Joseph is saying that his own being run out on a rail was part of the narrative of that which was meant to be. I kind of forgot that part on purpose. And, instead, was trying to imagine Joseph just being the bigger person, taking the high road, which clearly is not what’s taking place here.
Joel Baden:
What’s so weird is you just said— Obviously, if you’re the person asking for forgiveness for something you’ve done wrong, and you say, “God made me do it,” that’s a no-go. But this is a story about the person who is forgiving saying, “It’s okay. God made you do it.”
That’s weird. Right? I think that’s weird. I think that’s actually like…
Sarah Drummond:
It’s weird, but it might be wonderful. It might be wonderful.
Joel Baden:
Yeah, it is. I wonder, in a day and age like ours—when there has been such a, I don’t know, centuries, millennia-long overlooking or easy forgiveness of abuses, often abuses of power, I’m thinking particularly—where, if you can just chalk stuff up to “it was God’s plan somehow, it was God’s will,” then accountability is removed to an extent.
At the same time, hyper-accountability without any forgiveness obviously has its own pitfalls, socially. I don’t know where to slot this. And I think that’s fine. Right?
Sarah Drummond:
That’s the fun part.
Joel Baden:
I don’t know where to slot this text in here. Part of me reads it and thinks, as I think you wanted to read it, “What a model for forgiving those who have sinned against us most strongly.”
And part of me wants to read it as, “When you tell people that the crimes they’ve committed against you—against your person against your agency—are just part of the divine plan, you are simply reinforcing hierarchies, and power structures, and abuses, and permitting them to happen again.” I don’t know which one’s happening.
Sarah Drummond:
Well, the idea that, when we hurt people, we were just reading off a script, we had no role in that… I reject that. And yet, you’ve named the point where free will becomes less relevant. And, to me, I would call that grace on the side of the person who’s extending the forgiveness. Not because the person in need of forgiveness explained everything, but because there is this ethic of love that is greater than us that can fix almost anything.
But if I were to name now, having had this conversation, what’s really inspiring and helpful about this text is that it helps us to understand why forgiveness can be so hard for us now. That it’s not neat and tidy, and God’s involvement in it is not obvious.
Helena Martin:
Thanks for listening! For more information about the podcast, including a transcript and this week’s show notes, check out YaleBibleStudy.org. You can also find a lot of other great Bible study resources there. And remember to follow us on Twitter @BibleYale.
Chapter, Verse, and Season is produced by Joel Baden, Kelly Morrissey, and me, Helena Martin. Production help by Crichelle Brice, and our theme music is by Calvin Linderman. Thanks to the Center for Continuing Education at Yale Divinity School. And thank you to Dean Drummond and Professor Baden for being here with us again this week.
We’ll be back with another conversation from Chapter, Verse, and Season.
Book of the Bible:
Genesis
Guests
Text
New Revised Standard Version Bible
Copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Credits
Host and Executive Producer: Helena Martin
Production Manager: Kelly Morrissey
Creator and Managing Editor: Joel Baden
Assistant Producer: Aidan Stoddart
Music: Calvin Linderman
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Chapter, Verse, and Season gives listeners the opportunity to overhear the kinds of conversations that take place in the halls of Yale Divinity School. Each week, professors from different theological disciplines chat about biblical texts from the Revised Common Lectionary. They bring their own interests to the table and hopefully spark new insights into the scripture appointed for each Sunday.