Graduate 84: Advent, Day 7

Joseph, Eleventh Son
Genesis 37, 39-50

I’m pretty sure that the reading for this day is the longest of all in this series. It covers the entire life of Joseph as it’s recorded in Scripture. In it, we see another example of a pattern that recurs over and over in the course of God’s interactions with humanity and about which Jesus speaks frequently; it’s called the Great Reversal. Joseph is the eleventh of twelve brothers; yet he is the favorite of his father. His dreams anger his brothers just because they show him in a preeminent position. He begins in Egypt as a slave and moves up to overseer in Potiphar’s house. He is thrown in prison, but soon is placed in charge of the entire jailhouse; not only that, but Pharaoh appoints him to be second-in-command of the entire nation of Egypt.

And, as I said, Joseph is just one example of this pattern. God reveals that His promise is to be fulfilled in Isaac (second-born) and not Ishmael (first-born); God chooses Jacob (younger) over Esau (older); Joseph (the eleventh son) is brought to preeminence over all his brothers; and Jacob, at the end of his life, blesses Ephraim (second-born) first, and then Manasseh (first-born). What can we learn from this? Does this mean that we should always try to be ‘last’ as a way of guaranteeing that God will bless us instead of the ‘first’? Certainly not—that would just be another way of manipulating our situation for self-interest and personal gain. Hopefully what we do learn is that God’s ways are not our ways—that when the world and culture and society say that one person is a success because of his great accomplishments and that another person is a failure because of her poor position, that’s not necessarily the way God sees it.

This point can be seen clearly in the life of Jesus—who though He is God, Himself, is born in a dark and dank cave and laid, for his first night, in an animal’s feeding trough. He later dies on a cross—the most brutal and humiliating way to die in that time. Are these descriptive of the beginning and end of a great life of significance?

The prophet Isaiah says of the Messiah:

“Who has believed our message?
And to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed?
For He grew up before Him like a tender shoot,
And like a root out of parched ground;
He has no stately form or majesty
That we should look upon Him
Nor appearance that we should be attracted to Him.
He was despised and forsaken of men,
A man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief;
And like one from whom men hid their face,
He was despised, and we did not esteem Him.” (53:1-3)

Did you catch Isaiah’s opening words: “Who is going to believe what we say? Who is going to believe us when we say that this man is God’s chosen instrument for bringing deliverance and hope to the world?” (See also Philippians 2:5-11)

Joseph’s brothers certainly did not think that he would amount to anything or come to anything; but because of him, their entire family is saved from starvation. Because of Joseph’s faithfulness and obedience to God (even though it landed him in slavery and forgotten in a jail house for twenty years), the still-nascent nation of Israel (the ancestors of the Messiah) is saved from extinction. And Joseph, by a supernatural outpouring of grace and humility from God (I cannot imagine how else he could have done it), is able to say to his brothers: “And now do not be grieved or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve [your] life.”

May God grant us all such grace and humility.

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God is in this place,
And that reality, seen and understood by the grace of God in Christ Jesus through the work of the Holy Spirit, makes all the difference in the world.