God Did It? Really?

God Did It? Really?

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson

February, 2019

Scripture: Genesis 45:3-11, 15

The patriarch Jacob has a lot of sons, twelve of them actually. One of the latter born of them was Joseph, who was Jacob’s favorite because he was his first sons by Jacob’s favorite wife Rachel. Back at Genesis chapter 37 Joseph’s brothers did a terrible thing to him. Yes, he was being a jerk. Yes, he told his brothers dream he’d had, or at least claimed to have had, that suggested that one day he would lord it over them though he was younger than they. Still, what they did to him was terrible. First they threw him into a dry well planning on leaving him there to die. Then instead they sold him to some passing Arab traders who took him as a slave to Egypt. What Joseph’s brothers did to him was an act of unspeakable treachery and cruelty. They sinned gravely in what they did. They violated God’s laws several different ways. They acted out of human hatred not out of divine love. There’s no way to justify what they did. What they did was cruel, vicious, and utterly inexcusable, or so it seems to us and must have seemed to Joseph.

The story Genesis tells about what happened to Joseph in Egypt is wildly improbable. There’s nothing in the records of ancient Egypt to corroborate it. It surely never happened as a matter of historical fact, but never mind. That doesn’t matter for purposes of the story. Genesis says that Joseph became in effect the ruler of Egypt, or at least as the pharaoh’s agent he did. Genesis has it that Joseph ruled one of the ancient world’s greatest empires and greatest civilizations. He, a Hebrew not an Egyptian, supposedly did that. He didn’t as a historical matter, but never mind.

As Genesis continues Joseph’s brothers, the ones who first meant to kill him and then sold him into slavery, come to Egypt to escape a famine back home in Canaan. The story of what happens next has several twists and turns, but basically Joseph provides for his brothers, whom he recognizes as his brothers, without revealing his identity to them. Then comes the part of the story the lectionary puts in the readings for February 24, 2019. Joseph tells his brothers who he is, but they are “dismayed.” So he says to them: “Now do not be distressed, or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life.” And again: “It was not you who sent me here, but God.” Whereupon Joseph and his brothers kiss and make up.

Every time I read this story I want to say: “God did it? Really?” Genesis would have us believe that God brought about a human act of treachery and violence in order to accomplish some divine purpose. Genesis would have us believe that God took a young man’s freedom, took him from his home, family, and everything the young man knew, without his consent. Genesis would have us believe that God did all that and that it was all OK because God had some great purpose to accomplish through those unconscionable acts, namely, to save God’s favorite people years later during a time of famine.

And every time I read this story I have to say: “I don’t think so! The God I know, love, and seek in my horribly fallible human way to serve doesn’t do stuff like that. The God I know never would do stuff like that.” No, it was Joseph’s brothers who did something terrible to him, and it was precisely they who did it, not God. In the story God doesn’t tell them to do it. God’s doesn’t tell Joseph to go along with it because it will all turn out to be for the good in the end. In fact, God doesn’t actually appear in the story of Joseph and his brothers at all. So no. I’m sorry. What Genesis says about it to the contrary notwithstanding, God didn’t first try to kill Joseph, then sell him into slavery instead.

So if God didn’t do it, why does Genesis say that God did? The first part of the answer to that question, I think, is that Hebrew people in the ancient world that produced this text believed that everything that happened on earth was somehow God’s doing. The ancient people who told this story surely believed that if Joseph’s brothers sold him into slavery it was really somehow God’s doing. Ancient Hebrews believed that. I don’t. Genesis can lay what happened to Joseph (and a lot of even worse things) at God’s feet and say “You did it!” I can’t. Humanity’s catalog of horrors stops me from doing it. God didn’t create the Gulag and cause mass starvation of Soviet people in the 1930s. Stalin and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union did. God didn’t cause the Holocaust. Hitler and his Nazi henchmen did. We humans are tragically capable of immense cruelty toward our fellow humans. We can’t escape our culpability for doing it by pointing to God and saying “It wasn’t us, it was you” Genesis could say that. We can’t.

So no matter what Genesis says about it, God didn’t first plan to murder Joseph, then sell him into slavery instead; but we must then ask: Does that mean that this story of Joseph and his brothers has no meaning for us? Well, no. I don’t think it means that at all. I think we can see a profound truth in this story even if it isn’t the truth the story claims to tell. Let me use an example from my own life to illustrate the point.

On July 31, 2002, at about 10:45 pm, my first wife Francie died of breast cancer. She was only 55 years old, too young to die by our contemporary standards. Her death was nothing but a tragedy. There was and is absolutely nothing good about it. Her life ended too soon. Mine has gone on, and there has been much blessing in it since Francie’s death; but none of that makes her death anything but a tragedy and a deeply painful loss for me and our two children. The only sense in which I can say that God did it, that God ended her life too soon, is that God made us all mortal. But her too early death was a loss for God too. God didn’t do it.

God didn’t do it—and yet. That Francie’s premature death was a tragedy and that God didn’t do it doesn’t mean that God couldn’t bring something good out of it. I have long said that I was a better pastor than I otherwise would have been had I not lived through Francie’s final illness and death with her. That experience and the profound grief that followed helped me understand other people’s tragedies and grief in a way I never would have otherwise. That the people I served knew that I had lived through that loss and grief gave me a credibility with them in their time of loss and grief I otherwise would not have had. God used Francie’s illness and death and my suffering and grief over her illness and death to make me a better pastor. God brought that good thing out of what was and remains only a very sad and tragic thing.

But let’s make one thing perfectly clear here. That God was able to bring something good out of something horribly bad doesn’t mean that God caused the bad thing! Bad things happen. We are creatures not gods. Suffering and death are inescapable parts of created existence, of human life. Bad things happen, and the only good news in those bad things is that God loves us, holds us, and walks through them with us. And sometimes God is able to bring something good out of them. God did it with me after Francie’s death. That’s how I know it is true.

That’s how I think we should understand the story of Joseph and his brothers. Joseph’s brothers did a very bad, a profoundly sinful thing to him. They meant to kill him. Instead they sold him into slavery. There is nothing good about what they did. We must understand what they did as an act of pure evil, for that’s what is was. We must also understand that God didn’t do it, for the God we know in Jesus Christ never would. Yet the good news here is that God brought something good out of an act as evil as what Joseph’s brothers did to him. God can and does draw good things even out of terrible, sinful acts and events. That is a lesson I and many others have learned from life. It is a lesson we all can learn from the story of Joseph and his brothers.

So no, God doesn’t perform evil acts. God doesn’t cause suffering and death, but know this: God is with us holding us in love through our suffering and death. God can and does use suffering and death to bring good things to us and to God’s world. God did it with Francie and me. God did it with Joseph and his brothers. God can, and will, do it with you too. Thanks be to God. Amen.