I cannot imagine why a preacher would forego the Old Testament lection for this Sunday – ever, but especially now, given the severe splintering we’re experiencing in society, and in the church. Still, Jesus and the Canaanite woman is a rich text as well (see below).
Genesis 45 is the theological high water mark of the Old Testament, and is a peer of even the best the New Testament has to offer. Reconciliation should be the fixed point in all our thinking, imagination, labor, and prayers.
You can’t just plop down in chapter 45 either; the backstory matters. Without over-explicating every detail, the preacher has to pick up where the story begins, in chapter 37, with a pathetically dysfunctional family, Joseph’s dream that was from God but felt like sham arrogance, the brothers’ cruel dispatching of him and then the wretched way they shattered their father’s heart, Joseph’s rise, and then fall, and then rise in Egypt. Don’t assume people know the story, but then don’t expend twelve minutes retelling it either. Urge your people to read it at home, promising it’s better than House of Cards or Game of Thrones.
Here’s an interesting detail from the Hebrew: of all his sons, Jacob loved Joseph best – because his deepest affection was for his mother Rachel, not the other mothers of his other boys. And so, Jacob dressed this son, not in an “amazing technicolor dreamcoat” (as in the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical - which is such silliness compared to his other work!), but (as the Hebrew puts it) in “long sleeves.” The other brothers wore short sleeves, meaning their labor was in the fields, in the heat, where briars would get tangled in long sleeves. Joseph was established in the house with those long sleeves, in a position of comfort and power over the brothers. It was that long-sleeved garment of privilege denied them that they bloodied and handed to their father.
Marilynne Robinson has reflected so profoundly on the backstory - those years between when they did what they did to Joseph and the rediscovery. How did Jacob live with those ten sons? He never asked if they had done away with Joseph – “a question too terrible to be asked, a confession too terrible to be made, and Jacob growing old in this silence.” And, with them, did Jacob shiver when he recalled being himself a horribly flawed sibling? “Since the presumed death of Joseph, Jacob would have noticed a grim bond among them that excluded him. And he would not have been able to put aside the bitter knowledge that sons can deceive their fathers. Alone as he had been with his guilt as he stood absurdly disguised, lying to blind old Isaac, he might find a semblance of it in the tense caution of their dealings with him.” And isn’t Robinson right about Jacob’s reunion with Joseph? “But the days of many years have been full of dread and loss and grief and suspicion, and no ending can be happy enough to change this.” Boom. Brilliant.
To focus on chapter 45 I wouldn’t spend too much time on Joseph’s character – which isn’t really the point. He has considerable brilliance, and a moral compass we do not see often in our days. But that would be to moralize a theologically robust story. The shock of God’s way comes when the famine compelled the brothers to go down to Egypt, the breadbasket of the world. In a stunning plot twist, it was Joseph from whom they had to ask for food. He would give them far, far more. Naturally they didn’t recognize him; but he recognized them. After dallying with them a bit, he dismissed his entourage from the room, let loose long pent-up emotions, gathered himself, dried his tears, and revealed his secret: “I am Joseph, your brother.”
When I preach on this, I let the emotion drip, I leave time for it to flow around the room and into the souls of people. His next words? “Is my father alive?” Again, in a pre-cell-phone era, he did not know, and hoped against hope; the brothers, who had despised father and brother, had to feel the gut-wrenchingness of his question. Mind you, the Bible doesn’t tell us how they felt! So we have space to find our own emotions from our own life stories in there somewhere – without reading in so much you don’t hear Joseph’s story any longer. The brothers had to be stricken with shock, horror, guilt, trepidation, remorse.
But how did Joseph deal with those who had treated him and his father so cruelly? His words must have taken light years to sink in: “Do not be distressed; don’t be angry with yourselves because you sold me here. For God sent me here to preserve life” (Gen 45:5). Even after the glorious reunion with his father, and then even after Jacob’s death, Joseph said the most remarkable thing: “Do not be afraid. You meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, so that many people should be kept alive” (Gen 50:20). Joseph forgave; he cast their common, broken life into the hands of God’s larger intentions. Testimony to God’s miracle – in the big story, but then also in Joseph’s gentle disposition. Who is capable of what he just said to them?
Notice the brothers weren’t given a “second chance,” another crack at getting it right. They never got it right; they never made up for what they had done. God did not depend on any attitude change among the brothers. God quite simply used the evil they perpetrated and transformed it into good.
Not that God caused them to do evil: God did not make them sell their brother or break their father’s heart. But God gathered up their misdeeds, the broken will of God, and pieced it all together for God’s good purpose. Joseph’s leadership was defined by seeing, understanding, and then articulating this. He brought healing to the fractured family, and food to a hungry world – or rather, his leading was God’s imperceivable, mysterious use of his life, and then his awed witness to it. It’s so important to get this nuance: in my Will of God book, I carefully distinguish that God uses evil but doesn’t cause it; and we need to say God uses every evil for good. Some evils are just evil, and it eviscerates and trivializes the suffering to try sunnily to claim God brings some good from it.
Joseph's refusal to enact his power reveals indirectly the heart of God. Marilynne Robinson once more: PIf human beings are to be granted individuality, agency, freedom, meaningful existence as human beings, then God must practice almost limitless restraint,” and then that, “to refrain, to put side power, is godlike." Philippians 2 anyone? She continues: God “can change and not change,” and “immutability is not an inevitable consequence of His nature, as if options were denied Him by philosophical consistency.”
Leadership expert Ron Heifetz speaks of the need for leaders who climb up into the “balcony” and see larger patterns in the workplace. Joseph was caught up far higher than the balcony; he was granted a view from heaven itself. Claus Westermann (in his Genesis 37-50 commentary) wisely noticed that God did not merely use the evil of the brothers; God could have done that without the brothers ever meeting up with Joseph. No, “God’s plan is to bring the evil devised by the brothers to good in such a way that there can be forgiveness.”
So many threads to follow. Reconciliation takes time, a long time. Reconciliation isn’t forgive and forget; it’s genuine healing – for everybody involved. Joseph needed the healing as much as the brothers and their father did. The beneficiaries of this reconciliation? Not just this family, but people who had never known them!
If ever a text shouted to the preacher “Trust me!” it is this one. You don’t need to make it relevant; it’s more relevant than anything you can devise. You don’t have to make it interesting or funny; it’s the greatest story ever told.
I might touch on “Joseph could control himself no longer.” We are control freaks – but the healing comes when we yield control and let the emotions roll. The emotion isn’t Oh, I feel God! but rather, Wow, God is releasing, and healing my emotions! Think of the joy when the hobbits are reunited in Rivendell after the ring is destroyed at Mordor (The Return of the King); J.R.R. Tolkien told a friend that when he wrote this scene, his tears kept smearing the ink. He never saw the video of course, but Peter Jackson handled this so well.
Or the scene in Good Will Hunting where Sean embraces Will and keeps repeating, “It’s not your fault, it’s not your fault.” Very Genesis 45ish. Of course, the climactic scene of all climactic scenes is the cross (“You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good”) – or is it the resurrection? Or that breakfast reunion by Galilee (John 21)?
Matthew 15:21-28. The story of the Canaanite woman (Syro-Phoenician in Mark!) is a doozy - all the more reason to preach on it! Floyd Filson, in his 1960 commentary on Matthew, suggested that he winked at her when he spoke these words, implying insider status for this one. Or was it a clever ploy on Jesus’ part to evoke deeper faith in her, or those watching? I'm pretty sure I prefer the notion of Jesus growing into a fuller ministry, realizing through this woman's chutzpah that he has more boundaries to cross - than thinking Jesus is omniscient and a winker!
Sarah Ruden’s new translation (The Gospels) quite rightly renders kunarion as “little doggies,” instead of “dog.” Try it. Better. More pitiful, more dismissive. Dogs, we might recall, did not enjoy warm relationships with humans back in Bible times.
Morna Hooker, noting how Jesus confined his attention to the Jews, suggested that “the Gentile woman requests a cure outside the context of Jesus’ call to Israel; she seems to be asking for a cure which is detached from the in-breaking of God’s kingdom, merely taking advantage of the opportunity provided by the presence of a miracle worker. This is perhaps the reason for Jesus’ stern answer; his healings are part of something greater and cannot be torn out of that context.”
Joel Marcus is mindful of the history of bad blood between Tyrians and Galileans – and how the farm produce of Galilee so often wound up in Tyre, while the peasants in Galilee went hungry. So Jesus’ words make a bit of compassionate sense. Or should we suggest, as many have, that Jesus had a growing moment, a learning experience, a maturation in himself? Mistakenly, he turned her away – and her persistence cracked open a bit of hardness in Jesus’ Jewishness to leave space for a desperate Gentile? Depending on the height of your view of Jesus’ humanity, this may or may not work.
Martin Luther examined this text and thought of the ways Christians are to persist in trusting God, even when God seems to turn his back on them. They must learn to see the ‘yes’ hidden in his ‘no.’ Much wisdom here – although the preacher dare not resort to trifling ideas such as those articulated in Garth Brooks’s crooning “Unanswered Prayers.”
The woman’s persistence has recently been likened to the persistence of women right insisting on their place in the church. “Nevertheless, She Persisted” became a popular slogan, t-shirt and hashtag this year. Persistence of all kinds is a biblical thing, falsifying the absurd notion of God’s will being associated with “the door was open.” Many open doors we most surely should not walk through. And many closed and bolted doors should be knocked down.
I am fond of Sheila Nelson-McJilton’s probing sermon, “Crumbs” – cited in Leonora Tubbs Tisdale’s great book, Prophetic Preaching. “Crumbs. That’s all they are looking for. Crumbs. Not the whole life. Not even a slice. Just crumbs. You and I want the whole loaf…” – and then she speaks of our wealth, access, all the poor lack. But then she presses further: “Crumbs. They want more than crumbs because deep in their souls, they know they deserve more. And yet they often do not know who to ask or how to ask…”
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