Living the Dream

Joseph for Today

Introduction

by Pete Wilcox

republished with permission from Paternoster Press

The Joseph Story: A Text for Today

For centuries Jewish, Christian and Moslem parents, and more recently secular ones too, have called their children Joseph or Josephine: from Josephine Butler (the English social reformer) to Josef Stalin (the Russian dictator); from José Mourinho (the Portuguese football manager) to Giuseppe Garibaldi (the Italian revolutionary); from “Smokin’ Joe” Frazier (the black American boxer) to Joseph Rowntree (the English industrialist and philanthropist). Some, like Yusuf Islam (formerly the musician Cat Stevens), have chosen the name for themselves. For the last five years (and probably longer than that) in both the UK and the USA, the name Joseph has featured among the ‘Top Ten’ most popular boys’ names. Often the name has presumably been chosen for its biblical associations: with Joseph, the husband of the Virgin Mary; and beyond him, with Joseph, eleventh son of Jacob, the eponymous ancestor of Israel.

Even outside communities of faith, the story of that Joseph (found in Genesis 37-50) is known, rehearsed and valued. The official web-site for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s famous musical, ‘Joseph and his Techni-colour Dreamcoat’ estimates that almost forty years after its inaugural production in 1969, the show is still being performed in about 500 UK schools each year. So this story has a broad appeal.

But it is particularly a text for today. In many parts of the world (certainly in the UK and in the USA), the Christian Church is facing a double crisis: a crisis of decline on the one hand; and a crisis of disunity on the other.

The crisis of decline is, for many denominations, an attendance crisis and a financial one. The number of people attending public worship in Britain, for example, has been falling for decades, and despite some encouraging signs (individual congregations bucking the trend, especially in suburban areas; ‘fresh expressions’ of church promoting new opportunities for worship, especially midweek), the evidence does not yet suggest the pattern has been reversed. This attendance crisis is often compounded by a financial one: not least because of an increasing pensions’ burden, shrinking congregations are being asked to meet costs (relating chiefly to the provision of stipendiary ministries) which are rising sharply year by year. Most Dioceses in the Church of England, for example, are in acute difficulty balancing the books; and the situation is not much different in other historic denominations. Since 1980, the percentage of the population affirming allegiance to any church denomination has dropped more than 20% in Belgium, 18% in the Netherlands and 16% in France. Across Europe as a whole, the number of people who identify themselves as Roman Catholic - by far the biggest denomination on the Continent - has fallen by more than a third since 1978.

In addition there is a crisis of ‘disunity’, relating to controversies especially over the place of women in ordained ministries and the place of practising homosexuals within the church.

If there was ever a time when the two aspects of this double crisis (the decline on the one hand and the disunity on the other) were separate, that day is long gone. Generally speaking, in Britain, the congregations which have been most effective evangelistically in the last ten years (and have defied the trend of decline), have also been highly effective in encouraging the discipline of tithing among their members (making such churches centres of wealth). On the whole, these same churches tend to be charismatic and evangelical in style and so tend to adopt conservative, traditional stances in relation to the issue of both women in leadership and homosexuality. In the USA and Africa, of course, the polarisation of wealth, growth and conservatism on the one hand and poverty, decline and liberalism does not exist: but in those parts of the world too, wealth, growth and theological stance are thoroughly intertwined.

The church needs always to be hearing and responding to the Word of the Lord. In a time of crisis that need is most urgent. In seeking to respond faithfully to God in the face of decline and disunity, the church is bound to attend carefully to what the Lord is saying. But where is the Word of God to be heard?

It can be heard in the story of Joseph. There are obvious reasons for this. For one thing, the story of Joseph is about living faithfully in the face of adversity. In the first half of the story, the adversity is a personal one: Joseph is wronged by his own brothers and then by Potiphar and his wife. Later in the story, the adversity is a social one: not just Joseph’s family, but all the world, face famine and starvation.

There are good grounds to suppose that a church in the midst of adversity may find encouragement and inspiration and may hear the Word of the Lord in a story set in a time of adversity. Moreover, in adversity, Joseph wrestles with the issues of money, sex and power. These are just the issues over which the church finds itself in controversy today. Of course, these issues have always represented a kind of unholy trinity for Christian disciples, which is why nuns and monks have traditionally taken vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. But it is the context of adversity that makes the story of Joseph a promising place within the tradition for the contemporary church to turn as it seeks to live out the will of God.

Secondly, the story of Joseph is a story about the costly experience of forgiveness and reconciliation. In the decisive act of the story, Joseph is sold into slavery in Egypt by his brothers in Canaan. The story makes it clear that this was an atrocious thing for his brothers to do to him. But it also makes it plain that Joseph himself was no saint and to some extent provoked their hostility. The story portrays the maturing of Joseph and his brothers in the face of the adversities that beset them, so that they can be truly reconciled. An important and neglected feature of the story is the fact that although Joseph and his brothers are superficially reconciled about half way through the narrative (in Genesis 42), it is not until the very end of the story (in Genesis 50) that the reconciliation is complete. After seven chapters, their reunion is only physical; it is another seven chapters before it becomes something profoundly emotional.

There are also good grounds then to suppose that a church in the midst of disunity may find encouragement and inspiration and may hear the Word of the Lord in a story in which trust is not rebuilt between the estranged parties overnight. Part of the challenge facing the church is how to maintain relationships which are strained and how to repair those that are broken. The church faces this challenge locally, nationally and globally. Again, the story of Joseph a promising place in the tradition for the contemporary church to turn as it seeks to live out the will of God when its relationships are strained and broken.

The Joseph Story: A Drama in Fourteen Episodes

The Joseph story is sometimes described by scholars as ‘the Joseph cycle’. This is a helpful term. In Genesis, there are similarly ‘cycles’ of stories about Abraham (Genesis 12-25) and Jacob (Genesis 26-36); and in other parts of the Bible, there is a ‘David Cycle’ for example (1 Samuel 16-1 Kings 2) and one about Elijah (1 Kings 17-2 Kings 2). A ‘cycle’ in this sense is a series of connected and continuous narratives about a central figure, in which the component parts nevertheless have their own separate coherence and integrity – like episodes in a TV drama series perhaps (or like the individual parts in a ‘cycle’ of ‘Medieval Mystery Plays’).

It is on this understanding that the Joseph story is approached in the chapters that follow. Each ‘episode’ is treated as a drama in its own right, made up often of several distinct ‘scenes’; but with due attention to its place in the unfolding of the narrative as a whole. The narrative sequence and chronology are respected – and interrogated for meaning.

Often, but not always, a chapter in this book corresponds to a chapter of the biblical text. In each chapter special effort has been made to follow the contours of the Bible passage, attending carefully to its shape and structure. The text has been read realistically, attending to the literary details in the story. Like a novel, this text has to be taken at face value to some extent, if its meaning is to be appropriated. There has been a certain amount of reading between the lines of the text, but always with the aim of enabling the narrative to have its full dramatic impact.

To assist in this task, the biblical text, divided up into ‘episodes’ and ‘scenes’ is printed together with the commentary. The translation is the ‘anglicised’ New Revised Standard Version – chosen for the balance it achieves between a closeness to the Hebrew text on the one hand; and a fluency of contemporary English on the other.

But what is offered here is also ‘a theological exposition’ – and to be specific, a Christian theological exposition. This does not mean that in the following chapters every opportunity has been taken to draw parallels between Joseph and Jesus. There is a long tradition of this kind of ‘typology’ in the church. The aim in this book has been a little different. This book asks what the Word of the Lord might be to the church through this story today, and attempts to answer the question ‘in the light of Christ’. What do we learn from this text, in other words, given the nature of God as he has made himself known in Jesus Christ?

There is little here, therefore, in the way of interaction with other interpreters of the text (there are no footnotes) or with current academic scholarship. During the last two hundred years or more, much has been written about the development of this text as part of the book of Genesis. It is clear that the text has a history: it took shape over time, almost certainly at first in an oral culture as a spoken tale. It wasn’t written in a single sitting by a single author. But the form it now has, it has had for at least two thousand years, and what is offered here is a reading of this text in this form. Readers wishing to pursue questions of source criticism should turn to the standard commentaries. In particular, where this book comments on the Hebrew text, its observations are derived from the insights of others.

In my own reading of the story, I have been especially helped by the interpretations of John Calvin, Claus Westermann, R S Wallace, R T Kendall, Robert Alter and Walter Brueggemann – and readers who know their work will doubtless discern my indebtedness, which I am glad to acknowledge. I have also been greatly assisted by the opportunity to work through the story twice in bible study and sermon series at St. Paul’s Church at The Crossing in Walsall, and by the perception of members of the congregation there. It is to them that this book is dedicated, with a thankful heart.

Thanks also to Jonathan and Tom for encouraging me to ‘do Bible reading’; and to Cathy for encouraging me to write – as if one writer in the family were not enough.

Canon Dr Pete Wilcox, is Canon Chancellor of Lichfield Cathedral. Chapter Four of Living the Dream: Joseph for Today (Paternoster Press, 2007) will also be published on Fulcrum.