Commentary on Torah Portion Vayechi (Genesis 47:28-end)

Our parasha brings to a close the story of Joseph with his death. This narrative is truly a unique genre within Torah; it has been called its one "novella". In this, it also concludes the whole book of Genesis/Bereshit. It is short, but packs a punch. There is never any doubt who is centre-stage. Not Joseph, but his father, Jacob/Israel. 
 
It is Jacob who gives his farewell discourse (Gen 49:1ff), blessing his sons (albeit sometimes entirely negatively), in poetry both beautiful and at times impossible to translate (as one may expect, if the impression of archaic origins is desired). It is Jacob who is expressly mourned by the Egyptians for seventy days (50.3). It is Jacob whose dying wish is fulfilled, as his remains are taken, with pomp and ceremony, to his chosen resting-place, with his ancestors in Canaan (50.7ff). What is more, in the only disagreement between Jacob and Joseph, Jacob prevails. Jacob blesses Joseph’s sons as his own, but, in doing so, privileges the second-born Ephraim over the first-born Manasseh, against Joseph’s wishes. Jacob is clear that, whatever the failings of his eyesight, he knows what he is doing (48:19f). It is Jacob’s agency which counts.
 
There is something instructive here, for any who would make plans to shape their own legacy: it can never wholly be in your control; any effort to steer others may fail, on many levels.  
 
What of Joseph’s own death – without poetic farewells, without explicit mourning, without a journey home? He dies at 110 (50.26). Robert Alter, in his notes to his translation, tells us this is the Egyptian ideal age, over against the 120 years of Hebrew understanding. Joseph is placed in a coffin – an entirely Egyptian contraption within the Bible. Is there bathos here? The story that begins with the expanses of the heavens and the earth ends with its focus reduced to a mummified corpse in a box, a box alien to the corpse, as alien as the land into which the box is laid. Is this a warning against assimilation? Is the stage being set for the Pharoah “which knew not Joseph” (Ex 1.8 KJV), and the wretchedness of slavery?
 
Something may be lost if this is our only reading of the brief account of Joseph’s death. Perhaps there is another character in this passage whose legacy is not fully honoured. I refer to Egypt itself. If we limit ourselves to Genesis, it is only fair to describe Egypt as wholly benign, a place of refuge, of rescue, for Abraham, as for Jacob and his children. We hear Joseph say of his own travails: “God intended it for good, so as to bring about the… survival of many people” (50.20, NJPS). The Hebrew is strong: lehachayot: “to cause to live/to make alive”. That giving of life was brought about by the synergies of wise Joseph, and (let it be said) attentive and responsive Pharoah, and the fertility of Egypt itself. We who know the fuller story may miss here the absence of any strictly religious animosity between Pharaohs and patriarchs. In Christian language, this has been called the time of “ecumenical bonhomie” (Gordon Wenham). So Joseph’s coffin, which is called an “aron”, may in fact be a type of the ark (“aron”) of the covenant to come; it houses a memory of divine providence.
 
Biblical Egypt, like every nation since, is not one thing, neither simply refuge, nor simply oppressor. Just as it is folly to hope – or to fear – that our own legacy will be entirely one predictable and predicted thing. This is to the good!

Written for Limmud on One Leg, 2025. 

Sermon. What have Tears to do with Forgiveness?

 

Sermon. St Michael and All Angels, 13 September 2020

Trinity 14 (Year A)

 

·         Genesis 50:15-21

·         Matthew 18:21-35

 

I wonder how much you identify as British, and how much as Church of England? I am not asking if you are British or a member of Church of England (that would be an impertinence), but how strongly you would identify with those labels. If it is important to you that you are British, or Church of England, you may well – had you been paying attention – you may well have been discomforted by this morning’s First Reading. For, in that reading, from the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament), someone weeps.

 

Weeping is not really a British thing, is it? It is not really a Church of England thing, either. It’s hard to imagine this conversation has ever taken place, in a Church-of-England household:

“How was the service this morning, dear?”

“It was great. Because of something that happened, I cried and cried.”

But today, in the Bible, we read of someone weeping.

Worse than that, here is a grown man weeping.

Worse even than that, here are twelve grown men crying,

and crying in each other’s company.

And no football is involved. 

 

Perhaps you might console yourself by saying that this account of so many adult, male, hot tears is the exception? I can give you no comfort. It’s a striking, if underdiscussed, thing, just how much crying there is in the beginning of the Bible, in Genesis. Are you ready?

 

1.       Hagar weeps as Ishmael’s life is threatened (21.16)

2.       Abraham weeps at the death of Sarah (23.2)

3.       Esau weeps when deprived of his father’s blessing (27.38)

4.       Jacob weeps as he meets and kisses Rachel (29.11)

5.       Esau and Jacob meet after estrangement, they embrace and weep (33.4)

6.       Jacob weeps when he thinks Joseph is dead (37.35)

7.       Joseph weeps secretly for the first time, when his brothers come to him (42.24)

8.       Joseph weeps secretly away from his brothers for the second time (43.30)

9.       Joseph weeps in front of his brothers, and does so so loudly as to be heard throughout Pharaoh’s court (45.2)

10.   Joseph and Benjamin embrace and weep, then Joseph weeps with all his brothers (45.14f)

11.   Joseph embraces Jacob on being reunited, and weeps, and that for “a good while” (46.29)

12.   The Egyptians weep for seventy days at the death of Jacob (50.3).

 

Then, and only then, do we come to Joseph and his brothers engaged in the mutual weeping that we have heard and you can read in today’s first reading (50.17f).

 

A lot of weeping. (A lot of kissing too, by the way – but that’s another sermon.) Not British. Not C of E.

 

The family of Jacob – who is Israel, remember – weep readily. The family of Jacob-Israel is not a model family. In no sense are they an idealised family. They play games with one another. Manipulative games. They deceive one another. They push one of their number – Joseph – right out of the family and into dire straits. This is not a family shining bright with the evident glory of unadulterated holiness. This is, very clearly, a family muddling through, given to favouritism, impulsiveness, and worse.

 

But another way of saying all of this is that this is a family who can be brought – whom Gd brings – out of their estrangements into reconciliation. And, in their reconciliation, they weep. Of course they weep.

 

*

 

I don’t know if this is actually uncomfortable for us. You may be untroubled by tears, but you may still think I am deflecting from today’s proper theological theme: forgiveness! In the Gospel, after all, Jesus tells us we must forgive others seventy-seven times, meaning without counting. And he reinforces this point by telling us the story of one whose debts were forgiven, who yet refused to forgive others their debts to him. If we don’t forgive others, we learn, we are being ungrateful to Gd.

What have tears to do with forgiveness?

 

*

 

I am often struck how wrong people get the Christian doctrine of forgiveness, and by people I mean both those who call themselves Christian and those who oppose Christianity too. Often people, inside and outside the Church, somehow pick up this line of thought:

 

·         When Gd forgives us, Gd pardons us. Gd says:
“You are guilty of sin, and worthy of punishment, but I choose not to punish you. You are reprieved. Sin no more.”

·         However, when Gd tells us we must forgive those who harm us, Gd means we must love them, and (the crucial point) we think “love” means we must show sympathy for them, wish them well, help them as they want to be helped, and feel warm and at least spiritually cuddly about them.

 

Sound familiar? I’ve pushed things to extremes, admittedly, but such notions do abound. And I say this is 180 degrees the wrong way round.

 

Rather,

·         Christianity does indeed teach that we must forgive others who harm us. But the base-line forgiveness we are obliged to offer – that is pardon. It is precisely pardon. We must forgo vengeance, and, at least if the other shows sorrow, regret and remorse, we must not act in a spirit of punishment. But we do not have to like those we must forgive. No.

·         But when Gd forgives us, that is always more than a word of pardon. You see, when people (ourselves including) ask: “Why did Jesus have to die? Why can Gd not just forgive sins?”, they are at heart thinking of Gd’s forgiveness as pardon. And of course Gd can pardon just by pardoning. If Gd says: “You are pardoned”, you are pardoned. No need for any sacrifice, or indeed any complication of any nature. But the weight of Gd’s forgiveness of us lies so much deeper than any word of pardon.   

 

*

 

Jesus, as a mother you gather your people to you:

You are gentle with us as a mother with her children;

often you weep over our sins and our pride:

tenderly you draw us from hatred and judgment.

You comfort us in sorrow and bind up our wounds:

in sickness you nurse us,

and with pure milk you feed us.

 

You may think these are the words of some modern liberal revisionist. You are wrong. They are words of St Anselm, 11^th-century Archbishop of Canterbury. Today, I am wondering if we can make them our own.

 

Jesus as a mother you gather your people..

often you weep over our sins…

in sickness you nurse us...

 

What have tears to do with forgiveness?

Here’s what I invite us to reflect upon.

 

Gd in Christ forgives, not as a judge saying: “I declare there is no punishment.”

Gd in Christ forgives, not even as a wise therapist, nodding and writing things down concerning your case.

Gd in Christ forgives through a nursing carer’s touch,

and through tears.

Because Gd in Christ longs for our company,

and for us to get a lively and strong sense that we are made for the company of each other within the company of Gd.

So all our sins simply get in the way of our own way to our own vocation - our own fulfilment and joy.

And that pains Gd.

In that it pains Gd, it doesn’t make Gd less Gd.

It doesn’t change who Gd is.

We cannot wound Gd so as to disable Gd.

But!

But the Christian claim

– and I’d want to say it’s a claim of the whole Bible –

is that Gd, who is free, has freely chosen so to order things

that we, in our frailty, are partners with Gd,

and, when we fail,

Gd both

·        freely and generously and lovingly offers us the fulness of reconciliation and spiritual healing

and,

·        all the time, Gd weeps,

weeps at the pain of the messes we put ourselves and others in.

What have tears to do with forgiveness?

 

If we can sense this connection,

if we can get just the hint of a glimpse of the spark of the light of this,

our forgiving others will not be difficult.

As people bathed in such forgiveness,

we will want to forgive others.

As for when we don’t manage it,

we needn’t beat ourselves up.

This is a lifetime’s work.

But, make no doubt about it,

we are called

to enter into that virtuous circle of forgiving reconciliation,

starting now,

even if…

through tears.

Amen.