THE STORY OF JOSEPH – Genesis 37:23–24, 28; 39:2 – So when Joseph came to his brothers, they stripped him of his robe, the robe of many colors that he wore. And they took him and threw him into a pit. … Then Midianite traders passed by. And they drew Joseph up and lifted him out of the pit, and sold him to the Ishmaelites for twenty shekels of silver. They took Joseph to Egypt. … The LORD was with Joseph …
There’s a reason people in pain gravitate toward Joseph’s story. Joseph, the favored son of Jacob, suffered greatly. But in the end, every bizarre twist and turn in his story led to a beautiful resolution. It almost seems like a blueprint for enduring suffering: If you wait long enough, God will bring you, too, to glory and success.
So when we read that Joseph was attacked by his brothers, we think, Just wait. Sold into slavery? Just wait. Wrongly accused of assault? Just wait. Left in prison for years? Just wait.
And then, one day, Joseph’s waiting is over. He is raised to sit next to Pharaoh, the king of Egypt. He becomes the second most powerful man in the known world. He might have been the underdog for a while, but in the end, he has won.
One of the popular adaptations of this story, the musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, plays up this underdog approach to Joseph’s story. I have always loved this musical, in part because of the way it makes Joseph’s experience come alive. (It’s also the only way I remember the names of Jacob’s twelve sons.) But Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat falls prey to the underdog view of suffering. Each time the story turns against Joseph, the chorus sings to remind him:
Go, go, go Joseph, you know what they say, Hang on now, Joseph, you’ll make it some day. Don’t give up, Joseph, fight till you drop, We’ve read the book and you come out on top.
God really was doing something remarkable, even miraculous, in sending Joseph ahead to Egypt.
1 “Go, Go, Go Joseph,” text by Andrew Lloyd Webber, track 9, on Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (Canadian Cast Recording) (London, UK: The Really Useful Group Ltd., 1992)
Through his long years of suffering, Joseph was being put in a place to save the world—and God’s people—from famine. Because of Joseph and his dreams, the lineage God had begun in Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was allowed to continue—a lineage that would one day lead to Jesus.
Joseph, however, only realized this at the very end of his life. What preserved him in the previous years was not the underdog assurance that God would lead him to victory. What preserved Joseph was God himself. The refrain of Joseph’s story is not, “Hang on now, you’ll come out on top.” The refrain is, “God was with Joseph.”
In a sermon on Psalm 23, pastor Eugene Peterson wrote, “Our lives are lived in the company of both the Shepherd and the shadow.”2 We love Psalm 23 for its beautiful depictions of God’s love and protection. But Peterson is right: God does not meet us on the other side of suffering; God walks with us through suffering. We experience the shadow and we experience the Shepherd.
For many of us, the Christmas season is marked by pain and loss. What we need is not a promise that our story will have some Joseph-sized silver lining. What we need is a God who enters our pain so we’ll know we do not suffer alone. Mysteriously, this is precisely what God did, two thousand years ago, in the tiny town of Bethlehem.
2 Eugene Peterson, As Kingfishers Catch Fire: A Conversation on the Ways of God Formed by the Words of God (Colorado Springs, CO: WaterBrook, 2017), 101
Meditate:
Spend a few minutes allowing yourself to picture and feel some source of pain. Spend one more minute experiencing the reality that even in this space, God was (and is) with you.
