There were times, I’m sure, when Jacob must have agonized with regret over his showing to his other sons that he loved Joseph more than all of them. Yes, I can appreciate that when a man approaches old age, he treats any proof of his virility with extra special love, and certainly Joseph being a child of Jacob’s old age would qualify for that kind of attention. Yet, any of us here who has an ounce of wisdom in us can see the makings of a terribly dysfunctional family system in the household of Jacob and his twelve sons. Joseph had all the makings of an imp, a pipsqueak, a pest, a callow lad filled with all the narcissistic self-absorption that any 17 year old boy with raging hormones could inflict on his family. Jacob was the doting sugar-daddy. His older brothers could not even say, “Good-day” or “Hello” to him. Perhaps the Bible is describing a family you know well.
A word needs to be said about this coat Jacob dressed his coddled son up in. It is described variously as a “coat of many colors” or “a coat with long sleeves.” In any case as we know from elsewhere in the Bible, it was a coat of the latest fashion and could be worn equally by men or women who wanted to parade themselves in regal dress. Picture it like a dressing gown or a magician’s robe. It infuriated his brothers to see Joseph prancing around in it. Who does he think he is? Some prince? Little did they know. And it seems to just get worse. Joseph has two dreams which he tells his family.
Hear, I pray you, this dream……
behold, we were binding sheaves in the field
and, behold, my sheaf arose, and also stood upright;
and, behold, your sheaves stood round about, and bowed down to my sheaf.
Behold, I have dreamed a dream more;
and behold, the son and the moon and the eleven stars bowed down to me.
Behold, behold, behold. The teenaged boy repeats his dreams in breathless wonder and wide-eyed amazement. I believe he is crying out for help to the only persons he can talk to. Others may think that Joseph is just being Mr. egotistical smarty-pants. But I don’t. I hear his breathless stories as a cry. “Help me understand what’s going on inside me. I want someone to listen with me to these strange voices, these weird pictures of my future destiny.” I hear him asking his brothers and his father, “Won’t you just help me figure out who I am to be with my potential?”
Seventeen-year-old Joseph is Mr. Teenager of the Bible.
Seventeen-year-olds live lives of not-yet, but to-be.
That’s Joseph, surrounded by his dreams that present scary pictures of an unclear greatness. Seventeen-year-olds live lives of expectancy and hope which they experience right now as unsettledness, yearning and hunger. Joseph’s dreams surround him with a kind of chronic shadow of his destiny. Joseph wears a coat of
many colors, a princely coat. He has dreams that promise a regal future. What can it mean?
Go with me on the assumption that his telling of the dreams is actually a cry for help from one who senses himself to be especially gifted. But as we know from the rest of this story, soon, the family’s conspiracy not to let Joseph be Joseph will become a conspiracy not to let him be. Jealousy, envy, hatred, hostility on the one hand, and doting and spoiling love on the other, conspire in wrapping Joseph in smothering bonds—murder is in the air.
Later, out in the fields the brothers throw Joseph into a pit, and then they sell him as a slave to a caravan going down to Egypt. They return to their father with a tattered coat of many colors now stained with animal’s blood as evidence for their story that they had discovered their brother slain by a wild beast. To his brothers, Joseph is out of the picture. But his father never forgot him. The last verses of the opening of the story of Joseph I read today were these: But his father kept the matter in mind.
The story of Joseph stretches from the beginning I read today in chapter 37 to the end of the book of Genesis in chapter 50. This is a story of father and sons. Within those 13 chapters there are not less than ninety-two occurrences of the word “father.” Nowhere else in the Old Testament do we find such a focus on fatherhood.
His 92-times mentioned father never forgot him. What has happened to the boy of my dreams and to my boy and his dreams? What is yet to happen to me, as old as I am, because of my son and his dreams? Pitting hope against hope, Jacob never forgets his son.
And Joseph never forgets his father. Never forgets that his father had been the object of a mother’s spoiling love. Never forgets that his father as a young man had to leave under force to escape a murderous brother. Never forgets that while his father was in exile God was with him. Never forgets that his father also had a dream of future greatness that came true. Joseph never forgot.
Joseph in the pit where his brothers threw him, or Joseph in Egyptian solitary confinement where he is consigned to oblivion, holds to life only by one thread, the other end of which is in his father’s hands. Whether they know it or not does not change the fact. The fact is that only because Joseph continually embraces his father in memory does he stay alive. Likewise, only because Jacob continually embraces his son in memory does he stay alive.
Now if your thoughts have been wandering, stop a minute and bring them back. It gets a little tricky right here. The words in the Bible say that Jacob never forgot Joseph. In the big picture that means that Jacob, the adult, practices a fatherhood that embraces not only having a son, but being a son. All of us are always sons or daughters. We never stop being sons and daughters. We never finally arrive. We never stop growing. We are always living to some degree in the not-yet but to-be zone.
As a son lives in hope, so Jacob lives in hope. As a son is an unfinished male, so Jacob remains unfinished, open to surprise and wonder. That is the way he stays alive all those years of not knowing the whereabouts of his Joseph until the right time when Joseph reappears to save his family from dying of hunger.
You never get your children off your mind. They never stray far from your conscious thoughts. Though you will see them from time to time, you still wonder and worry across the miles that separate us. But worry and anxiety are only the dark side of the coin. The bright side is the new experiences that will come to your children as they follow their dreams, and the new experiences that will come to us as their dreams unfold. Our discipline is to be ready, to embrace our own unfinished-ness. Our discipline is to live more vigorously into our own not-yet but to-be zone. I’m sure that many of you have already come to this conclusion in your own lives as you have seen your children go away. Adulthood that continues to embrace childhood keeps the bond of life strong across barriers of time, space, and change.
An adult man is incomplete, off balance, one-sided, distorted, unless he stays connected with the boyish part, the son he was and always is. The blessing of sonhood can grace a man’s lifetime so that he never quite surrenders the savor of the mystery, the beyondness, the otherness of what life affords him. In that way every man remains forward looking and welcomed as a friend by the younger generation. The same can be said for an adult woman.
Jacob kept his Joseph in mind not knowing what his future might be, but knowing that their two lives were inseparable. He behaved in ways that showed he was keeping alive the boyish part of his soul that strains to see into the mystery of what life might afford them. People who walk the pages of our Bible are unfinished
sojourners. They expect to come into something more than they presently experience. Some day all our hoping and our straining forward will blossom into a stunning fullness. For Jacob it was enough to see his large family of twelve sons and their tribes comfortably settled in Egypt under the watchful eye of Joseph now risen from the depths of the pit to prime minister. This was his “enough” moment with his children. He is grateful to God. There’s not a kid among us who couldn’t be happier in such a place.