In Genesis, we read that Jacob’s 11th son, his first by Rachel, was his favorite. Fathering him late in life, the elder patriarch developed a special relationship with the handsome and meditative youth named Joseph. Because of this special bond, he gave his son an expensive and elaborately-decorated tunic to wear over his clothes, and as the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical so memorably puts it, “when Joseph tried it on, he knew his sheepskin days were gone.”
This seemingly lighthearted tale of favoritism and fashion soon turns tragic, and provides a commentary upon the human proclivity for vengeance, selfishness and treachery.
Joseph’s own brothers are beyond jealous of the gift, descending into the even deeper mire of envy. As Dante scholar Giuseppe Mazzotta explains, “All sins have some kind of positivity, except for one: and that’s envy. Because envy only likes nothing.”
Unlike jealousy, which desires an object and fears losing it, and so is a twisted misrepresentation of love, envy seeks only destruction. I explain to my undergrads that jealousy is wanting to steal your roommate’s iPod because you don’t have one; envy is wanting it to break so that no one can enjoy it.
As C.S. Lewis says, “It is like wishing that every nose in the universe were abolished, that the smell of hay or roses or the sea should never again delight any creature, because our own breath happens to stink.”
Envy is a corrosive and contaminating sin. The brothers didn’t want a coat of their own — they were merely resentful of any prominence being given to their younger sibling, whether deservedly or not.
Joseph enrages them further by discussing his dreams, where representations of his family (as sheaves of wheat and celestial bodies) pay him homage. They seek to spill their own brother’s blood, but settle merely for mockingly stripping him of his garment and betraying him for 20 pieces of silver, selling him as a slave to caravanning merchants. Because of these actions, Christians see in the blameless Joseph a foreshadowing typology of another innocent Lamb who will one day be handed over to captors for silver and selfishly deserted by those closest to him.
Joseph eventually goes on to become the vizier and official dream interpreter for the Egyptian Pharaoh. Without denying the importance and benefits of contemporary advancements in the social sciences and mental health practices, I note that Joseph’s claim — “Surely, interpretations come from God… It is not I, but God who provides the insight” (Gen 40:8, 41:16) — exhibits at least a complementary perspective to the Freudian assertion that a dream is always and only a disguised fulfillment of a repressed wish latently hidden in the waking subconscious.
God will one day speak to another Joseph through his dreams, influencing a decision to welcome an outcast, pregnant peasant woman that will forever change history. I answer Freud’s reductionist description of human beings as merely a bundle of sexually-driven and neurotic urges with an equally brilliant thinker’s claim: “We are the music makers and we are the dreamers of dreams.” (That’s Willy Wonka’s response to Veruca Salt’s denial of the existence of schnozberries, by the way).
Eventually, Joseph repays his brothers’ treachery with forgiveness, welcoming them to Egypt in a time of famine, and providing for them out of his abundance. Joseph’s words ought to resonate with our own approach to anyone (whether in our own political party, religion or country, or in that of any other) that trespasses against us: “Can I take the place of God? Even though you meant me harm, God meant it for good, to achieve his present end… Therefore have no fear, I will provide for you and your children.”
Again the New Testament picks up this theme, one ever-challenging and difficult, “Do not return evil for evil, or insult for insult; but on the contrary, a blessing, because to this were you called, that you might inherit a blessing” (1 Pet 3:9).
I do not claim that such a demand is easy or palatable, but I do assert that it is the standard to which we should hold ourselves. (For a moving example, think about John Paul II’s forgiving his potential assassin, Mehmet Ali Agca, upon release from the hospital for treatment of his bullet wounds).
Jesuit author Father James Martin recently wrote, “Christians are still in the midst of the Easter Season, when Jesus, the innocent one, not only triumphantly rose from the dead but, in his earthly life, forgave his executioners from his cross in the midst of excruciating pain. Forgiveness is the hardest of all Christian acts. (Love, by comparison, is easier.) It is also, according to Jesus, something that should have no limit. No boundaries.”
Joseph, who could have sent his brothers away empty-handed, or at the very least grudgingly lorded his acquired power over them, instead serves as a model of forgiveness and peacemaking for us to emulate.
Michael M. Canaris of Collingswood is an administrator at Fairfield University’s Center for Faith and Public Life and is on the faculty for the Department of Philosophy, Theology, and Religious Studies at Sacred Heart University.