And what am I to do about my instinctive reaction toward people who are judgmental? How do I, in my turn, keep from being judgmental? I know that I frequently err. But at least I don’t want those who disagree with me damned to eternal hell. I do want us all to meet with love at the Heavenly Banquet.
I don’t worry much about reincarnation one way or another. It is enough for me to believe that God’s love never ends. I don’t need to know how God is caring for Hugh now, only that Hugh is still alive in God, as much as I am alive in God.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross says that the subconscious mind cannot conceive of its own extinction. Most of the time the conscious mind cannot, either. We know that we are going to die, but most of the time we don’t believe it.
There is a theory that people have to finish working out unresolved relations with each other until love is perfected. How that is going to be brought about is in the hands of the Maker, and I am willing to leave it in the realm of mystery, in the design of the mysterium tremendum et fascinans. Faith is not for the things we can prove, but for the things we cannot prove.
The medical profession is in a time of crisis because of its amazing new technology. There are instruments and techniques that are wonderful lifesavers; some of them are also terrible death prolongers. The church is in its own time of crisis, seeming to fall into the same trap as the scientists, that of attempting to prolong the life of the body even when the spirit is gone.
The early people of Genesis did not have to face such ethical dilemmas. They lived to ripe old ages without the benefit of medicine. They were robust and healthy as long as the land yielded to them its grain and wine and oil, its milk and honey and olives. In times of famine people died of starvation—but not as many as are dying of starvation today, because it was a much less crowded planet.
The famine against which Joseph had stored up great reserves of grain spread far beyond Egypt, and when Jacob learned that there was food to be bought in Egypt he sent his ten eldest sons to go buy corn. Benjamin, his youngest son, he kept at home, fearing something might happen to him, as he believed had happened to Joseph.
And the irony of it was that it was Joseph himself who was in complete charge of dispensing food to the hungry, so it was to their own brother (though of course they had no idea of this, thinking Joseph long dead) that Jacob’s sons applied. After the long trek to Egypt, the ten of them prostrated themselves before him, like the sheaves of corn, like the stars of his dreams. They prostrated themselves before this magnificent stranger dressed in fine clothes and wearing all the emblems of power.
And Joseph saw his brothers and he knew them, but made himself strange to them, and spoke roughly to them, and said to them, “From where do you come?”
And they said, “From the land of Canaan to buy food.”
And Joseph recognized his brothers, but they did not recognize him.
Did Joseph have any expectation that his brothers would come to Egypt, looking for food? How strange, after all these years, to see these ten men, some of them middle-aged by now. How did he recognize them? From a family resemblance to Jacob? If he suspected that they might come, for the famine was bad in Canaan, that very expectation would have made it easier for Joseph to recognize them, those brothers who had been so jealous of him that they had plotted against him; some of them had even been eager to kill him. Paradoxically, he had both suffered and prospered because of them. But surely by now he would have seen and acknowledged his own part in what had happened, his arrogance, his insufferable bragging. He had brought at least some of his problems upon himself.
And Joseph [seeing his brothers prostrate before him] remembered the dreams which he had dreamed and he said to them, “You are spies, and have come to see the nakedness of this land.”
And they said, “No, my Lord, your servants are twelve brothers, the sons of one man in Canaan, and the youngest is at home with our father, and one of us is not.”
But Joseph repeated the accusation that they were spies, and said that the only way that they could prove that they were honest men was to bring their youngest brother to him. He would keep one of them hostage in Egypt, in prison, as surety, while they went back to Canaan for Benjamin. Meanwhile, he locked them all up for three days.
To have time to think. To decide what to do. Was revenge totally sweet, or was it bittersweet? Egypt was still the land of his exile. He longed for home.
At the end of three days Joseph brought his brothers out of prison, and again told them that one of them should be bound in prison (as Joseph had been bound). The others were to go and buy corn to relieve the famine at home, then go back and give food to their father. Then they were to bring Benjamin to Joseph.
“So shall your story be verified, and you shall not die.”
The ten brothers huddled in consternation, admitting one to another that they had been truly guilty about Joseph—and that was why this present distress had fallen upon them, with this strange lord standing by, darting glances at them.
And Reuben answered them, saying, “Didn’t I beg you not to sin against the child? And you would not hear. Therefore his blood must be avenged.” And they did not know that Joseph understood them, because he spoke to them through an interpreter.
At last Joseph was hearing his own language, words that must have shaken him, but he held himself back, speaking only in the language of Egypt. By now he would have been completely fluent in Egyptian, perhaps even dreaming in that language (as occasionally I used to dream in French), but the language of his birth, coming from his brothers, must have pierced him with homesickness.
And he turned himself away from them and wept.
He was to do considerably more weeping before finally the twelve brothers were reconciled, and Jacob was to see all his sons together again.
Men in Joseph’s day were not afraid to weep, had not yet been forced by society to repress honest emotion. I am glad that Joseph wept, because it meant that he was not concerned only with revenge, but also for his brothers, concerned for little Benjamin, not so little anymore, concerned for his father, who must be an old man by now.
I have wept for the loss of my husband, wept with our children, wept alone, wept in my bed at home, and sometimes in strange beds in hotel rooms. During the years of our marriage Hugh and I sometimes wept together, holding each other, not tears of self-indulgence or self-pity, but tears which are an appropriate response to the sorrows and losses of this world.
Joseph wept.
Jesus wept.
The shortest verse in the Bible is
Jesus wept.
Why did he weep?
He wept after his friend, Lazarus, had died, and before he had raised him from the dead. The people said that he wept because he loved Lazarus so, and that was probably one of the reasons.
My friend Tallis says that Jesus wept from sheer anguished frustration, because nobody understood what he was about, nobody, not one of his disciples, not one of his friends. He may have held on to the hope that Mary would understand, Mary who had washed his feet with rare oil and wiped them with her hair. But even Mary did not understand.
And perhaps, because of the paradox of Jesus being human as well as God, he wept because of the anguish of his mission. He knew that he was the Messiah, and yet he also knew that when he went to Jerusalem he would be captured and killed.
And he wept because of Lazarus, but not because Lazarus was dead. He had stayed away from Bethany to be sure that Lazarus was indeed dead. By the time Jesus got there Lazarus had been dead for four days. Martha, that blunt woman, put it graphically:
“Lord, by this time he stinketh.”
Lazarus had been dead for four days, had been for four days in the Presence, and Jesus had to bring him back from that bliss. And so he wept for Lazarus. Then he had the stone rolled away and called him back to mortality.
We don’t know much about Lazarus after his raising. Once when Jesus came to Bethany Lazarus was there at dinner with Mary and Martha, and peop
le came to stare. But it would seem that he was different after Jesus brought him back to life, still partly in the presence of God, homesick for heaven. And it was likely that he had to go into hiding because he, like Jesus, was sought by the confused and angry authorities.
Jesus wept.
The tears of Jesus dignify our own tears. I am grateful for that brief, two-word verse of Scripture, because it frees us to weep our own legitimate tears. When we are alone with God there is no need to put on a front.
Jesus wept.
Joseph wept.
Gad. We don’t know what Gad thought about God. But Gad grew up in the overarching shadow of the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the father of the twelve sons. They knew themselves to be called, specially called.
And one thing I learned in working on the fantasy which needed to be written before this book is that Gad was never separated from Christ; that Christ, the second Person of the Trinity, has always been, is always, and always will be available to all people and at all times. We are so focussed on the Incarnation, on Jesus of Nazareth, that sometimes we forget that the Second Person of the Trinity didn’t just arrive two thousand years ago, but has always been. Christ was the Word that shouted all of Creation into being, all the galaxies and solar systems, all the subatomic particles, and the wonderful mix of Creation that is what makes up each one of us.
Jesus said, to the horror of the establishment people,
“Before Abraham was, I am.”
In chapter 20 of Luke’s gospel Jesus has been questioned by the elders of the temple, who are trying to trick him. Finally he says,
“How is it that they say the Christ is the Son of David? David himself declares in the Book of Psalms, ‘The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet.’ David calls him ‘Lord.’ How can he then be his son?”
Another heresy down the drain, I hope. How can we blithely assign all those who lived before Jesus to the flames of eternal hell when they never denied Christ? Their way of knowing was inevitably different from ours, but God cannot be limited, and a God of love does not casually wipe out the prophets and the people who found Christ in the love of the Creator.
Paul talks about the journey from Egypt to the Promised Land, and the Rock that went before the people, and that rock was Christ.
So, for Gad, for Joseph, for Moses, for all of us, Christ always is.
My Christmas poem for this year runs:
He came, quietly impossible,
Out of a young girl’s womb,
A love as amazingly marvellous
As his bursting from the tomb.
This child was fully human,
This child was wholly God.
The hands of All Love fashioned him
Of mortal flesh and bone and blood,
The ordinary so extraordinary
The stars shook in the sky
As the Lord of all the universe
Was born to live, to love, to die.
He came, quietly impossible:
Nothing will ever be the same:
Jesus, the Light of every heart—
The God we know by Name.
But we find it hard to hold on to the impossible, so we tend to settle for the limited possible. And our vision of God dwindles, and we become selfish and hard of heart as we close ourselves off from love.
GAD’S WIFE
Had I known what a strange family I was marrying into I would have fought the match all the way. I thought I was marrying Gad. Instead I married Gad and his eleven brothers, including the one who was dead, torn into pieces by wild beasts—though I thought Gad’s expression strange as I was told this.
I do not mean that the brothers came to our tent or did anything unseemly. In fact, Simeon and Levi scarcely spoke to me, as though the wives of the sons of the slaves were less important than the wives of the other brothers. What I mean is that Gad was not Gad except as part of his brothers. The father, Jacob, and the brothers and their wives were the tribe. There was nobody else. They had their tribal god, and I was expected to abandon my home goddess and obey their god. Since their god never bothered me, that was all right, and nobody knew what I was doing when I left the tent to watch the moon rise, or suggested the best times for plantings.
My prayers were answered, and I gave Gad sons. And then, for myself and my own joy, I had daughters. I do not mean to complain. Gad was good to me, a vigorous lover and a good provider. And though his pride was in his sons he loved our little girls and played with them and made them laugh. But sons were what counted. How strange! How could a man have sons without a woman? But if Gad and his brothers thought of women at all, it was because they were useful as producers of men. And, of course, to keep tent, draw water, be available whenever desire arose.
We had, I suppose, a good life. My children had plenty of cousins as playmates as well as each other, and in their games no difference was made between the grandchildren of the two slave women and the grandchildren of the two wives.
Gad was the first son of Zilpah, the slave who was unloved Leah’s maid. She was less well thought of than Bilhah, dead Rachel’s maid.
Dead Rachel. Dead Joseph. Not dead to Father Jacob! They were ever present in his brooding eyes, in the down-twist of his mouth when he thought he was alone. Sometimes he would clutch Benjamin—my youngest brother-in-law, still smooth of cheek—clutch him so hard that the poor lad would squirm and try to break away. Benjamin, the beloved. The rest of the brothers are—sons. Father Jacob has sons, as he has camels and goats and sheep. He knows how to breed well, both man and beast.
He has grandsons. Oh, yes, he has grandsons. Between us, we have given him plenty, and granddaughters, too, and Reuben’s children are old enough to give their grandfather great-grandsons and daughters. He will like that. Sometimes I wonder why he does not collect gods as he collects the rest of his livestock. Between us, we would give him quite a few.
But I do not mean to be unkind. He is good to us, the old patriarch.
But what, I wonder, happened to Dinah, the one sister? Where is she? Benjamin asked me about her, once, telling me she had been his mother—or like his mother—after Rachel died giving birth to him. He loved Dinah, but even he does not know where she is, or why she is not with the rest of the family.
When I leave the tent to watch the moon rise I pray for Dinah. I pray that she was not sent away from home by men who do not understand the ways of women. There is a mystery about Dinah that in some way touches on Simeon and Levi, whose faces close in on the rare occasions that her name is spoken. I pray that she may have left the home tents for love of some man who will be good to her, and let her have her own home god, if that is what she wants.
But I will never know.
Asher’s bread is rich;
he provides fruit fit for a king.
GENESIS 49:20
When Jacob gives his blessings to his sons, he says,
“Asher, his bread is rich; he provides fruit fit for a king.”
Asher’s land was lush and productive, and he benefited from his geography.
Moses, in his blessing, says,
“Most blessed of the sons may Asher be! Let him be privileged among his brothers and bathe his feet in oil!”
And after all this we still don’t know a great deal about Asher, Zilpah’s second son, Jacob’s eighth. In Egypt, how did Asher feel when Joseph wept? Did he see that the great man was turning away because he had tears in his eyes? Or were the brothers too terrified by all that was happening to notice anything except that the great man thought they were spies, and was holding one of them in Egypt while the others went to fetch Benjamin? It was fearful and confusing. Why did the most powerful man in Egypt want their little brother? (Not so little anymore. By now, Benjamin was fully grown.)
Joseph wept.
One of the most important things we can do for each other in times of grief is to weep together. Words are useless. We are in the realm of ultimate mys
tery. Nothing speaks except touch and tears.
And, sometimes, anger. When Mrs. Pat Campbell’s son was killed in the trenches in World War I, George Bernard Shaw wrote to her, his beloved friend, starting the letter with “Damn damn damn damn damn.” That was compassionate understanding, outrage at the blasphemy of war. It was not sacrilegious, and was far more acceptable to God, I believe, than pious utterances about its being God’s will. Such “piosity” is an obscenity, not a comfort. Terrible things are not God’s will, but God can enter them with redemptive love, that is the promise of the Incarnation.
Was Joseph ever able to weep with his wife, Asenath? He was not allowed to eat with her, since she was an Egyptian and he a Hebrew, although he was allowed to sleep with her, know her, give her children. Did he ever weep in her arms?
I visualize Joseph turned away from his brothers, his shoulders shaking a little (did they think he was laughing at them?), his hand covering his face until he could turn and look at them again.
A formidable figure, this Joseph, with the power to hold Simeon in Egypt. (Since Simeon was one of the two brothers who had murdered Shechem, that may have had something to do with Joseph’s choice of hostage.)
Joseph sent off the other nine brothers for home, ordering his servants to make sure that not only should their sacks be filled with corn, but that their money should be returned to them—the money with which they had paid for the corn—and put in their sacks.
On their way home, when one of the brothers, we are not told which one,
opened his sack to give his ass provender at the inn, he saw the money, because it was right in the mouth of the sack.
And he said to his brothers, “My money is returned; look, it is in my sack!” and their hearts failed them, and they were afraid, saying one to another, “what is this that God has done to us?”
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