Sold into Egypt

by Madeleine L'engle

  Was it Levi who found the money? Did he and Simeon think of God when they slaughtered Shechem and his tribe? Were the brothers thinking of God when they planned to kill Joseph? When they sold him into Egypt?

  When they got home they told their father all that had happened, how the lord of the land spoke roughly to them and accused them of being spies, despite their protestations that they were simply

  “twelve brothers, sons of our father; one is not, and the youngest is this day with our father in the land of Canaan.”

  They also told their father that the lord of Egypt had informed them that the only way they could prove their innocence was by leaving Simeon in jail until they brought their youngest brother, Benjamin, to Egypt. Then and then only would the great lord believe that the brothers were not spies, and Simeon would be restored to them.

  Jacob put his arms around Benjamin in anguish, holding, shielding the beloved flesh of his youngest son.

  The brothers had opened only one of their sacks on their way home. Now they opened the others, and each one of them found that his bag of money was in his sack, and they were afraid, and so was Jacob. He wailed,

  “You are robbing me of my children. Joseph is no more. Simeon is no more. And now you want to take Benjamin. All this I must bear.”

  Again it was Reuben who intervened. He promised his father the lives of his own two sons if he did not bring Benjamin back to him.

  “Put him in my care and I will bring him back to you.”

  It was a generous and rash offer. Reuben did not ask his wife, he simply made this wild promise. But it was not enough for Jacob. He cried,

  “My son is not going down with you, for now his brother is dead and he is the only one left to me. If anything should happen to him on the way, you would bring down my grey hairs with sorrow to the grave.”

  Benjamin alone is left to me! Reuben turned away. Benjamin alone? What about the other ten? Was it only for his beloved Rachel’s children that Jacob truly cared?

  Jacob was too involved in his own grief to understand what he was doing to his sons. And by now perhaps they were used to being second-best. They all lived near their father, with their wives and children, and they lived well. Their flocks had increased, and, until the famine struck their gardens had grown, their fields and flocks had prospered. They knew themselves to have a goodly heritage.

  But Jacob was still immersed in grief, grief for Rachel, for Joseph he thought to be dead. He could not bear any more death. What did he believe about Rachel? About Joseph? About his fathers, Isaac and Abraham?

  In the creed, as I say it each day, I affirm that “I believe in the resurrection of the body.” I don’t need to belabour my expressed belief that we don’t know how that body is going to be resurrected, or what it is going to be like. If Paul could believe in a spiritual body so, most of the time, can I. It is yet another mystery of the Word made flesh.

  The Episcopal Church is a credal church. When I go to the Congregational Church near Crosswicks there is no creed, but there is an “Affirmation of Faith.” Wheaton College requires its faculty to sign a “Statement of Faith,” and I can’t see much difference between creeds and affirmations and statements. By whatever name it is called, most religious establishments express what they believe in one way or another. And these expressions are all inadequate. What we hold in common is the affirmation of our faith in the mystery of the Word made flesh.

  If that Word should come to another planet in another galaxy with different life forms, and be made manifest according to the flesh of that planet, this different incarnation would still be the same original Word made flesh. That Word may express itself in many images, many languages, each equally the true Word.

  We are given a unique glimpse of the mystery of the Word in the wonder of the Transfiguration, when briefly James and John and Peter were allowed to see the radiance of their Lord, bright and glistening and wholly other. Is that how we will appear at our resurrection?

  We are given further glimpses when we remember that after the Resurrection Jesus was never recognized by sight, though he ate fish with his disciples, shared their bread and wine, to prove that the resurrection body was true body.

  David Steindl-Rast reminds us that the word spirit means breath, and that breath stands for life, so to be spiritual means to be alive. The spiritual body that Paul talks about is a real body that is truly alive—truly aware, truly being—as most of us are alive only occasionally.

  Did Jacob have any such hope? We don’t know. But he rebelled categorically at the idea of letting Benjamin go to Egypt. His roars are like that of the psalmist many generations later.

  “I will say to the God of my strength, ‘Why have you forsaken me? All day long they mock me and say, Where is now your God?’ ”

  I, too, have cried out with the psalmist,

  “You are the God of my strength; why have you put me away from you?”

  There was no hesitation in Old Testament days about crying out to the Lord in times of trouble.

  Awake, O Lord! Why are you sleeping? Arise! Do not reject us forever. Why have you hidden your face and forgotten our affliction and oppression?

  In Psalm 13 the appeal is even stronger:

  How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and every day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me?

  I do not believe that God is ever absent from us. There may be times when God’s face seems hidden, but if we know where to look, it’s always there.

  There have been many times, such as the captivity out of which the psalmist was crying, and often in the world’s history, and in our own personal histories, when we cry out like the psalmist. And in our crying out we try to come to terms with whatever it is that is troubling us (“No! Benjamin shall not go!”), and we struggle to be human.

  We make a terrible error when we think that to be human means to be perfect, some kind of unerring Christian model that cannot exist in reality. Only God is perfect. To be human is to be able to laugh, to cry, to live fully, to be aware of our lives as we are living them. We are the creatures who know that we know, unlike insects who live by unthinking instinct. That ability to think, to know, to reflect, to question, marks us as human beings. And our humanness includes an awareness that we are mortal. To be a human being is to be born, to live, to die. We have a life span. George Macdonald reminds us that Jesus came to us in a human body not so that he would be like us, but so that we would be like Jesus. Jesus died to his human life, and what he demands of us is equally hard, never sentimental or easy, and it is always part of that call to be human.

  We don’t know what Jesus looked like, but it’s a pretty safe guess that he didn’t look like most greeting-card representations of him; it is not likely that he was a blue-eyed blond. He was a Jew, and he was a carpenter. He was a strong, rough-hewn man.

  Dr. Paul Brand tells of a time when he was a student in England and his aunt went in to London to hear a famous speaker. She came back absolutely shattered because the speaker had talked about an historian, the only historian we know of who was writing at the time of Jesus, and recorded Jesus as an historical figure. And the historian referred to Jesus as a hunchback. This news shook Paul Brand’s aunt badly. Brand himself was less upset. He remarked that because there was a great deal of TB of the spine in those days it was quite possible that Jesus’ back wasn’t quite straight. And he said, “I don’t mind. I really don’t mind.” Well, I don’t, either.

  Among the early church fathers were those who talked of Jesus as being small, frail, long-faced, with eyebrows that joined, dark-skinned, a beautiful and ugly hunchback. In the apocryphal The Acts of John is this passage:

  “What does this youth want of us? Why is he calling us from the shore?” said my brother James to me.

  I said, “My brother James, your eyes must be dimmed by the many sleepless nights we have spent on the lake. Do you not
see that the man standing on the shore is a tall man with a joyful face of great beauty?”

  My brother said, “I do not see him like that. But let us row ashore and we shall see.”

  When we hauled up the boat, Jesus himself helped us to make it fast. When we left the place to follow him, he appeared to me as a bald man with a thick-growing beard while to my brother James he seemed a youth with but a faint down on his cheeks, and we could not understand and were amazed.

  And so it often happened, and he would appear in forms even more marvelous, sometimes small of stature with crooked limbs, sometimes as a giant reaching for the heavens.

  Perhaps he appears to each of us according to our need and according to what God wants of us. We are not to get stuck with any one image, no matter how dear.

  If you will notice, the great novelists describe their secondary characters in far more detail than their protagonists. One reason for this is that if the protagonist is not too closely described, it is easier for us to identify with whoever the hero or heroine is—to put ourselves in that person’s body.

  But another reason is that we see those we love with far more than the outer eye. Think of someone you care about most dearly. Close your eyes and try to visualize that person. It isn’t easy, because what we love in someone is far more than just what that person looks like. It is much easier to visualize an acquaintance—someone you do not know with your heart.

  So we do not know what Jesus looked like any more than we know what those dearest to us look like. But we do know what they are like. We know them in movement, with their funny little idiosyncrasies that can sometimes irritate us but are basically lovable. We know the humanness in them, so that at the very best we know Christ in them. Jesus came to us to call us to be fully human, and Christ is still calling us to that fullness of humanity.

  All of the heresies about Jesus Christ come about because we over-emphasize the divinity at the expense of the humanity, or overemphasize the humanity at the expense of the divinity. Jesus was equally human and divine, and that has always been difficult for us to accept, much less comprehend.

  The great hoo-hah about Last Temptation of Christ a while ago came about because of this. I did not see it because I heard it wasn’t a very good movie, and Jesus, as usual, was not cast strongly enough. But many of the movie’s detractors also had not seen it, and what they were upset about was Jesus’ temptations, because these people are (once again) emphasizing his divinity at the expense of his humanity. But we are told that Jesus was tempted in everything, just as we are, but that he did not give in to the temptations.

  When Satan tempted Jesus after his baptism, and Jesus rejected the temptations, Satan left him for a time. Satan did not let go easily. Immediately after Peter recognized Jesus as the Messiah, the Promised One, Jesus talked of his return to Jerusalem and the trials he must suffer, and Peter protested that this must never happen, and Jesus cried fiercely,

  “Get behind me, Satan!”

  Of course he did not look forward to the betrayal, the pain, the cross. But he did not give in to the temptation to emphasize his divinity and to forget his humanness.

  The more human we become, the more closely we follow Jesus, the less will Satan be able to tempt us.

  One of Satan’s temptations is virtue—making us believe that not only can we be virtuous, but that we can be virtuous by our own merit. And Satan confuses virtue with moralism and legalism. But virtue in Scripture is power, loving power. When the woman with the issue of blood touched the hem of his garment, Jesus felt the virtue drain from him.

  Satan tempts us to make our virtue a matter of pride. And indeed, pride goes before a fall. Recently we have had several examples of this in Christendom. These people who fell from their pinnacles of virtuous pride were not bad people. They were, on the outside, moral. They tithed, they conducted services, they proclaimed themselves models of what people ought to be, and their very goodness produced pride, and the pride, in some cases, produced a terrible fall. Perhaps if they had preached less about the anger of God and dwelt more on God’s forgiveness they would not have done what they did.

  Jesus was never proud. He simply was. It was the pride of the Pharisees which made Jesus such a threat to them, because he challenged them to let go of their pride and be human. Being human was too frightening—too demanding. And so they tried to trap Jesus.

  Recently I read the galleys of a book in which the author rather casually referred to Jesus as a wimp who was into sin, punishment, fear of life, denial of the flesh. Seeing Jesus that way seems to be a human tendency. We are not able to handle the Scriptural character who was robust and open. His first miracle was at a Jewish wedding feast where the guests had already had plenty to drink. But he went ahead and turned water into wine anyhow. Lavishly. And just as lavishly he poured out his own blood for us.

  Jesus was lavish in all ways. He loved to laugh, to make jokes. He had a short temper; he occasionally blew his stack. His friends were not “the right people.” Most, though not all of them, were from the wrong side of the railroad tracks, and those who belonged to the establishment were often afraid to be seen with him; Nicodemus came to visit him at night, lest he be seen in Jesus’ company by his powerful friends at the Sanhedrin. The things that bothered Jesus most in people were hardness of heart, coldness of spirit, self-righteousness, judgmentalness. And he made it very clear that separating people into “us” and “them” was not a good idea. But he did demand that we be human (and remember, to be human does not mean to be perfect; indeed, to be perfect is inhuman). Though we are all called to bear within us the image of God, that image is expressed not through perfection, but through faith, love, passion.

  What about the mandate to be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect? The word perfect comes from the Latin and means to do thoroughly. So, if we understand the word that way, we might say that it means to be human, perfectly human, and perhaps that is what we are meant to understand by this command which is on the surface a contradiction to Jesus’ emphasis that only his Father was good, only his Father was perfect. We human beings are to be human—to be perfectly human, not indefectible or impeccable or faultless or superhuman, but complete, right, with integrity undivided. I looked that up in my old thesaurus given me by my father when I was in high school. But no dictionary or thesaurus is going to define humanness for us. The storyteller comes closer.

  We tell stories, listen to stories, go to plays, to be amused, to be edified, but mostly so that we can understand what it means to be a human being. Jesus was a storyteller. Indeed, according to Matthew, he taught entirely by telling stories. One of the great triumphs of Satan has been to lead us to believe that “story” isn’t true. I don’t know if all the facts of the story of Joseph are true, but it is a true story. That is very important to understand. Jesus did not tell his parables in order to give us facts and information, but to show us truth. What is the truth of the story of the man with the great plank in his eye? Doesn’t it tell us very clearly that we must not judge others more stringently than ourselves?

  And Joseph’s story tells us much about what it means to be human. More important than whether or not Potiphar’s wife actually tried to seduce him is the truth of his integrity in refusing to betray his master. Story is the closest we human beings can come to truth. God is truth. God is beyond the realm of provable fact. We can neither prove nor disprove God. God is for faith.

  When I was a child, story helped me find out who I was in a world staggering from the effects of that war which was meant to end war but which, alas, was the beginning of a century of continuing war. Story helped me to accept that human beings do terrible things to other human beings, but that human beings also do marvellous things. Story was a mirror in which I could be helped to find the image of God in myself.

  The image of God in ourselves is often obscured, and we surely don’t find it in the bathroom mirror. Better mirrors are our friends, those we love and trust most deeply. That image is n
ever found in competition with our neighbours or colleagues; rather, in not wanting to let down those who believe in us and in God’s image in us. Each one of us is probably as varied as the Jesus in The Acts of John, and which aspect is the more true? Probably the whole bundle together.

  Certainly the more human we are, the more varied and contradictory we are. And that is as it should be. God often reveals the infinite Presence to us through paradox and contradiction, and Scripture is full of both. Through paradox and contradiction we are enabled to sift for truth, that truth which will set us free, that truth which is not limited by literalism. What confuses many people about Scripture is that some of it is history, and some of it is story. The story of Joseph may be part history, and part story, but it is true.

  Is it legalistic literalism which is behind the wave of censorship that is rolling across the land? Are people so afraid of the truth of story that they have to look for some way to deny it? If people look for key words (magic; witch; occult) does that excuse them for disregarding content? In Frances Hodgson Burnett’s beautiful book, The Secret Garden, the children not only bring a dead garden back to life, but cold hearts are opened in love. Dickon looks at the wonders they have wrought, saying, “It’s magic!” and then bursts into song: “Praise God from whom all blessings flow, praise him all creatures here below, praise him above ye heavenly host, praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.” But because he has used the word magic the book is being censored, removed from the shelves as being unChristian. No regard has been paid to content, to what the book is saying. The truth underlying the book is beautifully Christian. Censorship is dangerous because there is something inhuman, or mechanical, about it. Jesus couldn’t stand inhumanness. Hitler began by burning books and ended by burning people.