The Good Book- J is for Joseph- Rev. Wendy McCormick
“J is for Joseph” Rev Wendy McCormick
June 23, 2024
Genesis 50:15-21
In a gathering like this, I imagine there are quite a few of us who at one time or another in our lives have studied a foreign language. Any of us with even a little foreign language learning probably have stories about mistranslating or about inadvertently stepping into an idiom. One of my growing up friends took our not-too-shabby middle school French lessons on her first trip to France and stayed with a family. She felt confident telling them that she didn’t need seconds at dinner because she was full. Well, “I’m full,” literally rendered from English to French actually means, “I’m pregnant.” Oops.
Even a little bit of language study gives us appreciation for the fact that there is no such thing as an “exact” translation, that there are different ways to render the same words from one language to another. You’ve probably heard that in the Eskimo-Aleut or Inuit language there are many different words for snow . . . well, if they’re all translated “snow,” something is lost. You get the idea.
I won’t call on those of you who have studied ancient languages but suffice to say that these challenges are only multiplied. At the end of the day, linguists and translators, along with reputable biblical scholars, understand that translation unavoidably includes interpretation.
Which is at the heart of today’s story. In considering a few of the stories and characters from Anna Carter Florence’s book in this series, we are not just looking at the Bible but at what it means for us to interact with the Bible – we’ve talked about the value in asking questions and not settling for easy, object lesson approaches to the Bible. We’ve talked about the importance of imagination in filling in the gaps of the stories we have. And today’s story brings us to translation and the things we may miss in a plain reading.
We are invited to consider the different ways translators render the key Hebrew word, ‘hashabah.’ It can be translated intended, meant, or planned – very similar, but also different. And it makes a difference in what we assume and what we believe about God.
Both the RSV and the NKJV say “you meant evil . . . but God meant good”. Similarly, the NRSV and NIV say “you intended harm . . . but God intended it for good”
These are all longstanding reputable translations. But they have contributed to the prevalent belief – Anna Carter Florence calls it greeting card theology – that God has everything all pre-determined for us. Popular sayings for wall hangings and inspirational pillows include “everything turns out for the best”. If we truncate the key verse from Joseph, “you meant evil toward me, but God meant it for good,” we come dangerously close to saying that God meant for these awful things to happen ---- deceiving the father into believing for 20 long years that his beloved son was dead, selling the boy into slavery and an uncertain but definitely not pleasant future. This is pure evil, and it happens throughout history. Can you imagine saying that just because Elie Wiesel became an amazing and influential writer that God meant for the holocaust to happen so that good could come from Wiesel? Just because an amazing tradition of music came from enslaved peoples in the US, that God meant 400 years of human bondage?
Of course we would never say such a thing.
But if we jump too quickly to “God meant it for good,” we can come dangerously close to turning a blind eye to the evil in front of us or even to justifying it because, well, it must be part of God’s plan – we love to say that – as a logical extension of “God meant it for good.”
Very dangerous territory, even if it is really, really common. At our worst, we do not step in when we could to name and resist evil as we tell ourselves that it must be part of God’s plan. At our very worst, we tell people who are suffering that their pain that it must be part of God’s plan when we might instead offer God’s comfort and compassion.
Which brings us to doctrines of providence and yes, predestination. You’ve probably heard that historically Presbyterians have been well-known for the doctrine of predestination. This doctrine is a way of explaining that salvation is not based on anything we do or don’t do but is solely in the hands of God.
But too many people think pre-destination means pre-determination – that everything that happens, everything we are going to do in our lives is pre-determined --- it’s the belief that makes people say in reference to death, “well, when your number’s up, your number’s up” --- it’s what makes people say to someone who is deeply hurting from a traumatic experience or from the death of a loved one, that this was God’s will, that God wanted this to happen.
Bad theology is everywhere.
Of course it doesn’t make sense that everything that happens is pre-determined as if we are but puppets in that great purple puppet stage that was up here last week, playing out parts over which we have no control. Free will is a huge part of what it is to be human and a huge part of what it is to be in relationship with our God.
Nor does it make sense that a loving God would will for us or want for us the many terrible things that happen in this world, especially those that are of human making like human bondage, human slavery, human trafficking. When the human spirit triumphs in one of those terrible and unspeakably traumatic situations, we are inspired and we should be. And we can give credit to God for keeping that human spirit vibrant and resilient and, well, human. We can be like Joseph and acknowledge God’s providence – another doctrine – which is to look back and see God’s guiding hand in Joseph’s dreams, in the actions of a friend he made in prison, in Pharoah’s decision to trust Joseph’s dreams about the famine and especially in Joseph’s amazing choice to forgive his brothers so completely and abundantly that they could only question if it was real. This is to see God’s guiding hand, God’s creative and life-giving presence at work.
But it cannot be, it must not be to say that God meant or intended the terrible things that happened just so that the good things could happen.
More recent translations of the key verse – Genesis 50:20 – lean into translating “hashabah” as planned instead of meant or intended. It’s a nuance, but the sense of the passage changes remarkably to something that makes clear that God did not and does not mean or intend evil. In his 1995 translation of the 5 books of Moses, our first 5 books of the Bible, Everett Fox renders the passage with the word “planned.” Notice Fox also likes to include the repetitions that are in Hebrew. “Now you, you planned ill against me, but God planned-it-over for good, in order to do (as is) this very day – to keep many people alive.” A very faithful translation if a little bumpy to our ears. But consider the difference in ‘you planned evil but God planned it over’– kind of a plan B.
Eugene Peterson in his 2005 Bible, The Message, translates it this way: “Don’t you see, you planned evil against me but God used those same plans for my good, as you see all around you right now – life for many people.”
The Common English Bible, drawing on this newer scholarship, offers this: You planned something bad for me, but God produced something good from it, in order to save the lives of many people, just as he’s doing today.
When we think of it as planning and not as intending, we open up the nuances of plans that change, plans that get overridden, plan A and plan B. It’s still tricky – we don’t ever want to justify evils like we hear about in this story and like we know go on every day right under our noses. But if we think of the evil-doing as Plan A and of God as being in the Plan B business, it changes things remarkably. It stops us short from those terrible platitudes like “it must have been God’s will” that Joseph was sold to slavetraders and his father was told he was dead. Or that innocent people die every day from gun violence. Or that domestic violence goes on quietly and invisibly, disproportionately hurting women and children. So not God’s will.
All of that is the plan A of our evil and sinful world, and we all bear some responsibility.
But God is in the Plan B business. And God’s plan b in the Joseph story is overflowing in forgiveness and abundance and life. It’s not just the incredibly moving healing and restoration of a deeply broken, hurtful, dysfunctional family. Though that is huge. In addition, countless people are saved from famine.
I have lived my life with many privileges – race, education, health care, financial security – so I don’t have any experiences of evil directed at me the way Joseph did. I’ve had some of the hardships and challenges that life presents to all of us, even though I could not and would not attribute them to anyone’s evil intention. Still, I have experienced our Plan B God, a God who plans things over, a God who works in my life for good. And there is no better example than the past two years. It is true that something terrible happened in the sudden death of my husband. It is true that my life is harder parenting our disabled daughter on my own. But I have the image of the scale breaking it’s so out of balance when I see the ways God has shaped this Plan B phase of my life ---- the right people showing up in my life for me, for my daughter, for our relocation, an unexpected direction to the last chapter of my working life and the possibilities for my retirement, the opportunity to be a pastor again after a significant time away and that door apparently being closed and then being led to you. I can surely say with these new translations, God planned it over for good, God used those things for my good.
What about you? Where have you experienced our Plan B God? What in your life might you need to retranslate, to see how God has planned things over for you?
What might you reconsider in light of God’s plans for good, for life for many people? As you look backward in your life, where do you notice God’s providence, that God planned something over or offered you Plan B to the Plan A that was the result of terrible or even evil choices – yours or someone else’s?
And then where might you step in to offer or to point out a Plan B – a godly planning over – for someone else, someone overcome by guilt, by brokenness, by the consequences of evil and wrongdoing?
And when someone offers one of those sappy sayings about something terrible being God’s will or telling someone who’s hurting that everything turns out for the best, maybe you are God’s witness -- the one to say --- well, I’m not so sure about that, but I do believe God always has a plan B.
The Bible isn’t always easy even though people want it to be. It’s more like real life.
Complicated. Messy. Good and bad are interwoven in individual people, in particular situations. Bad behavior, evil and wrongdoing that are discouraging and sometimes overwhelming. Pain and difficulty that are sometimes caused by the power of evil and sometimes just by bad choices. But also experiences of life, repair, healing, compassion, abundance. The Bible demonstrates over and over that that’s where God is, in the goodness, in the compassion, in the forgiveness. Working in and through imperfect people, bad decisions, unspeakable pain, to always offer life and abundance: Plan B. Amen.
Chapters in “A is for Alabaster”, by Anna Carter Florence, published in 2023 by Westminster John Knox, provide the source and inspiration for this sermon series.
