'Then Joseph could not refrain himself before all them
that stood by him; and he cried, Cause every man to go
out from me. And there stood no man with him, while
Joseph made himself known unto his brethren. And he
wept aloud: and the Egyptians and the house of Pharaoh
heard. And Joseph said unto his brethren, I am Joseph;
doth my father yet live? And his brethren could not
answer him; for they were troubled at his presence. And
Joseph said unto his brethren, Come near to me, I pray
you. And they came near. And he said, I am Joseph your
brother, whom ye sold into Egypt. Now therefore be not
grieved, nor angry with yourselves, that ye sold me
hither: for God did send me before you to preserve life.
For these two years hath the famine been in the land:
and yet there are five years, in the which there shall
neither be earing nor harvest. And God sent me before
you to preserve you a posterity in the earth, and to
save your lives by a great deliverance. So now it was not
you that sent me hither, but God: and He hath made me
a father to Pharaoh, and lord of all his house, and a
ruler throughout all the land of Egypt. Haste ye, and
go up to my father, and say unto him. Thus saith thy son
Joseph, God hath made me lord of all Egypt: come down
unto me, tarry not: And thou shalt dwell in the land of
Goshen, and thou shalt be near unto me, thou, and thy
children, and thy children's children, and thy flocks,
and thy herds, and all that thou hast: And there will I
nourish thee; for yet there are five years of famine;
lest thou, and thy household, and all that thou hast,
come to poverty. And, behold, your eyes see, and the
eyes of my brother Benjamin, that it is my mouth that
speaketh unto you. And ye shall tell my father of all
my glory in Egypt, and of all that ye have seen; and ye
shall haste and bring down my father hither. And he fell
upon his brother Benjamin's neck, and wept; and Benjamin
wept upon his neck. Moreover he kissed all his brethren,
and wept upon them: and after that his brethren talked
with him.'
GENESIS xlv. 1-15.
I
If the writer of this inimitable scene of Joseph's reconciliation with
his brethren was not simply an historian, he was one of the great
dramatic geniuses of the world, master of a vivid minuteness like
Defoe's, and able to touch the springs of tears by a pathetic
simplicity like his who painted the death of Lear. Surely theories of
legend and of mosaic work fail here.
1. We have, first, disclosure. The point at which the impenetrable,
stern ruler breaks down is significant. It is after Judah's torrent of
intercession for Benjamin, and self-sacrificing offer of himself for a
substitute and a slave. Why did this touch Joseph so keenly? Was it not
because his brother's speech shows that filial and fraternal affection
was now strong enough in him to conquer self? He had sent Joseph to the
fate which he is now ready to accept. He and the rest had thought
nothing of the dagger they plunged into their father's heart by selling
Joseph; but now he is prepared to accept bondage if he may save his
father's grey head an ache. The whole of Joseph's harsh, enigmatical
treatment had been directed to test them, and to ascertain if they were
the same fierce, cruel men as of old. Now, when the doubt is answered,
he can no longer dam back the flood of forgiving love. The wisest
pardoning kindness seeks the assurance of sorrow and change in the
offender, before it can safely and wholesomely enjoy the luxury of
letting itself out in tears of reconciliation. We do not call Joseph a
type of Christ; but the plain process of forgiveness in his brotherly
heart is moulded by the law which applies to God's pardon as to ours.
All the wealth of yearning pardon is there, before contrition and
repentance; but it is not good for the offender that it should be
lavished on him, impenitent.
What a picture that is of the all-powerful ruler, choking down his
emotion, and hurriedly ordering the audience chamber to be cleared! How
many curious glances would be cast over their shoulders, by the slowly
withdrawing crowd, at the strange group--the viceroy, usually so calm,
thus inexplicably excited, and the huddled, rude shepherds, bewildered
and afraid of what was coming next, in this unaccountable country! How
eavesdroppers would linger as near as they durst, and how looks would
be exchanged as the sounds of passionate weeping rewarded their open
ears! The deepest feelings are not to be flaunted before the world. The
man who displays his tears, and the man who is too proud to shed them,
are both wrong; but perhaps it is worse to weep in public than not to
weep at all.
'I am Joseph.' Were ever the pathos of simplicity, and the simplicity
of pathos, more nobly expressed than in these two words?--(There are
but two in the Hebrew.) Has the highest dramatic genius ever winged an
arrow which goes more surely to the heart than that? The question,
which hurries after the disclosure, seems strange and needless; but it
is beautifully self-revealing, as expressive of agitation, and as
disclosing a son's longing, and perhaps, too, as meant to relieve the
brothers' embarrassment, and, as it were, to wrap the keen edge of the
disclosure in soft wool.
2. We have, next, conscience-stricken silence. No wonder his brethren
'could not answer' and 'were troubled at his presence.' They had found
their brother a ruler; they had found the ruler their brother. Their
former crime had turned what might have been a joy into a terror.
Already they had come to know and regret it. It might seem to their
startled consciences as if now they were about to expiate it. They
would remember the severity of Joseph's past intercourse; they see his
power, and cannot but be doubtful of his intentions. Had all his
strange conduct been manoeuvring to get them, Benjamin and all, into
his toils, that one blow might perfect his revenge? Our suspicions are
the reflections of our own hearts. So there they stand in open-mouthed,
but dumb, wonder and dread. It would task the pencil of him who
painted, on the mouldering refectory wall at Milan, the conflicting
emotions of the apostles, at the announcement of the betrayer, to
portray that silent company of abased and trembling criminals. They are
an illustration of the profitlessness of all crime. Sin is, as one of
its Hebrew names tells us, missing the mark--whether we think of it as
fatally failing to reach the ideal of conduct, or as always, by a
divine nemesis, failing to hit even the shabby end it aims at. 'Every
rogue is a roundabout fool.' They put Joseph in the pit, and here he is
on a throne. They have stained their souls, and embittered their
father's life for twenty-two long years, and the dreams have come true,
and all their wickedness has not turned the stream of the divine
purpose, any more than the mud dam built by a child diverts the
Mississippi. One flash has burned up their whole sinful past, and they
stand scorched and silent among the ruins. So it always is. Sooner or
later the same certainty of the futility of his sin will overwhelm
every sinful man, and dumb self-condemnation will stand in silent
acknowledgment of evil desert before the throne of the Brother, who is
now the Prince and the Judge, on whose fiat hangs life or death. To see
Christ enthroned should be joy; but it may be turned into terror and
silent anticipation of His just condemnation.
3. We have encouragement and complete forgiveness. That invitation to
come close up to him, with which Joseph begins the fuller disclosure of
his heart, is a beautiful touch. We can fancy how tender the accents,
and how, with some lightening of fear, but still hesitatingly and
ashamed, the shepherds, unaccustomed to courtly splendours, approached.
The little pause while they draw near helps him to self-command, and he
resumes his words in a calmer tone. With one sentence of assurance that
he is their brother, he passes at once into that serene region where
all passion and revenge die, unable to breathe its keen, pure air. The
comfort which he addresses to their penitence would have been
dangerous, if spoken to men blind to the enormity of their past. But it
will not make a truly repentant conscience less sensitive, though it
may alleviate the aching of the wound, to think that God has used even
its sin for His own purposes. It will not take away the sense of the
wickedness of the motive to know that a wonderful providence has
rectified the consequences. It will rather deepen the sense of evil,
and give new cause of adoration of the love that pardons the wrong, and
the providence that neutralises the harm.
Joseph takes the true point of view, which we are all bound to occupy,
if we would practise the Christian grace of forgiveness. He looks
beyond the mere human hate and envy to the divine purpose. 'The sword
is theirs; the hand is Thine.' He can even be grateful to his foes who
have been unintentionally his benefactors. He thinks of the good that
has come out of their malice, and anger dies within him.
Highest attainment of all, the good for which he is grateful is not his
all-but-regal dignity, but the power to save and gladden those who
would fain have slain, and had saddened him for many a weary year. We
read in these utterances of a lofty piety and of a singularly gentle
heart, the fruit of sorrow and the expression of thoughts which had
slowly grown up in his mind, and had now been long familiar there. Such
a calm, certain grasp of the divine shaping and meaning of his life
could not have sprung up all at once in him, as he looked at the
conscience-stricken culprits cowering before him. More than natural
sweetness and placability must have gone to the making of such a temper
of forgiveness. He must have been living near the Fountain of all mercy
to have had so full a cup of it to offer. Because he had caught a gleam
of the divine pardon, he becomes a mirror of it; and we may fairly see
in this ill-used brother, yearning over the half-sullen sinners, and
seeking to open a way for his forgiveness to steal into their hearts,
and rejoicing over his very sorrows which have fitted him to save them
alive, and satisfy them in the days of famine, an adumbration of our
Elder Brother's forgiving love and saving tenderness.
4. The second part of Joseph's address is occupied with his message to
Jacob, and shows how he longed for his father's presence. There is
something very natural and beautiful in the repeated exhortations to
haste, as indicating the impatient love of a long-absent son. If his
heart was so true to his father, why had he sent him no message for all
these years? Egypt was near enough, and for nine years now he had been
in power. Surely he could have gratified his heart. But he could not
have learned by any other means his brethren's feelings, and if they
were still what they had been, no intercourse would be possible. He
could only be silent, and yearn for the way to open in God's
providence, as it did.
The message to Jacob is sent from 'thy son Joseph,' in token that the
powerful ruler lays his dignity at his father's feet. No elevation will
ever make a true son forget his reverence for his father. If he rise
higher in the world, and has to own an old man, away in some simple
country home, for his sire, he will be proud to do it. The enduring
sanctity of the family ties is not the least valuable lesson from our
narrative for this generation, where social conditions are so often
widely different in parents and in children. There is an affectionate
spreading out of all his glory before his father's old eyes; not that
he cared much about it for himself, since, as we have seen, elevation
to him meant mainly work, but because he knew how the eyes would
glisten at the sight. His mother, who would have been proud of him, is
gone, but he has still the joy of gladdening his father by the
exhibition of his dignity. It bespeaks a simple nature, unspoiled by
prosperity, to delight thus in his father's delight, and to wish the
details of all his splendour to be told him. A statesman who takes most
pleasure in his elevation because of the good he can do by it, and
because it will please the old people at home, must be a pure and
lovable man. The command has another justification in the necessity to
assure his father of the wisdom of so great a change. God had set him
in the Promised Land, and a very plain divine injunction was needed to
warrant his leaving it. Such a one was afterwards given in vision; but
the most emphatic account of his son's honour and power was none the
less required to make the old Jacob willing to abandon so much, and go
into such strange conditions.
We have another instance of the difference between man's purposes and
God's counsel in this message. Joseph's only thought is to afford his
family temporary shelter during the coming five years of famine.
Neither he nor they knew that this was the fulfilment of the covenant
with Abraham, and the bringing of them into the land of their
oppression for four centuries. No shadow of that future was cast upon
their joy, and yet, the steady march of God's plan was effected along
the path which they were ignorantly preparing. The road-maker does not
know what bands of mourners, or crowds of holiday makers, or troops of
armed men may pass along it.
5. This wonderfully beautiful scene ends with the kiss of full
reconciliation and frank communion. All the fear is out of the
brothers' hearts. It has washed away all the envy along with it. The
history of Jacob's household had hitherto been full of sins against
family life. Now, at last, they taste the sweetness of fraternal love.
Joseph, against whom they had sinned, takes the initiative, flinging
himself with tears on the neck of Benjamin, his own mother's son,
nearer to him than all the others, crowding his pent-up love in one
long kiss. Then, with less of passionate affection, but more of
pardoning love, he kisses his contrite brothers. The offender is ever
less ready to show love than the offended. The first step towards
reconciliation, whether of man with man or of man with God, comes from
the aggrieved. We always hate those whom we have harmed; and if enmity
were ended only by the advances of the wrong-doer, it would be
perpetual. The injured has the prerogative of praying the injurer to be
reconciled. So was it in Pharaoh's throne-room on that long past day;
so is it still in the audience chamber of heaven. 'He that might the
vantage best have took found out the remedy.' 'We love Him, because He
first loved us.'
The pardoned men find their tongues at last. Forgiveness has opened
their lips, and though their reverence and thanks are no less, their
confidence and familiarity are more. How they would talk when once the
terror was melted away! So should it be with the soul which has tasted
the sweetness of Christ's forgiving love, and has known 'the kisses of
His mouth.' Long, unrestrained, and happy should be the intercourse
which we forgiven sinners keep up with our Brother, the Prince of all
the land. 'After that his brethren talked with him.'