Rev. Jared Buss
Pittsburgh New Church; January 14, 2024
Readings: Genesis 37:18-36; Arcana Coelestia §589
To begin with, I’m going to read the next part of the Joseph story, picking up exactly where the reading for the children left off. This next part of the story is about Joseph’s brothers breaking the news to their father. We read: [Gen. 37:29-36].
This story is sad. There really isn’t anything happy about the passages we’ve heard today. Of course Joseph is liberated much later on, but we’re not there yet. One of the challenges of doing a long series, like the series we’re doing on Joseph, is that you have to dwell on the sad parts of the story as well as the happy parts. As I said to the children, it’s hard to find any moral or lesson in today’s readings other than, “don’t do any of the things you see here.”
Joseph’s brothers go to some lengths to conceal the crime that they’ve committed. They want to make Joseph disappear—they want to be done with this dreamer, this boy who dares to tell them that they will bow down to him (Gen. 37:5-9, 20). They also want to appear innocent after the crime is over. Which is what criminals usually want. We aren’t going to focus on the evils of murder or slavery, because we already know how we should hold those things. Today’s sermon is about the deeper meaning of this story, which is, in a nutshell, that people sometimes treat the truth the same way that Jacob’s sons treated Joseph.
Last week we talked about what Joseph symbolizes, in the internal sense of the Word. Broadly speaking, he stands for the internal person, or the higher regions of our minds; his brothers, on the other hand, stand for the external person, or the lower levels of our minds. More specifically, Joseph stands for truth from the Lord, also called “the Divine Spiritual” (AC §§4669, 4724). And more specifically still, he’s said to symbolize “the heavenly of the spiritual” (AC §§4286, 4592, 4675). When the teachings of the New Church use terms like this, the word “heavenly” refers to something that has to do with goodness, and the word “spiritual” refers to something that has to with truth. So Joseph stands for the goodness or the blessings that flow from the Lord’s own truth.
If all of this sounds kind of lofty, or if we look at our own lives and wonder where this thing that Joseph represents actually shows up, that’s to be expected. The whole point is that Joseph stands for something higher, something heavenly, something transcendent. The natural mind—which is the mind that most of us live in most of the time—doesn’t “get” Joseph. Joseph’s brothers, who represent the natural mind, don’t get Joseph. They don’t realize that God has chosen him to rule over them; they think he’s just a kid with delusions of grandeur. Joseph stands for something that most of us probably don’t see very often—a flash of heavenly light and heavenly warmth that our minds aren’t always open to.
And the story we read today is about what happens to that higher truth when our natural minds are full of falsities. Those falsities don’t just fail to understand the spiritual thing that Joseph symbolizes: they are actively hostile to it. They actively try to bury it, and erase the memory of it. The thing is, these falsities then try to pass themselves off as innocent, just as Joseph’s brothers did. They concealed what they had done from their father. When we’re in a state that’s hostile to the Lord’s truth, we conceal that hostility from ourselves. We convince ourselves that we’re blameless.
What’s so tricky about this is that Joseph’s brothers stand for things that should be true. They stand for truths known to the church (see AC §§5403, 5409, 5741)—that is, they stand for ideas that come from the Word. These ideas are true… unless they’re separated from the thing that Joseph symbolizes. Joseph stands for the Lord’s truth, or the Lord’s presence within the truth—the Lord’s spirit infilling the truth with heavenly goodness. When ideas from the Word are used against Joseph, they become falsities.
In order to understand all of this properly, we need a more grounded idea of the kind of truths that Joseph symbolizes. The passages from the Heavenly Doctrine that discuss today’s particular story associate Joseph with two specific truths (see AC §§4723, 4747). The first of these is that the Lord’s Human is Divine. Jesus Christ, who is revealed to us in the Gospel, is God. In other words, as He Himself says, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Him (Matt. 28:18). If we let that truth soak in and carry weight with us, then that’s a “Joseph” truth: it opens the door to heaven and to God Himself. The other truth that comes up again and again in the explanation of today’s story that the works of charity do contribute to our salvation. In other words, what we do matters. Religion can’t just be a spiritual thing—it has to “show up.” The Christian church has a history of attacking these two truths, which is one of the reasons why the Heavenly Doctrine focusses on them. You may also have noticed that these two truths resonate with the two great commandments, which are that we’re to love the Lord above all things, and our neighbors as ourselves (Matt. 22:37-40; Mark 12:29-31; Luke 10:27). Joseph is connected to the two great commandments. These two commandments are the soul of the Word and the soul of the church; so if we take a truth from the Word and use it against the great commandments, that truth becomes a falsity (AC §4776).
The world we live in likes to celebrate love—which makes it easy for us to champion the two great commandments, which are all about love. But love as the light of heaven reveals it to us and love as we understand it aren’t always the same thing. Teachings or messages about what we call love can be falsities, such as Joseph’s brothers represent. The Lord says, “If you love Me, keep my commandments” (John 14:15). If we wave the banner of love to the Lord, and yet live a life that goes against His commandments, we’re burying the light of heaven.
We can do the same thing with love for the neighbor. Love for the neighbor is one of the things that the world around us celebrates the most loudly—and it’s worthy of every bit of that celebration. “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” can feel like a tired message, but it’s still exactly what we need to hear. The thing is, the Lord says that the first step on the road to loving the neighbor is to cease to do evil to the neighbor (see Is. 1:16; TCR §435). Sometimes we convince ourselves that we want to love people, yet we reject the Lord’s definition of love. If we, for example, were to say to ourselves, “the Lord told us not to judge, because judging is unloving; and that means that no one is allowed to judge me; and that means that I’m allowed to live whatever life I want, even if the Lord says otherwise,” that would be taking something that once was true and using it to throw Joseph into a pit.
As I said before, when we do this kind of thing, our reflex is to hide it from ourselves. Joseph was hidden in a pit; out of sight, out of mind. When we do this kind of thing, we argue with ourselves until we’ve convinced ourselves that what we’re doing is just; and anything that speaks out against our conclusions gets buried. The symbolism of what Joseph’s brothers do to his tunic is especially interesting. That tunic—or coat of many colors—stands for the external truths that clothe the heavenly truth that Joseph symbolizes. The Heavenly Doctrine says that the tunic stands for appearances of truth: in other words, the tunic stands for those higher truths once they’ve shone down into the external mind, and appeared to us in ways that we can see and understand (AC §4677, 4741). To put it simply, the tunic stands for everything that confirms and supports those higher truths.
Joseph’s brothers strip him of his tunic (Gen. 37:23). To strip Joseph of his tunic is to hide the evidence—to get rid of everything that confirms that higher truth that we don’t want to listen to. And later on, his brothers paint the tunic with blood (v. 31): they paint it the color that they want it to be. This stands for taking the truth and making it look the way we want it to look: making it mean what we want it to mean (AC §§4769, 4770). When we do this sort of thing, we do violence to the Lord’s truth. We do violence to the spirit of the Word. The bloodstained tunic is a representation of that violence.
What’s the remedy to all this bad stuff? Well, the rest of the Joseph story is about the remedy to the problem that emerges in today’s story. As I said before, the trouble with moving slowly through this story is that it’ll take us a while to get to the happy parts. But who comes to church to hear exclusively about problems?
Today’s readings do give us a hint of a way forward. When Joseph’s brothers sell him, they sell him to some Ishmaelites. What happens next is a little confusing, but it seems that those Ishmaelites then sell Joseph to some Midianites, who sell him to Potiphar in Egypt (Gen. 37:28, 36). In the literal sense, these Ishmaelites and Midianites don’t seem like such great people, since they’re buying and selling slaves. But we can also think of them as the people who take Joseph away from his brothers—or even, the people who rescue Joseph from his brothers—and if we hold the story this way, then the symbolism of the Ishmaelites and Midianites makes a little more sense.
In the internal sense of the Word, the Ishmaelites and Midianites symbolize people who are in simple good and simple truth (AC §§4747, 4756, 4788). That is, they stand for people who are a bit simplistic—people who don’t have an expansive or nuanced understanding of the teachings of the Word. What these people have going for them is that, in their simplicity, they accept the authority and the basic message of the Word.
Most people would prefer not to be simplistic. Most of us want to learn and understand. After all, here we are in church; people come to church for lots of reasons, but one of them is to learn. Clearly learning and understanding are good. But there is an inherent danger in being learned, which is that we’ll get carried away by our own cleverness. The Heavenly Doctrine regularly makes statements like, “It is a common and well-known fact that the learned have less belief than the simple in a life after death, and that in general they see Divine Truths less clearly than the simple do” (AC §4760.4). Of course, this statement was written a long time ago; whether or not it’s still true today is something that we’re left to ponder on our own.
What certainly is true is that all of the mental gymnastics that we looked at earlier—hiding Joseph in a pit, painting his tunic with blood—everything that Joseph’s brothers do to hide their crime, relies on cleverness. Everything that twists the message of the Word away from the Lord, away from the two great commandments, and away from the Lord’s definition of love and charity relies on cleverness. If we simply assert that the Lord is God; that our job is to obey Him; and that the Word is His Word, and is therefore true, whether we understand it or not, then we can’t hurt the truth that Joseph represents. We might not fully grasp that truth; but we won’t hurt it either.
But it can be difficult for people—especially for educated people—to make their peace with this kind of simple faith. Maybe we want to insist that we’re too smart to accept something just because somebody else says it’s true. And yet, the smartest people of all are the ones who are able to recognize when they’re out of their depth. There is more truth in this world, and especially in heaven, than we can possibly comprehend. And as we’ve all experienced, we don’t always know how to make ourselves happy. The smartest thing of all is to recognize that we need a teacher, and to put our faith in the right Teacher.
And of course the Lord wants to open our eyes—we will get there. For now, accepting that He is the Shepherd and we are the sheep is a good start. Our final reading for today is about this kind of simplicity [read AC §589].
Amen.