Rev Jared Buss
Pittsburgh New Church; February 11, 2024
Readings: Genesis 42:1-15 (children’s talk), 14-24; Arcana Coelestia §5422
In today’s story we’re told outright that, “Joseph recognized his brothers, but they did not recognize him” (Gen. 41:8). And he didn’t tell them who he was. What we’re going to look at now is why Joseph chose to remain hidden from his brothers. In the deeper sense of this story, Joseph represents the Lord—so what we’re really talking about is why the Lord sometimes seems to be hidden from us. Another way of saying the same thing is that Joseph symbolizes truth that comes from the Lord, and sometimes we don’t see that truth. Sometimes we don’t have that insight from heaven that shows us what we need to do and guides us through the thorny parts of our lives. We look up to God and say, “Where is Your truth? Where is the guidance that I need from You?” And we get no answer. It’s as if there’s a thick cloud between us and the Lord. He is hidden from us.
But the Lord doesn’t actually hide Himself from us. That would be a heartless thing to do—and that’s not who He is. So what’s really going on here?
The first thing we’re going to do is look more closely at the literal sense of this story. The easy explanation is that Joseph hides himself from his brothers because he’s angry with them. And he sure does seem angry with them. But if he was purely angry—if he wanted nothing but revenge—why would he hide himself? Why wouldn’t he tell them, “Guess who has power over you now?” The fact that he conceals himself from his brothers suggests that he is conflicted. He isn’t ready to forgive them, but he isn’t ready to denounce them either. Part of him wants to be their brother again, but he doesn’t know how to get past the bad history that stands between them. All of this becomes much more evident if we look at the next piece of the story. This reading picks up right where the reading to the children left off [read Gen. 42:10-24]. In what follows the brothers are sent home with their grain, and Joseph secretly returns the money that they paid for their food to their bags (vv. 25, 26).
So at first he accuses them of being spies (vv. 9, 14), which makes it seem like he is simply out to get them. He locks them up, and says that one of them needs to go home and bring Benjamin down to Egypt, so that he can verify their story (v. 16). But he knows their story is true. Part of what’s really going on here is that he yearns to see his brother Benjamin again.
But after the brothers have been in prison for three days, Joseph seems to relent. Instead of sending one brother back to Canaan while the rest remain in prison, he says that he’ll keep one of his brothers in prison, and let the rest go home (vv. 17-19).
And somehow—even though his brothers have no idea that the man they’re dealing with is Joseph—they recognize that the bad things that are happening to them are because of what they did to Joseph. For the first time, the story talks about the anguish that Joseph felt when they threw him into the pit. His brothers remember how they saw his anguish and did not heed him. They say, “we are truly guilty concerning our brother” (v. 21). And then Joseph turns away from them and weeps (v. 24).
Why does he weep? One obvious explanation is that it’s a massive relief for him to hear his brothers acknowledge that what they did to him was wrong. His tears are the part of this story that shows us most clearly that he wants to be reconciled with his brothers. He wants to be their brother again—but the evil that they did to him still stands in the way. The passage from the Heavenly Doctrine that we’ll read in a moment says outright that Joseph’s tears are a sign that he loves his brothers.
To understand this reading from the Doctrine, we need to know a little bit more about the inner meaning of this story. Joseph, as I said, represents the Lord, but he also represents internal truth—that is, truth that comes directly from the Lord (AC §§5417, 5444, 5459). Joseph’s brothers, on the other hand, represent the external truths that are known to the church (AC §§5409, 5419). And Benjamin, who isn’t present in this story, represents the intermediary—that is, he represents the thing that is able to connect external truth with internal truth (AC §§5411, 5413). We’ll say more about this intermediary a little later on. The point that this passage is making is that when that intermediary is not present, external truth sees internal truth as a stranger. We read: [AC §5422].
Internal truth—or truth coming directly from the Lord—is seen as a stranger by people who are interested solely in external truths. And that’s why Joseph’s brothers don’t recognize him. They represent external truths, or people who are only interested in external truths; and people like that don’t get internal truths. They just don’t see them.
And what are these internal truths that the external doesn’t get? The reading used the Lord’s love as an example. The Lord is love itself, and is never angry. But people who are living a life of evil find the Lord’s love—and the truth that goes with it—uncomfortable. They react to His love with hostility, and project their own hostility onto the Lord. So the Lord appears angry to them. And the letter of the Word speaks according to this appearance, because the Word is designed to reach people where they are. People who are only interested in external things see this anger, but the deeper truth—the truth that expresses the Lord’s love—is lost on them. It’s invisible to them.
The Heavenly Doctrine gives us a few more examples of internal truths that a merely external mentality just doesn’t get. The truth is that the angels of heaven possess incredible glory and power, but their glory is the glory of wisdom, which comes from their recognition that they know nothing without the Lord. And their power comes from their acknowledgement that they can do nothing without the Lord. To the merely external mind this is gibberish. To the merely external mind, glory means fame and money and power means telling people what to do (AC §5428.2) It’s the same with freedom: the angels of heaven live in incredible freedom, because they love to do what the Lord says. But to the merely external mind, freedom means doing whatever we want to do, and heavenly freedom sounds like slavery (AC §5428.3).
When we’re in a merely external state, the internal seems hostile: the internal is like an Egyptian shouting at us in a language we don’t understand. But the reality is that there is no hostility in the internal. The Lord is love: the Lord’s truth is not harsh or oppositional at all. The hostility actually belongs to the external. This is illustrated in today’s story. Joseph loved his brothers. The problem was that they had sundered him from themselves. They had turned on him, thrown him into a pit, and sold him as a slave.
Let’s look a little more closely at the symbolism of Joseph’s brothers. They stand for external truths known to the church. The external truths known to the church are teachings from the Word—teachings like, “Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy,” (Ex. 20:8); “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:31 et al.). But if teachings like these are what Joseph’s brothers stand for, then why are they a problem? Aren’t we supposed to learn and to believe the teachings of the Word?” This takes us back to the problem that we looked at right at the beginning of the sermon. Sometimes we try to reach out to the Lord, and we feel like He’s hidden from us. We ask for guidance or for answers, and we feel like we get nothing. And we look at what we’re doing and we say, “Aren’t I doing this the right way? I’m praying, I’m going to church. I’m trying to use the truths that I’ve been taught. Isn’t that what I’m supposed to do? Why isn’t it working?”
This is a bit like Joseph’s brothers protesting to him, “we are upright men—your servants are not spies!” (see Gen. 42:11). Being upright and being in the truth are the same idea (AC §5434). Joseph’s brothers saw themselves as righteous people, so when he called them spies they felt falsely accused. But if they were truly upright men, they wouldn’t have sold their brother into slavery. Sometimes when we try to approach the Lord, we allow ourselves to be convinced that the act of approaching Him makes us righteous. Or we allow ourselves to be convinced that the truth we know makes us righteous. That belief that we’re already righteous blinds us.
Joseph called his brothers spies, and what that means, in the internal sense of the Word, is that they stand for people who do indeed know the truths of the church, but who value those truths for selfish reasons (AC §§4332, 5433). They value the truth because it makes them look smart, or seem devout. They value the truth because it makes them feel spiritually superior. Truths that we value for selfish reasons cannot rise up. They can’t be anything more than facts in our brains. They don’t hold the spirit of the Lord. They don’t help us see the Lord.
What’s missing, throughout this story, is Benjamin. Benjamin is the intermediary; he’s what connects the truth we know with the spirit of the Lord. In the Joseph story we see very clearly that Joseph is not willing to reveal himself to his brothers until Benjamin is present. That intermediary, in a nutshell, is truth that looks to good (AC §§3969.3, 5586, 5600). It’s truth that we hold with affection—truth that we value because we want it to change us (see AC §§5433.2, 5639). We want it to lead us to the good of life.
It’s obvious that we’re supposed to do what the Lord says. But it’s also easy for us to drift, in the quiet of our minds, from a desire to be led by the truth to a desire to know the truth for the sake of feeling good about ourselves. Because being led by the truth is hard. To be led by the truth we have to hold our feet to the fire. We have to be willing to change the way we live, in the name of what’s right, even if that’s inconvenient. Teachings like “remember the Sabbath” and “you shall love your neighbor” have to become more than just words that we nod to. In the Heavenly Doctrine we’re told that truths remain nothing more than factual knowledge until a person:
… begins to use his own ability to look at those truths and see for himself whether they really are truths, and—having seen that they are such—to act in conformity with them. That ability to look at such truths and this willingness to act in conformity with them cause them to be factual knowledge no longer. Now they are commandments to be obeyed in life, till at length they are his life; for they then pass into the life he leads and are made his own. (AC §5432)
To accept the truths of the Word as commandments that are to be obeyed in life is simple enough in theory. But the difference between doing that in theory and doing that in practice is everything.
The bottom line is that until we’re willing to take responsibility for doing what the Word says to do, the truths that we know will remain external. And merely external truths can’t show us the things that the Lord wants us to see. They can’t show us the power of heavenly love or the glory of heavenly wisdom. They can’t show us the spirit of the Lord. When external truths are all we have, the Lord will seem far away from us. When we aren’t willing to live as He teaches, the Lord will seem far away from us.
And all the while, the Lord will love us. Joseph loved his brothers, even though he wasn’t able to close the gap between them and himself. We’re told that his tears symbolize the mercy of the Lord. Mercy is love that is grieving (AC §5480). It’s love that feels far away from the people that it loves, and yearns to close that gap. Sometimes the Lord really does seem to be hidden from us. But He says, “the mountains shall depart and the hills be removed, but My mercy shall not depart from you, nor shall My covenant of peace be removed” (Is. 54:10).
Amen.