Rev. Jared Buss
Pittsburgh New Church; March 17, 2024
Readings: Genesis 45:1-15 (children’s talk); John 15:1-12; Apocalypse Revealed §306
Today’s sermon is going to be centered around Joseph’s ability to love his brothers in spite of what they did to him. But before we explore the Joseph story any further, I’m going to read a passage from the gospel of John. The connection between this reading and the Joseph story will come to light later on. For now, you’re simply invited to imagine what it would be like to hear the Lord speak these words to you. We read from John 15 [vv. 1-12].
Now let’s go back to the Joseph story. When Joseph reveals his identity to his brothers, he also reveals his love for them—his desire to comfort them, his total disinterest in punishing them. That love makes this a wonderful story. The obvious question that the story puts in front of us is, “How do we do this? How do we forgive like Joseph did?”
In a sense, the answer is, “You just do it.” You just choose love instead of resentment, like I said to the children. But if you consider how deeply people can be hurt, that phrasing might start to sound a bit simplistic. When we, as adults, reflect on how it would feel to experience what Joseph experienced at the hand of his brothers, it becomes clear that Joseph didn’t casually leave his wounds in the past and move on. He was seventeen, and they were his family (Gen. 37:2). And they physically overpowered him, and then they sold him (vv. 23-28). That would be a hard thing to forgive.
And as I said to the children, they never do say sorry to him either. They do admit that what they did to him was a sin (Gen. 42:21-23, 44:16; cf. AC §5785), but they don’t say so to his face. They never ask for his forgiveness. In fact, they don’t even believe that he really has forgiven them: in the last chapter of Genesis we see that they’re still afraid that Joseph is going to get revenge on them someday (50:15). The point is, they don’t make it easy for him to forgive them.
This means that his willingness to forgive them isn’t about what they do. In a way, it has nothing to do with his brothers. It certainly has nothing to do with whether or not they “deserve” to be forgiven. Joseph’s ability to love them and to move forward is something that he comes to within himself. And actually it has everything to do with his relationship with the Lord. We get a strong indication of this in the story. Joseph makes it very clear to his brothers that he sees that God is in charge. He says, “do not … be grieved or angry with yourselves because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life” (v. 5, cf. v. 7). And he says, “it was not you who sent me here, but God” (v. 8). This is a big hint at how we learn to forgive like Joseph did. Putting everything into God’s hands has everything to do with it.
The Heavenly Doctrine of the New Church teaches that the stories of the Word contain an internal, or spiritual, sense. We might expect that the internal sense of the Joseph story would lay out everything that we need to know about the internal process of forgiveness. But if we look at what the Heavenly Doctrine actually has to say about today’s story, we don’t find they word “forgiveness” anywhere. Instead, we read that today’s story is about the conjunction of internal good with external truth (AC §5867). This might seem like it has nothing to do with the question that we’re exploring—how do we forgive like Joseph did? But the internal and the external senses of the Word are always connected. So let’s look more closely at what the Heavenly Doctrine says about the internal sense of this story; and then we’ll look at what this has to do with forgiveness.
We’re told that Joseph symbolizes internal, heavenly goodness; he also symbolizes the Lord, because the Lord is the source of this goodness (AC §5869). And Joseph’s brothers symbolize truths in the natural mind (AC §5872). The mind has many levels, but while we live in this natural world, we tend to think and operate at the natural level of the mind. This is the lowest level of the mind—the level that’s nearest to the external, or natural world. Joseph’s brothers stand for the truths that are known to this level of the mind. Specifically, they stand for the truths of the church that are known to the natural mind (compare AC §§5409, 5419, 5574). Anything from the Word that we accept as a truth is a truth of the church that is known to the natural mind. So if we accept that Jesus Christ is God, then when we hear Him say, “I am the vine, you are the branches” (John 15:5), those words become a truth known to the natural mind. “If you keep My commandments you will abide in My love” (v. 10) is a truth known to the natural mind—until it becomes something more.
There’s a really big difference between knowing that the Lord said something—or knowing that the church teaches something—and finding the Lord’s love within His truth. Joseph stands for heavenly good from the Lord, heavenly love that fills His truth. The Lord’s intention is to reveal this love to us. That’s why He’s taught us His truth: truth is nothing but a vessel for love. Love and truth belong together—they yearn for each other, just as Joseph yearned to be close to his brothers. But when we first learn the truth, we don’t really see the love inside it. We don’t recognize that the Lord Himself is present in that truth. This is what’s symbolized by the brothers’ failure to recognize Joseph. He was right there in front of them, but they didn’t know him.
Today’s story is about the moment of revelation—the moment in which we get it (cf. AC §§5878, 5885). Truth becomes a transparent vessel: within that truth the Lord Himself shines out. Suddenly the brothers know who Joseph is. And more than that, they see that he loves them. They see that he bears them no ill will—he just wants to take care of them. The Heavenly Doctrine says that when external truth is joined to internal good, there is a reordering that takes place in our minds; it says that we don’t really see that reordering, but we feel it, “through some joyful feeling, like that experienced at daybreak” (AC §5871). When truth and good are joined together we find the Lord, and in the Lord we find joy. And this is what it means to abide in the Lord.
The process by which we come to abide in the Lord—or by which truth and good are joined together—is long and complicated. The internal sense of the entire Joseph story is about this process. But in today’s reading from John the Lord gives us a really good summary of this process: He says, “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love” (15:10). Elsewhere in John He says, “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our home with him” (14:23). When we keep the Lord’s Word—that is, when we use the truths we know, when we take the commandments of God and act upon them—then, little by little, the truths we know are transformed into vessels that can receive Him. As He says, He comes to us and makes His home with us. We abide in Him, and He in us.
The reason we’ve spent so much time going over all of these ideas is that the ability to forgive—or to rise above the hurt that we’ve experienced—flows from abiding in the Lord. Our next reading is a passage from the Heavenly Doctrine, from the book Apocalypse Revealed, about the deeper meaning of the word “peace.” Listen to what this passage says about abiding in the Lord. We read: [§306].
“When a person abides in the Lord, he is at peace with his neighbor” (AR §306). And when a person abides in the Lord, he “has protection from hell, which is spiritual security” (ibid.). The natural mind on its own can’t comprehend that kind of peace, or that kind of security. The natural mind on its own says that there can be no peace until our neighbors come to us and somehow undo all of the hurt that they did to us. The natural mind on its own says that the bad things our neighbors do and the false things that our neighbors believe make us unsafe, and that we cannot ever be safe until our neighbors stop doing those bad things and thinking those false things. It says that we cannot be safe until our neighbors become the way that we think they ought to be.
But as we’ve discussed, Joseph’s ability to forgive his brothers has relatively little to do with the way that they treat him. There are some things that he needs from them. For one, he doesn’t really forgive them until they bring Benjamin down to Egypt; Benjamin’s presence softens his heart. His brother Judah’s willingness to become a slave to Joseph in Benjamin’s place also seems to soften Joseph’s heart (compare Gen. 44:33, 34 and Gen. 45:1). But as we discussed, Joseph’s brothers don’t ask to be forgiven. They don’t make it easy for Joseph to forgive them. He doesn’t forgive them because of what they do. He forgives them because he isn’t living in a world that they control; he isn’t living in a world in which they have power over his spirit. He knows that God is in charge. He knows that it was his God, and not his brothers, who brought him down to Egypt. He is in God’s hands; he abides in the Lord. And when we abide in the Lord we are at peace with our neighbors.
The ability to forgive—or better yet, the ability to let go of resentment—flows from abiding in the Lord. You could even say that the ability to forgive is a by-product of doing your personal spiritual work. Our job is to learn to abide in the Lord. If we abide in the Lord, that means we aren’t abiding in the past; neither are we abiding inside someone else’s head, or inside someone else’s estimation of us. The ways we’re treated by other people will never cease to matter. The people around us have the power to help us and to heal us, and with that comes the power to hurt us. That’s the way that the Lord made us. But the thoughts and feelings that other people hand us don’t have to be our resting place. They don’t have to be our home. The Lord is willing to be that for us. His love can be our resting place.
None of this should be taken to mean that forgiveness should be easy. Often forgiveness is the work of a lifetime. And learning to abide in the Lord is the work of a lifetime. Perhaps we know that we’re supposed to do it; perhaps we know that if we obey His commandments we will abide in His love. But at first this knowledge is just a truth in the natural mind. We may believe it, but we don’t feel the Lord in it. Only in time, as we do our daily spiritual work, as we act on the truths that we know, are those truths joined to goodness—goodness that transforms them into vessels for the love of God.
What’s startling, but also wonderful, is that the Lord tells us to love as He loves. He says “If you keep My commandments you will abide in My love” (John 15:10), and two verses later He says, “This is My commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you” (v. 12). The Lord doesn’t wait for people to be perfect; He simply loves them. And He tells us to do the same. For us to love somebody who’s hurt us can be deeply challenging. It should be said that loving people isn’t the same thing as giving them permission to hurt us. We can set boundaries, and still love people. And yes, that isn’t always easy to do. The thing is, evil has no power over the Lord’s love. If we abide in the Lord, He gives us the ability to love, and no one can take it from us. How other people receive that love is their choice—we will never have power over that. That isn’t our responsibility. The Lord’s commandment is that we love one another as He has loved us.
Amen.