Rev. Jared Buss
Pittsburgh New Church; March 10, 2024
Readings: Genesis 44:14-34 (children’s talk); Arcana Coelestia §§5804, 8480; Mathew 16:24-26
Judah was willing to give up his own freedom so that Benjamin would not be lost. Judah isn’t necessarily a hero—there are other stories in which his behavior is awfully selfish—but what he does in today’s story is good. And what he does in today’s story is an image of one of the steps in the process of regeneration—the process of allowing the Lord to make us new. Judah chose to give up his freedom—something that was precious to him—for the sake of something that he valued more. The question we’re going to be exploring today is: What are we willing to give up in exchange for the new life that the Lord can create within us?
If you zoom out from it, the whole Joseph story is about two relationships. In the first relationship, Joseph’s brothers are superior to him; and that first relationship is defined by their resentment of Joseph. In the second relationship, Joseph is superior to his brothers—and in the end, that second relationship is defined by Joseph’s willingness to forgive his brothers. When Joseph is in charge, things are good; when his brothers are in charge, things are bad. And to put it simply, Joseph stands for something that comes from the Lord; his brothers stand for levels of our hearts and minds that don’t necessarily have the Lord in them. Everything is better when we allow the Lord to reign! The Joseph story is about the process by which we get there.
Last Sunday we talked about gratitude—and the message was that real gratitude to God is what follows when we recognize that we need Him. Gratitude comes from recognizing that it’s better when He’s in charge. Today we’re talking about the harder side of recognizing that we need the Lord. If we need Him—if we need the life He gives us—then we can’t insist that we’re good enough without Him. If He’s going to be in charge, then there are things we have to give up.
Judah chose to give up his freedom In a sense, he gave his life to Joseph: if he became Joseph’s slave, then for the rest of his life, he would be in Joseph’s hands. Clearly this symbolizes some sort of yielding on our part. The first thing we’re going to get into is what this yielding is for. What is it that makes us willing to do this?
In the internal sense of the Word, Judah and his brothers stand for goods and truths that are present in the external mind, or natural mind. Joseph stands for something that comes from the Lord. He stands for something really good that the Lord is creating within us. But at the point in our regeneration that’s represented in this story, that good thing that Joseph stands for is hidden from us. We haven’t recognized it yet: we haven’t seen the fullness of the joy that the Lord holds in store for us. That’s why Joseph, at this point in the story, is hidden from his brothers. They still think he’s just some Egyptian.
Benjamin, on the other hand, stands for something new from the Lord that we have seen. In a lot of places the Heavenly Doctrine of the New Church says that Benjamin stands for the intermediary between the external mind and something much higher (see AC §§5411, 5443, 5639, 5688). But in the context of the story that we’re looking at today, the Heavenly Doctrine mostly describes Benjamin as a symbol for “new truth” (see AC §§5804, 5822). He has this symbolism because he is the youngest of Israel’s twelve sons—the newest of Israel’s sons (AC §§5804, 5812).
Some of Israel’s other sons also symbolize truths, but for the most part they symbolize truths that we’ve learned from books or from teachers. The new truth that Benjamin symbolizes is completely different. Our next reading—which is from the Heavenly Doctrine, from the book Arcana Coelestia or Secrets of Heaven—describes the quality of this new truth [read §5804].
These new truths aren’t just ideas that we’ve learned; they aren’t just what our parents or our pastors have told us to believe. They hold life within them. These truths are rays of spiritual light. They illuminate a brand new possibility—a kind of peace and beauty that leave this world behind. Fundamentally, Benjamin stands for truth that comes from good. So he stands for the way we see our lives and the way we see the Word of God after He has shown us what goodness—or love—really means.
Once you’ve seen that new truth—that new vision of the life that the Lord could create for you—what will you be willing to do for its sake? What would you be willing to give up in order to hold on to that hope, that promise from the Lord? Judah was willing to give up his freedom so that Benjamin would not be lost. The question, then, becomes: What does Judah really represent? Where or what is the Judah in our lives? What does it mean to give it up?
Earlier I said that Judah and his brothers stand for parts of us that don’t have the Lord in them; but I also said that Judah and his brothers stand for goods and truths in the natural mind. Those two statements might seem contradictory—but they’re not, and that’s the whole point. It seems to us that if we know true things and do good things (or at least, things that look good on the outside), then we’re good people and the Lord is with us. But before we’ve truly allowed the Lord to enter in, the good that we do on the outside is lifeless—and it may even be evil on the inside. And that’s the kind of good that Judah represents.
The Heavenly Doctrine says that he stands for the good of the external church (AC §§5782, 5794, 5841), and it defines this good as good that springs not from affection but from obedience (AC §5843). In other words, Judah stands for the kind of good that we do before the Lord’s light is actually shining in our minds. This good isn’t bad—it’s a step in the right direction. But compared to real spiritual goodness, it’s lifeless. And sooner or later it needs to yield; it needs to give itself up.
There are two things that are involved in giving up external goodness—two closely related things. The first is the recognition that a lot of the good we’ve done in that external way has actually been done for selfish reasons. The second is the recognition and acknowledgment that we cannot do good that is truly good unless we do it from the Lord.
As regards the first recognition—the recognition that a lot of the external good that we do is actually evil on the inside—one easy thing to point out is that Judah stands for this external good, and Judah did a lot of terrible things (see Gen. 38). He was the one who said that Joseph should be sold as a slave (Gen. 37:26, 27). And in the story we read today, Judah admits to this. As he kneels before Joseph, he says, “How shall we clear ourselves? God has found out the iniquity of your servants” (Gen. 44:16). This is puzzling, because it sounds like he’s saying that he and his brothers are guilty of stealing Joseph’s cup, when in fact they didn’t steal the cup. But the Heavenly Doctrine explains that Judah is really confessing to the crime that he did commit—the crime of making Joseph a slave (AC §5785). Kneeling there in Joseph’s presence, he knows that he has done evil, and he admits it.
For our part, most of us probably already know that sometimes we do good things not because we’re motivated by any real love, but because we want to look good. Or because we want to worm our way into someone’s good graces. Sometimes when we donate to charity, we’re thinking more about the tax deduction and less about the charity. Sometimes we do good so that we can get what we want. It’s still good to do these kinds of good deeds—it’s better than not doing them. But it’s also plain that we should do more; we should go deeper. It’s also easy enough to see that if we were to pause, and look back over our lives, and recognize that the good deeds we’ve been so proud of have been riddled with selfishness, that recognition would hurt. If we were to admit to that, that admission would feel like a blow—like something was being taken away from us. That’s probably how Judah felt when he knelt down in front of Joseph.
But the deeper admission—the one that’s both more difficult, and more powerful—is that we can’t actually do any good at all without the Lord. A lot of the time, this seems unbelievable—because all of us are aware of good things that we have definitely done. But listen to what the Heavenly Doctrine has to say. This second reading is also from Arcana Coelestia, or Secrets of Heaven. [Read §8480].
To understand the flower analogy, you have to bear in mind that when this passage talks about a picture of flowers, it means a painting of flowers. The Doctrines were written before cameras were invented. The pigments in old fashioned paint came primarily from minerals, which is why the passage describes paint on a canvas as “a mass of particles of earth.” The point is clear: good that comes from the Lord is beautiful inside and out. More than that—it’s alive. It’s like a flower in a garden, a flower that holds seeds that can grow into more good things, and more and more forever. Whereas good that we do without the Lord is an imitation of goodness. It only goes so deep, and it is not alive.
It can be really hard to hear the Word say things like, “in himself a person is nothing but evil” (AC §8480). This seems untrue. When we were little children we gave our parents hugs and kisses, and that was good—and surely we’ve done a few more good things since then. The truth is that yes, we have… because the Lord has been with us. The love that we shared with everyone when we were tiny children was His love, and He’s been with us ever since, giving to us freely of His goodness, whether we know that it comes from Him or not. His goodness has been part of our lives. But when we’ve pushed or crowded Him out of our lives, what we’ve done has not been good.
It’s when we’ve tried to do it without Him that we’ve made the messes in our lives. When we ignore His mercy and His power, and try to do good deeds in the name of our own goodness, that’s when we feel inadequate. When we try to take control—when we believe that we need to be the source of the good that we do—that’s when we’re met with failure. The truth is that we need the Lord. We cannot do good that is really good without the Lord. To accept this truth we have to lay down our pride; we have to lay down our “right” to do it our way. And that’s what’s symbolized by Judah’s willingness to lay down His freedom.
But of course, Joseph doesn’t actually make Judah a slave. When we give our lives to the Lord, what actually happens is that we get to keep it all. He gives us new life—His own life—and He gives us the power to put that life into action as though it is our own. He puts His love into our hearts, into our hands, and He says: “love one another as I have loved you” (John 15:12).
Everything that we’ve talked about today is taught much more concisely in a few lines that the Lord says to His disciples in the Gospel. In Matthew we read: [vv. 24-26].
Right there in the Gospel, the Lord asks us what would we give in exchange for our souls. On the face of it, He’s asking us what we’d give up in order to save our souls from evil, but the question can also be framed the other way. He is willing to give us new life. He is trying to teach us new truth—truth that shows us real joy and real love. What does it profit us if we hold on to all of our pride and every piece of the life that we’ve created for ourselves, and lose that new life? What would you give in exchange for the goodness that flows from the kingdom of heaven?
Amen.