The story of Joseph in the book of Genesis is a common one many of us learned in church or through the popular musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. While it may be an ancient story, it bears relevance today.
As the story goes, Jacob, one of the patriarchs of Israel, had 12 sons, his favorite of whom was Joseph. One day, Jacob sent his publicly pronounced favorite son into an empty field to find his brothers, who clearly hated him. A field ripe with opportunity for revenge. It’s not clear who’s to blame for what happens next. Jacob and his ignorance? Joseph and his arrogance? Or the 11 other brothers and their thirst for vengeance?
It’s not a clean-cut story. Surely, we could sympathize with all the different characters in the narrative because there is no real protagonist — no one who seems to stop the pattern of dysfunction and do the next right thing.
As Joseph makes his way toward his brothers, the Scripture says, “As he came near, they conspired against him.” Linguistically, the verb “conspire” is a relatively rare Hebrew word that is both reflexive and causative, which means the verb refers both to the subject and the object. So, a better English translation would be: “They conspired against themselves and their brother.” Or as one Hebrew scholar translates it: “They caused deceit to themselves to kill their brother.”
What happens next should sound familiar. After they sold their brother to a group of traders, they took his coat, slaughtered a goat and dipped the coat in its blood to fool their father into thinking his son had died.
There’s great irony in this decision because their own father had used the same animal to deceive his father, Isaac. To steal a blessing that wasn’t intended for him, Jacob had taken the skin of a goat and covered his hands and neck with it, and then deceived his father into thinking he was his brother, Esau.
“Ancestral sin doesn’t mean we inherit the judgment for the sin of our ancestors, but it does mean we repeat their sins until we choose to stop the cycle and do differently.”
Ancestral sin doesn’t mean we inherit the judgment for the sin of our ancestors, but it does mean we repeat their sins until we choose to stop the cycle and do differently. By taking a page right out of Jacob’s playbook, they followed the same scheme and used a goat to trick their father and betray their brother.
And yet, their conspiring was against themselves.
According to the story, these brothers violated a core value of ancient Near Eastern family life and biblical law which held brotherhood as a critical and crucial component of life. They let their envy, pride and ego deceive themselves into casting their brother away. They sold him for 20 shekels of silver, and in so doing they sold their souls.
How often is our conspiring against each other actually a conspiring against ourselves? How often are our misdeeds rooted in our own self-deceit? The story of Joseph and his brothers is a cautionary tale to all of us, a warning about what we become capable of the moment we deceive ourselves based on our own envy, pride and ego.
Recently, the Department of Education granted Baylor University a religious exemption to the Title IX sexual harassment law. Simply put, Baylor asked the federal agency to dismiss sexual-harassment complaints by LGBTQ students, arguing their claims infringe on the school’s religious beliefs.
As a Baylor graduate and a pastor, I am appalled at my alma mater.
After a broad backlash from people everywhere, Lori Fogelman, one of the university’s assistant vice presidents, lamented that Baylor’s religious exemption was being “mischaracterized” as a “broad-based exception to sexual harassment.”
“This is a modern example of what it means to deceive yourself.”
This is a modern example of what it means to deceive yourself. Because no matter how you try to spin it, this Title IX religious exemption is a broad-based exception to sexual harassment, and it’s rooted in ego, pride and homophobia. Regardless of how anyone feels about LGBTQ people, they deserve to be protected in all spaces, including conservative-led, faith-based college institutions.
Baylor would be wise to heed the advice the story of Joseph and his brothers offers us. Any time we conspire against any person or group, we conspire against ourselves and our own morality. This misdeed is rooted in self-deception.
And when we cause deceit to ourselves, we violate our own core values, and we sell our siblings for a handful of silver or for an exemption that allows us to continue our bigotry. Whether we are casting our own flesh and blood into the hands of a slave owner or our own LGBTQ students into the hands of hate and violence, they are both rooted in self-deception.
Baylor has forgotten its core value as a Christian institution rooted in the radical love of Jesus Christ that demands that we love, honor, respect and protect every member of the human family, even those we might consider our own enemies.
When will we learn? Is the story of Joseph being sold for 20 shekels of silver not enough? Or is the story of Christ, our own brother, sold for 30?
When will we put an end to our own family history of dysfunction and stop conspiring against ourselves?
We must be careful because future generations are learning from us. Like Jacob and his sons show us, the skin we wear is the blood they bear. So, let’s stop the cycle now, and do differently.
Victoria Robb Powers serves as senior pastor of Royal Lane Baptist Church in Dallas. She is a graduate of Baylor University and Brite Divinity School and previously served in ministerial roles at University Park United Methodist Church and Highland Park United Methodist Church in Dallas. She chairs the board for the new Baptist House of Studies at Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University.
Related articles:
Baylor asks for — and gets — new exemption to discriminate against LGBTQ students
Is it possible for a Baptist school to maintain top-tier recognition and still discriminate against gay students? | Analysis by Rodney Kennedy
