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This is it. The moment we've all been waiting for. The moment when all the people who thought you'd never amount to anything watch you come out on the stage. The spotlight hits you. The audience stands and the entire hall reverberates with their applause. This is that moment when a man dressed in the finery of the Egyptian court makes himself known to his impoverished brothers. "It's me, Joseph! It's me! Remember me? The brother you threw into a pit? Don't you remember me, Judah? You suggested that you could get some money by selling me into slavery."

At first sight the brothers do not remember. Twenty years made a great difference between the men. Joseph had changed. First he was a slave for a short time in an Egyptian household. Then he spent years in a prison. He no longer had the soft, pampered, playful look of the spoiled boy from Canaan. In addition, Joseph now had the dress and demeanor of a high counselor ("father to the Pharaoh") and kept his distance from those who stood in his audience.

And the brothers had changed also. They had first come to the house of the governor to ask for grain. They had returned because Judah had come to offer himself as a slave in the hope of saving his family. It was Judah who once said, "What profit is it if we slay our brother ... Come, let us sell him to the Ishmaelites" (Genesis 37:26-27). How strange the wheel turns that Judah now offers to give himself as a slave.

As Joseph stands before his brothers, he has them right where we'd love to have all those petty gossipers who have told tales on us. All those obnoxious co-workers who take great joy in criticizing us behind our backs. Joseph has his brothers right where the psalmist would like to put all his malicious witnesses: "At my stumbling they gathered in glee ... slandered me without ceasing ... Let them be put to shame and confusion altogether who rejoice at my calamity!" (Psalm 35:15, 26).

We had a friend who had a good sales position, making almost $50,000 a year. But then the office ran into hard times. Stress mounted and relations between sales representatives and the management broke down. When the office closed down, those who remained refused to give our friend a helpful reference. He was unemployed for two-and-a-half years and never did find a decent job in his profession. He was bitter. He often wished he could bring down those executives who still had cushy jobs but had sent him out without even as much as a good word.

There are some events in our life that make us cringe when we remember them. And there are some people we would love to have at our mercy, as Joseph had his brothers at his mercy. But what did he do at that juncture? He sends all of the Egyptians, all of the witnesses, out of the room. When they are gone, he starts bawling, not crying but bawling. His bawling was so loud they heard his weeping throughout the house and even next door! But his brothers still did not know who he was. Wouldn't you love to know what was going through the brothers' minds when this Egyptian started to break down and cry? Finally, slowly, Joseph regains his composure. He then invites them to come closer, to cross that understood boundary between peasant and ruler. And after exposing his emotions, he says it: "I am your brother, Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt" (Genesis 45:4). Walter Brueggemann, an Old Testament scholar, suggests that the terror and astonishment these brothers experienced would have been similar to the awesome shock the early church experienced in the presence of the risen Christ.1

Joseph had his brothers right where he could humiliate them. Right there where he could even the score for the pain and hardship he endured. But instead Joseph comes to his senses. Perhaps for the first time in his life, Joseph realizes that everything his brothers did, every miserable thing that happened to him was twisted by God into something good. Because of his past, God had placed Joseph in a position that enabled him to save a new nation from the ruin of famine. The brothers' actions were God sending him on ahead of them to ensure their future.

Joseph was unable, even with all the power in Egypt, to do anything to change the past. But now he could see that God had been at work redeeming those years. Perhaps Joseph bawled because he was finally released from his captivity of sadness and frustration, and now his brothers were finally freed from their guilt. Joseph basically took a big eraser and wiped off the names of all the people he had blamed for his misfortune. Then in the cleared space he wrote in "Praise only one name, GOD." It was not in a vacuum that Jacob favored Joseph. It wasn't an isolated event that Judah and his brothers sold him into slavery, or that Potiphar's wife sent him off to prison. God chose him. God enslaved him. God imprisoned him. And so to God the praise is given! For it was also God who taught him the way with dreams and God who selected him as counselor to the Pharaoh. Terence Fretheim writes:

God has "taken over" what they have done and used it to bring about this end. Their actions have become God's by being woven into his life-giving purposes. Even more, Pharaoh's actions -- elevating Joseph as ruler -- have become God's!2

We also are unable to change many of the lousy things that happen to us in our lives at the hands of others, but we can allow God to redeem them. All the terrible comments and relationships and events can become God's life-giving purposes. If these incidents have matured us in Christ, if they have made us empathetic and able to help others out of their lethargy, hurt, or bitterness, then our past is redeemed. We have been sent ahead.

Blaming others traps us in the past with them. A black picture of others sticks us with a dim image of God. Charles Stanley writes:

There have been times when I felt as if I was on a Ferris wheel. Round and round I would go, experiencing the same hurt over and over again. "Lord," I would say, "What are you doing? I've already been through this." It was as if He said, "You're right, and when you respond correctly, I'll let you off."3

Joseph is helping his brothers off the Ferris wheel. They are getting off together. They are going as a family into the future that God has planned for them. In his tears, Joseph tells his brothers to come closer. He realizes that he holds no power over them. Just as he realizes his brothers never held any power over him. God was and is the One shaping history, even our history! Augustine concurred with this in a quote from the Second Helvetic Confession: "Everything which to vain men seems to happen in nature by accident, occurs only by His Word, because it happens only at His command."

Our friend who was slighted a good reference now works at a local community college. He is out of the cutthroat profession he left and is making use of not only his sales experience but also his math background in his new vocation. I know that he is very good at what he does. And it took all the pressure, rejection, and waiting to get him where he is.

Even if we live through unemployment, or slavery, or imprisonment, or chemotherapy, or whatever, we can claim our life with pride. Paul's words are certainly true: "We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him."

Tempe Lee Fussell

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1. Walter Brueggemann, Genesis: Interpretation -- A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (Atlanta, Ga.: John Knox Press, 1982), p. 344.

2. Terence E. Fretheim, "The Book of Genesis," in The New Interpreter's Bible, Volume I (Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press, 1994), p. 644.

3. Charles Stanley, How To Handle Adversity (Nashville, Tenn.: Oliver-Nelson Books, 1989), p. 184.