Joseph: learning manood--abandoned

Joseph.
Imagine what it was like for him, his life, through his eyes. See life in a troubled home, in a slavemarket, in a pagan household, in the prison---and a boy-man fighting to be holy in an unholy world. Even before he was abandoned as a 17yr old and sold to a pagan world, his homelife had not been with particularly holy people, and it was certainly bot peaceful. Reuben and Judah, Bilhah, Rachel's idols, all show that the whole family were in no way untouched by the Canaanite culture and values and definitions of manhood striving around them. And what was there of his own "culture" to fight back against it with? A clan of sheepfarmers, 1 father with troubled marriages with all 4 wives, 10 angry half brothers, and singled out for spoil treatment from a doting father. There were bitter rivalries among the mothers and bitter jealousies among his brothers. His brothers did not always keep themselves free of the habits of Canaan (Judah).
Not exactly the Shabbat-peace home, or the material that holy men are made of. And then there was his father's hope, the name of this strange God, who knew his greatgrandfather and his grandfather and father by name, who thy knew His name, like a friend, who had called his great grandfather out of all that Mesopotamian culter, into the desert.

In the face of all that sick Canaanite culture, plucked out of his own barely-there culture and thrown into an adopted Egyptian culture that says that manhood is, he had to fight to be a man. What did he have? What chance did this abandoned 17 yr old---at the age when all boys have to fight themselves and fight the definitions of manhood around them to learn how to be a man---here this spoiled child from a dysfunctional family is flung out into the Egyptian world, amid slavery, bitter injustice, temptation, his own hormones, his own hurt...What chance did this betrayed teenager have with everything stacked against him, everything taken from him, except the name of his father's God.

And there we find him in a oppressive pagan world, hammering out precept by precept what it even meant, to be a man.
He must face betrayal--what its like to have your brothers hands on you, this far from killing you, hating you. The humiliation of being stripped and sold like so much livestock. The brutality of the desert journey and the Egyptian slave block.
Then even when sold and bought, he rises to the top, tries hard, behaves like a king in chains, with honor and command. He grows, he's handsome and temptation is thrown into his face. The chapter before we are given the picture of how his big brother falls, him who hasn't been betrayed, who isn't alone and has other men to pray and sing to God with. How many college freshman fall---good Christian kids from good homes, because the fight is so hard. Its internal too. And he stands up to it. He fights it, and himself. Why? For love. He recounts the goodness of his master and "how then can I do this great wickedness, and sin against God?"
For the love of his master, for the love of perhaps even the wellbeing of this woman, and most of all, for the love of the God of his father, this fledgling man fights to be holy in a pagan world.
His reward? Flagrant injustice, he is maligned as a rapist, thrown into prison, with no friends and the whole world thinking you were a scummy jerk. And even there, he prays.
Where did he get the strength? To stand when everyone else was on the ground, when no-one else thought sin was really sin, among the Canaanites and the Egyptians, and even his own troubled family. Where did this boy-man get the strength to stand, and to take the punishment for standing? What had he to look forward (or backward) to? He was a slave in a pagan world. He was an exile, unable to reminisce and hope for home, from a family that wanted him dead. He was a boy trying to learn how to be a man when all the other men had failed. Out of all this mess comes this one shining man, who must fight, fight so hard to be a man. What did he have?
Through it all, it says “and the Lord was with Joseph, in prison.”
With Joseph, in Prison. With him. Not watching over, not seeing, not looking down, with.
You get the feeling that Joseph is learning it all, from God. The only one that hasn't left him or sold him or wanted to 'eat him up' or betrayed him at this point. Point by point, God and this abandoned Hebrew teenager are hammering it out for the first time, how to be a man, how to be righteous, how to be a God-fearing Hebrew in a pagan world, with no mentor, no solid precedent, step by step with God and through suffering, he learns.
It's not that the others didn't try. God alone knows, how hard Abraham tried, coming from that pagan world, setting out with nothing but his tents and household into the wilderness, to learn who this God was, who had called his name. He was plagued by doubt, and family problems and banished children, and an estranged wife. He tried, and he was the first one, to follow God. Then comes Isaac, he too tries. And he too deals with the aftershock of struggling to live in a pagan world, and with his sons deceiving and trying to kill eachother. Then Jacob. Perhaps the best example, of "struggle". His whole life was a struggle, it seems there was no peace, between a deceived brother with murderous intent, a blind father, a manipulative mother, fleeing for his life, a con-man of a father-in-law, 4 wives with much jealousy and strife and hatred, that only passed onto his 12 sons who he didn't know how to control very well, between them sinning against God and wiping out cities. And then comes Joseph.
In Haiti, my father remembered the Catholic saying "it takes 7 generations to make a priest"
For the first 6 generations coming out of a pagan world, with pagan laws and pagan thought, it took that long for the mess of destruction caused by unholiness to die out, lessened in each generation. The drunkard beats his children. The drunkard's child manages to stay dry, but struggles with forgiveness and healing and wanting to control everything to keep it from being the nightmare his own childhood was, the drunkard's granchild deals with his father's over-control and strange reactions and quick temper, formed by that, then comes the drunkard's great-grandchild, and he can laugh easier then his father did and reaps the benefit of the struggle of his forefathers.
"The punishment for the sins of the fathers pass down to the third and fourth generations" said Moshe. The results of unholiness take generations to be eradicated.
And now we have Joseph, the fourth generation from a pagan culture, a fresh young 17 year old, learning what it is to be a man, with the Holy God of his fathers.
It is a story that I think could bear repeating, in our modern time.
And of course being the romantic sucker that I am I start wondering about Joseph’s wife, the pagan priest’s daughter. The gods of Egypt always struck me as so terrifying, so nightmarish, I wonder what it was like for her to marry this red-headed Hebrew that spoke of the God of his fathers, a new God, a God that would be with you in prison. And I wonder what his kids were like, and how they felt not really being Egyptian in a sophisticated Egyptian world, and choosing instead to intermarry with their shepherd cousins and become the tribes of Manasseh and Ephraim. There are stories there, pulsing with blood and tears and human sweat, in the Bible, we see their faces, glimpses of their faces in those brief moments where it mattered most.
And out of Joseph's suffering, came life for all of his family. Grain in Famine. Forgiveness, the first real unmistakable example of unwarranted forgiveness that we see in the Bible.
The history of Joseph is pulsing with life, and symbolic significance--- as the entire children of Israel subsist on Joseph's grain in the drought of the world-- written into things by the great Storywriter of the universe.
Joseph has a lot to teach us.