Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity, 2009

Text: Genesis 42:1-34

The Rev. Jerry Kistler

St. Stephen’s Reformed Episcopal Church

Montrose, Colorado

“A Lesson in Grace”

It was a lesson in grace. In Victor Hugo’s classic novel Les Miserable Jean Valjean is sentenced to nineteen years hard labor for the crime of stealing a loaf of bread. In the violent world of the work camp, where only the merciless survive, he’s gradually hardened into a ruthless convict. No one can beat him in a fight. No one can break his will. At last he’s let out on parole. But no one will give him shelter, because in those days convicts had to carry papers identifying them as dangerous felons. For four days he wanders through the village streets, knocking on doors, seeking food and a bed, until he finally comes to the door of a kindly old bishop. The bishop actually invites him in, to which Val Jean responds, ‘I’m a convict. Here is my passport. I can’t read, but I know what it says: “He’s very dangerous.” The bishop shakes his head and smiles. “Messier, you are welcome to eat with us as my guest.” “I’m a convict!” Valjean insists, “You saw my papers.” “I know who you are,” the bishop replies. Incredulous, Valjean stammers,

“You… you are going to let me inside your house?” Later, as they finish their meal together, Valjean is finally able to overcome his disbelief and distrust enough to thank the bishop for the meal and the bed. And then he speaks his fateful words: “In the morning I’ll be a new man.”

At this point, however, Valjean is still a ruthless convict. So that night, after the bishop and his sister have drifted off to sleep, Valjean quietly gets up from his bed, goes down the stairs, and begins to fill his sack with the bishop’s silverware, and then creeps off into the darkness.

The next morning three policemen knock at the bishop’s door with Valjean in shackles. They’d caught him fleeing with the sack of the bishop’s silver and were ready to put him chains for life. But Valjean claimed that the bishop had given him the silverware, to which the bishop responds, as unexpectedly to Valjean as to the policemen: “Yes, of course I gave him the silverware. But why didn’t you take the silver candlesticks? That was very foolish. They’re worth at least 2000 francs. Did you forget to take them?”

Jean Valjean looks at the bishop in stunned amazement. Valjean is no thief, the bishop assures the policemen. “The silver was my gift to him.”

When the police withdraw, the bishop adds the candlesticks to Val Jean’s bag of stolen silver and says to the now speechless convict, “Do not forget. Never forget. You’ve promised to become a new man.” “Promise?” Val Jean sputters, “Why are you doing this?” “Jean Valjean, my brother,” says the bishop, “You no longer belong to evil. With this silver I’ve bought your soul. I’ve ransomed you from fear and hatred. And now I give you back to God.”

It was a lesson in grace that changed Jean Valjean’s life forever. It’s a lesson to us of how grace – unexpected, amazing grace, grace that defies all human instincts for revenge – is able to transform the lives of even the most hardened of sinners.

Without becoming the recipients of grace, the human condition is such that we do not know how to show grace. We must first be broken by grace – broken of all of our merciless legalism, broken of our basic human instinct to exact revenge and pay-back, broken like Jean Valjean was broken by the bishop’s grace, when nothing in this world could break him. An experience of divine grace - something totally unexpected, something so outside of this world of retribution and revenge, and something frankly that we’re a bit suspicious of and have a hard time believing can really exist – is the necessary ingredient to our living a life of grace towards others.

Joseph gave his brothers a bit of lesson in grace. And they really needed a good lesson in grace, didn’t they. The ten brothers of Joseph were all justice and retribution; they knew nothing of grace. Remember these are the same brothers who had bullied him, had cooked up plans to murder him, and finally sold him into slavery. Because of them Joseph had spent the best years of his life down in the depths of Pharaoh’s prison. They needed to be taught a lesson! But the truly amazing thing is that the lesson Joseph wants to teach them is a lesson in grace. What kind of lesson would you want to teach them?

The first thing Joseph realizes is that, in order for his brothers to receive grace as grace – as nothing less than pure unmerited favor – they first had to be made aware of their guilt. Unless we come to recognize our total unworthiness to receive grace, we will never recognize grace as grace. It will always be something we convince ourselves we’ve somehow earned or deserved. Joseph’s brothers had to be brought to the point that they could recognize that all the gifts and all the favors they would receive from him would come to them not on the level of justice – not as rewards for services rendered – but as the very opposite of what they felt they deserved – as grace.

And so Joseph begins his lesson first by putting them into a situation where he knows they will begin to revisit upon themselves their guilt for the way they’d treated him those many years ago. See, after all this time, Joseph still knows his brothers. He knows that they’re all about justice and retribution and revenge, even in the way they conceive of God. And so, as we turn back a chapter in the book of Genesis to Genesis 42, where we see Joseph first meet his brothers after all those years, I believe what we see is Joseph deliberately setting his brothers up to do exactly what they do, and that is to begin to interpret their unjust suffering as God’s punishment for their unjust treatment of Joseph all those years ago.

But why would Joseph begin here to give his lesson in grace? Why would Joseph want to begin by driving these men to dig up things from the far distant past to make them feel and acknowledge their suppressed guilt? Because, in the words of C.S. Lewis, “A man who admits no guilt can accept no forgiveness.”

And so in verse 6 we read:

“Now Joseph was governor over the land; and it was he who sold to all the people of the land. And Joseph’s brothers came and bowed down before him with their faces to the earth. Joseph saw his brothers and recognized them.”

Now this is where I think Joseph decides to give his brothers a lesson in grace. For it goes on:

“But he acted as a stranger to them and spoke roughly to them. Then he said to them, “Where do you come from?” And they said, “From the land of Canaan to buy food.” So Joseph recognized his brothers, but they did not recognize him. Then Joseph remembered the dreams which he had dreamed about them, and said to them, “You are spies! You have come to see the nakedness of the land!” And they said, “No, my lord, but your servants have come to buy food. We are all one man’s sons; we are honest men [there’s the biggest lie of all!]; your servants are not spies.” But he said to them, “No, but you have come to see the nakedness of the land.” And they said, “Your servants are twelve brothers, the sons of one man in the land of Canaan; and in fact, the youngest is with our father today, and one is no more.” But Joseph said to them, “It is as I spoke to you, saying, ‘You are spies!’ In this manner you shall be tested: By the life of Pharaoh, you shall not leave this place unless your youngest brother comes here. Send one of you, and let him bring your brother; and you shall be kept in prison, that your words may be tested to see whether there is any truth in you; or else, by the life of Pharaoh, surely you are spies!” So he put them all together in prison three days.

“Then Joseph said to them the third day, “Do this and live, for I fear God: If you are honest men, let one of your brothers be confined to your prison house; but you, go carry grain for the famine of your houses. And bring your youngest brother to me; so your words will be verified, and you shall not die.” And they did so. Then they said to one another, “We are truly guilty concerning our brother, for we saw the anguish of his soul when he pleaded with us, and we would not hear; therefore this distress has come upon us.”

You see, the unjust treatment they’re suffering brings out all their suppressed guilt over their unjust treatment of their brother. But already Joseph has begun to teach them the meaning of grace. Did you catch it? As the man with all the power to do anything he wants to do tothem, he first throws them all in prison as spies, and he says, “Only one of you can go back to you own land and bring back your younger brother to prove you’re not spies. But if he doesn’t come back, the rest of you are under a death sentence.” Imagine these brothers, who all know each other’s lack of mercy, sitting there in prison for three days trying to decide which one of them they could all trust not to run off and save his own skin by never returning to Egypt. But then, totally unexpectedly, Joseph comes down to the dungeon and says, “Because I fear God – because I, the governor of Egypt (a pagan in their eyes), fear God – all of you except one man may go back to Canaan and bring your brother back.” In other words, “I’m going to trust that you are who you say you are: honest men.”

Well, the power of Joseph’s grace begins to do its work. Having received mercy - from a pagan ruler no less – the brothers begin to feel shame that they showed no mercy to their own brother when they had him in their power.

But Joseph is not finished with his lesson because his brothers are still a long way off from being transformed by grace, just as Jean Valjean remained the ruthless convict that he was even after the bishop gave him the grace of a meal and a bed.

And so a little further down in the chapter (chapter 42 beginning at verse 25) we read how Joseph commands his steward to surreptitiously return each of his brothers’ money into their own sacks. But these brothers still have no concept of grace. So when the first of them opens his sack and sees his money, the Scripture says (v. 28), “Then their hearts failed them and they were afraid, saying one to another, ‘What is this that God has done to us?”

You see, grace is so unexpected that sometimes we can’t believe it. We’re suspicious of it. We think it must be some kind of trick, and if we accept it and put our trust in it then one day later we’re going to find out we’ve been duped. And this is why we have the tendency to say in our hearts even of God’s grace, “There must be something I have to do. There must be something I have to do to deserve God’s grace, or there must be something I have to do to keep God’s grace. It can’t simply be because God is gracious.” We have a natural suspicion of grace. But for grace to be grace it must be totally unexpected, totally beyond what we feel we deserve, or else it’s not grace. It is something totally out of this world. It’s not something we get from the world. And it is by that kind of grace that we are saved – grace that is truly grace, and nothing of our own deserving.

But at this point Joseph’s brothers are not ready to accept grace. They can only see it as God bringing on them even greater trouble: “What is this that God has done to us?”

But Joseph is still not done with his lesson. In chapter 43, when his brothers finally return to Egypt, with their little brother Benjamin in tow, they come expecting to meet a man who is exacting to the nth degree, who is swift to meet out punishments, and who has no problem assuming a person is guilty until proven innocent. And so what do they do? They go down carrying cart loads of the best of the produce of the land of Canaan as a kind of bribe. And they’re prepared to pay double the money that had been returned to them, because they’re certain that this great man is now going to accuse them of being thieves in addition to being spies. But again, what they’re met with is totally unexpected grace.

What do we see? As the bishop, with amazing, unexpected grace, invited the self-consciously guilty convict into his house, so Joseph now invites his self-judged, self-convicted brothers into his house to be his guests at a banquet held in their honor. And if that’s not a type of the grace that we receive from Jesus Christ as we come here to his table, I don’t know what is. Grace upon grace is poured out on these brothers who were so undeserving of grace. Even when they try to explain and to pay their double payment the stewards says basically, “Hey, don’t worry about it. Peace be with you, and do not be afraid. I received your money. So your God and the God of your father must have given treasure into your sacks.” And then Simeon was brought out of prison, and they were all brought in and given seats at a great table set out before Joseph’s throne. And then Joseph himself came and served them. And all they could do is sit there looking at each other in total astonishment.

Grace is astonishing. Grace is amazing, because it is the very opposite of what we deserve. Joseph was breaking his brothers with grace. But his lesson is still not complete. We’ll see the conclusion of the lesson next week.

But two quick points of application and then I’ll give you the unexpected grace of being done. First, for grace to be grace it must be totally unexpected; it must be something we realize we don’t deserve. And so if you’re having a hard time accepting the grace of God – if you’re having a hard time accepting that God’s grace is even for such a person as you – then be encouraged. At least you’ve recognized the essential thing – that you don’t deserve God’s grace. But then when you figure out that grace is for those who don’t deserve it, then you can begin to accept grace for yourself.

Second, the key to living a life of grace towards others is having become the recipients of grace ourselves. If you have difficulty showing grace to others, then the solution for you is not to go back to the Law which tells you to be gracious, or else. It is for you to return and be amazed again by the amazing grace of God shown to you in Jesus Christ. The law kills. The gospel gives life. It is the gospel of grace that can transform you and me into gracious people.

Brothers and sisters, we’ve been given the greatest lesson in grace imaginable. God himself came down to earth in the person of Jesus Christ, and in his time on earth he showed us up for the sinners we truly are. He made us know the guilt of our sins. And then he bore our guilt and paid the price for our sins. Having received such grace beyond measure, how shall we not live lives of grace toward each other? Jesus says, “Be merciful, just as your Father also is merciful.” That’s not just a law; it’s the only way we can do it. And so this morning, as we come to the table of the Lord and receive God’s grace anew, let us learn our lesson in grace. +