Thursday of the Fourteenth Week in Ordinary Time

 Lectionary: 386

...his sobs were so loud that the Egyptians heard him, and so the news reached Pharaoh's palace.
"I am Joseph," he said to his brothers."Is my father still in good health?"
But his brothers could give him no answer, so dumbfounded were they at him.

Tolstoy opened his Anna Karenina with, "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." 

Jacob's family of twelve sons had its own peculiar type of unhappiness. It was based upon his first wife's sons' resentment of his second's wife's son Joseph, and their selling him into slavery. They told the old man he'd been killed by a lion, and they showed him his bloody cloak; but, as today's reading suggests, he didn't believe it:

"As you know, my wife bore me two sons.

One of them, however, disappeared, and I had to conclude

that he must have been torn to pieces by wild beasts;

I have not seen him since."

The crafty old man knew a lie when he saw it though he had little choice but to accept what they said. 

The story of Joseph, the longest single narrative in the Bible, shows how the LORD manages to transform human foolishness, deceit, and crimes into vehicles of grace. Their unhappy family was given a wonderful healing when a prolonged famine forced them to deal with their lost brother Joseph. The victim had become their savior; and he forgave them when he saw how they cared for their aging father. Not even Jacob's prolonged, unresolved grief could turn them from him. 

But that miracle could hardly compare with the opening of the sea, the people's escape, and the annihilation of Egypt's army. Neither Jacob nor his sons could imagine the Mighty Work that their descendants would witness as God delivered his people from bondage to freedom. 

We never forget the saga, especially as we celebrate Saint Joseph, the husband of Mary. He led the Lord and his Mother into Egypt as the patriarch had led Abraham's descendants into Egypt. Neither Joseph would see those Great Days of deliverance but their faith anticipated them, even as Jacob's grief anticipated his peaceful death amid a happily reunited family. 

We walk by faith, as Saint Paul, and that is satisfaction enough.