Did you Forget to Give?

Genesis 50:15-21

“Did You Forget to Forgive?”

15 When Joseph’s brothers saw that their father was dead, they said, “What if Joseph holds a grudge against us and pays us back for all the wrongs we did to him?” 16 So they sent word to Joseph, saying, “Your father left these instructions before he died: 17 ‘This is what you are to say to Joseph: I ask you to forgive your brothers the sins and the wrongs they committed in treating you so badly.’ Now please forgive the sins of the servants of the God of your father.” When their message came to him, Joseph wept. 18 His brothers then came and threw themselves down before him. “We are your slaves,” they said.   19 But Joseph said to them, “Don’t be afraid. Am I in the place of God? 20 You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives. 21 So then, don’t be afraid. I will provide for you and your children.” And he reassured them and spoke kindly to them.

Introduction: In busy New York City lived a middle-aged couple. Their names were Eldon and Ida Haid. Eldon was a banker who lived a straight, unassuming life. However, his constant concern with money had made him a rather cold, calculating sort of fellow. On the other hand, Ida was quite personable, as one would expect of a saleslady who presided over a perfume counter at Macys’s. Ida loved her husband, whose eye never strayed, but whose demeanor toward her was as lacking in warmth as a one-dollar coin left out in the middle of a snowstorm. Ida wanted some genuine passion from Eldon, not just a faithful husband.

Unfortunately, one day her need for passion found someone who was willing to meet her need for a sinful price. It was Ida’s bad luck that Eldon came home early that day to find the amorous couple entwined in their bed.

The noise that ensued and the quarreling that occurred over the next few days became the talk of everyone in the apartment building. Of course, Ida could not keep quiet, and sought solace with some of her girlfriends at church. Consequently, as these girlfriends gossiped among themselves and confided this terrible story to their husbands, the tale of this infidelity had soon permeated the entire community in which the Haids lived.

Some people thought that Eldon would finally show some righteous indignation and divorce Ida, especially after making them the talk of the block. But everyone was surprised when Eldon told Ida (and by telling her, announced it to the world through the grapevine) that he would forgive her.

But had he? The hurt remained in his heart; he just didn’t express it outwardly. He continued to recall to his mind the feelings he felt when he discovered his wife enjoying the passion of another man. And as he relived this vision day after day, it weighed on his heart. This feeling of heaviness due to the burden he bore as a victim of his wife’s infidelity robbed him of happiness and hope. Work became uninteresting. At home, he faced everyday that one who had wronged him.

But one night he had a dream. He was staked to the ground, unable to move. But out of the clouds, a ray of light began to beam upon him. The light felt good. It warmed him and his cold chains. As the chains grew warmer, they grew looser, due to the expansion that results when metals are heated. This gave him the ability to move somewhat.

But then he thought of his wife’s sin. Immediately, the clouds came together and the beam of light disappeared. He cried in anguish, “Come back, dear sunbeam, and loosen my chains!”

To his amazement, a voice from heaven, as if from God, called out to him, “How can I shine on one who continually brings darkness to his heart?”

“What do you mean?” Eldon replied.

“I cast my light upon you to loosen those chains, yet you make them cold again by your hateful lack of forgiveness for your wife,” the voice replied.

“But I have forgiven her,” Eldon responded. “I even told her so.”

“But you haven’t loved her, and you won’t love her as long as you hold her sin against her in your heart. Words alone aren’t enough. Rather, you must truly love her, and truly forgive her.”

With that, the heavens opened and, as Emperor Constantine had seen so long before, there stood a cross in the heavens, reminding him of the one who had truly loved and truly forgiven.

The next day, Eldon began to kiss his wife without her having to make the first move. This brought a smile to Ida’s face and a tear to her eye the first time it happened. But soon, Eldon found the kiss was no longer forced, but felt. And Ida responded in kind by showing through her cooking, her cleaning, and her conversation that she still loved him and him alone among mortal men.

Of course, every day at first, there were times when the anger within him would again arise and his heart would grow cold. But then he would remember the cold chains that had held him so tightly in his dream and he would repent of his inability to truly forgive.

But as time went on, he thought these thoughts of unforgiving hatred less and less. And as these feelings of unforgiveness faded, and his love and passion for his wife grew, it was as if the chains from the dream melted away and freed him to again enjoy the freedom made possible through love. Fifty years later, when they celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary, Ida and Eldon could tell those gathered in celebration that theirs had been a marriage with relatively few obstacles along the way. And those few weren’t worth mentioning.

The process of not forgiving others is a slippery slope. We begin by not wanting to forgive the one who forsook us. Later it becomes increasingly hard, then almost impossible to forgive them.

If God retains his primary, sovereign place in our faith and life, the way of access back to him and his resource of forgiveness can be opened. If Joseph wanted to set about counting the wrongs committed against him, he could tabulate many. Not only did his brothers sell him as a slave to a caravan of traders; not only was he wrongfully charged with sexual assault by Potiphar’s wife; but the chief cupbearer, after he had been exonerated (and in fulfillment of Joseph’s correctly interpreted dream), forgot Joseph for two full years. But the remembrance of God’s mercy and grace left an indelible mark of gratitude on Joseph.

God retained his place as CEO in relation to Joseph. After Jacob died and Joseph had his most important opportunity to forgive them, Joseph said two things: “Am I in the place of God?” (I wouldn’t presume to usurp his place.)

And second, Joseph saw himself and his brothers with a grand, global perspective: “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives. So don’t be afraid.” And Joseph brought full closure to the act of forgiveness: “‘I will provide for you and your children.’ And he reassured them and spoke kindly to them” (v 21).

Lewis Smedes analyzes our inability to forgive: “Hate is for emergencies, like a fast battery charge … But as a long-term energizer, it is unreliable. And in the end it kills. Hate-power is especially superficial when it is generated out of our fear of weakness (p 177). “(Forgiving) is creative: when we forgive we come as close as any human being can to the essentially divine act of creation. For we create a new beginning out of past pain that never had a right to exist in the first place. We create healing for the future by changing a past that had no possibility in it for anything but sickness and death” (pp. 191–2).

Jesus didn’t wait for apologies when, as his first order of business on the cross, he asked, “Father, forgive them.” Then people, beginning with the thief on the right, began to taste God’s mercy, and then ask for and receive from God the sweet-tasting eternal gift of forgiveness.

Conclusion: When Margaret joined the church, she admitted to her new pastor that she believed her brother—now dead—had ruined the life of their father. Perhaps the brother had even driven his dad to death by incessantly frustrating him. Her pastor lent her Smede’s book. She read it. “Sorry, pastor, no sale. I can’t forgive my brother. He killed our dad.”

One day while walking to her car in the parking lot of the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, Margaret had a massive stroke. Surgery the next day repaired the leaking blood vessel in her brain. A long recovery followed. She re-read Smedes. She thought and savored God’s mercy in rescuing her from physical and spiritual death. “Finally,” she told her pastor, “I’ve let my dead brother go. I’ve forgiven him.”[1]

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[1]Eldon Weisheit, Homiletic Help!, (St. Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House) 1998.