He Said, She Said

Now Joseph was handsome and good-looking. And after a time his master’s wife cast her eyes on Joseph and said, ‘Lie with me.’ (Genesis 39:6b-7)

Ah, here's to you Mrs. Potiphar! Today's reading from the Daily Office Lectionary (Genesis 39:1-23) makes it very clear that this is all her fault, and poor young handsome and good-looking Joseph was innocent and unjustly accused by a woman angry that he wouldn't give her what she wanted. And maybe that's exactly what happened.

But I think the most important thing I have learned from feminist Biblical scholars is to develop a "hermeneutic of suspicion" - or as Walter Brueggemann puts it, to ask "who has an axe to grind in this text?" Poor old Joseph: first his mean brothers, and now Mrs. Potiphar! Smart, good-looking and charming Joseph: what's not to love? Yet somehow he seems to bring out the worst in people, and it never seems to be his fault.

I remember when the film "Disclosure" came out in 1994 with Demi Moore and Michael Douglas - about sexual harassment in the work-place with a clever twist (at least at the time): the boss is a woman and she is the one who harasses her male employee. Except that as I remember the conversations after that film, few of the women I spoke with who saw that film saw Michael Douglas as "an innocent victim;" yet most men I knew did. I haven't seen the film since it came out, so I don't know how I'd see it today. But the conversations with friends, and their divergent perspectives, have stayed with me.

So what would Mrs. Potiphar say happened with that young good-looking man whom her husband invited to live in their guesthouse "just until he could get back on his feet again?" Of course we can never know; we get only the story we get. And I'm not trying to cast aspersions on beloved Joseph nor question the authority of Scripture. But I think Scripture is meant to be read critically and to engage our minds and our imaginations as well as our hearts.

One thing seems clear to me in the entire Joseph saga: God's ways are far more mysterious and difficult to comprehend than in the good old days of his great-grandaddy, Abraham. By the time we get to this fourth generation, God is no longer saying "go to a land I'll show you" or "your wife will be pregnant soon" or "take your son, your only son whom you love..." God now speaks through dreams that need to be interpreted; God's ways are revealed based on what T. S. Eliot once called "hints and half-guesses." We throw the word "discernment" around in the church a lot these days, but the fact of the matter is that true discernment takes a lot of work and is at best an imperfect science. Sometimes I think the more certain we are that "this is God's will" the more likely we are to be wrong, and with great consequences.

Real discernment begins with seeing rightly, which requires great discipline and effort. It requires that we see our own complicity when things go wrong, which it seems to me is one of the things we can work on in Lent. God is in the midst of it all to be sure, not just the joys and celebrations but the scandals and shame-filled press conferences too. God is there - in the fasting and the feasting, in the wilderness as well as the promised land. But it's not always clear how, or why, things happen when they happen nor is it always apparent where God is leading us next.

Whatever we make of the Joseph saga, and whatever crazy circles these ruminations may be running in, we do well to remember where the story goes next - the one the Biblical narrators and editors have in fact given us, I mean. Joseph ends up in jail for a long time. He'll have a lot of time to think back on what happened and whether or not he was complicit or completely innocent. The Joseph we finally see when he has become Secretary of Agriculture in Pharaoh's administration, the Joseph who forgives and welcomes his brothers seems to be a wiser, more faithful, and even more likeable person than he was as a kid. Amazingly, he does not seem to have allowed his travails to leave him bitter, but instead to have allowed them to lead him to growth.There is something to be said for that.

I wonder, if he ever ran into Mrs. Potiphar at a cocktail party: would he be as gracious to her as he was to his brothers?