These three passages could be considered about adoption and identity, because identity shifts, and refuses to be be the same throughout a life time, and because they are about questions of geography, of choice, of desire, they become complicated and difficult places. Painful places.
Joseph is the son of Jacob, literally and figuratively the son of Israel, and he is sold into slavery in Egypt—Egypt as a place of exile, but also Egypt as a place where patriachs gain power, a place in Isrealite imagination of wealth, of status, of earthly goods. Joseph was successful in Egypt, he was the second most powerful person in the land, he goes from a slave to a vizier, from an Israelite to someone who is found safety within the Egyptian court...this is not the only patriarch who goes through Egypt, who understands the power of otherness, of an exilic imagination, the isolation from the homeland, the being sent out and returning, or being forbidden from returning is central to the larger understanding of the world—it is seen in Moses, who liberates his people from the Pharaoh, and it is seen in Christ, who flees to Egypt, in order not to be killed by Herod, and so Joseph, becomes one beginning of the Israelites as strangers in a strange land, this strangeness requires of them an explicit sense of cultural and social memory: “"Do not oppress an alien; you yourselves know how it feels to be aliens, because you were aliens in Egypt."
Joseph so isolated from his family, that they sell him to the stranger, they abandon him, and after years, he returns—and this is the place where his forgiveness becomes intensely moving, the hugging the neck, the kissing of the forehead, his brothers eventually accepting of Joseph as prophetic though previously what sent Joseph away was his hearing the voice of god, no matter how obliquely, or symbolically—the younger brother becoming an example for the older brothers—the seeking and the gaining of forgiveness—of course it is an example, an intense, moving, radically renewing, almost raw, example of family, of forgiveness, of closeness, of the desire for completion, but also all of it, is intensely, forever a homecoming, but Joseph never loses the Egyptian part of himself, he is a citizen of Israel, and his family, and his people, but his land, the province he lives in, Goshen, is carved out of Egypt, and the way that he reads dreams and prophecies has an Egyptian style—remember that his brothers don't recognize Joseph when they first see him in the court of Egypt.
This question of inclusion and excision, of being an alien and being a member of a group, becomes firmer over time, there are rules, conclusions that are reached, so that the call of hospitality is given and so people do not lose their Jewish identity, so they do not become Babylonians, or Egyptians or Canaanites. Joseph becomes a way, in a liturgical sense, an introduction to the problems of the Gospel.
The gospel becomes really difficult for Christians who have a social justice bent, We try to be like Christ here, but Christ here is not the man who says the first will be last and the last will be first, he is not the christ of priority of the poor, or the one who talks about the leveling of inequility—here he uses a racial slur, and worse he tells the woman that she will never be part of the jewish culture “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”--for those of us who are not Jewish, who are not part of the lost sheep of Israel, how do we connect ourselves to the Lord, a Lord who in this passage who has decided to be abandon us---it reminds us that Christ was not a christian, that we as Christians are interlopers for the original message, and that we are not here, like christ, but we are the Caaniate woman, who are begging for a small intervention, a small notice of Grace, from a God who might not have priority for us, or at least at this point in time, in this point in the history of Christ, he was not for us.
In the Anglican tradition, there is a memory, of our base humanity, of our fallen nature, of our inability to fully understand or know the Master and our internalization of our separation from the divine comes from the difficult place where Christ isolates himself from the larger world. The prayer of humble access in the 1662 BCP can be seen as a place where we recognize that we are adapted into this tradition—it is not only our separation from the full glory of god, because of our humanness, it is because we are part of another tradition, a branch that has been transplanted onto the tree of life. Let me read that prayer:
We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table. But thou art the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy: Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body, and our souls washed through his most precious blood, and that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us. Amen.
The prayer of Humble Access is the place where we are exilic, it is a mark of our exilic space.
This is where the epistle provides a place of grace—this fear that we are defiled, that we embody the problem of purity, because the first half of the gospel is about what can defile and what cannot defile, but the purity and the defiling happen at the same time—and just as we cannot presume to come to this thy table, we cannot presume to clean enough, to wash our hands the right way, or say the right words, or to pray sufficiently to be pure, We are Christian because we have agreed to be adopted into the family of Abraham, but we are still strangers in a strange land.
God's understanding, has grown wider, the contract he had with Abraham has grown past the lost sheep of Israel to the dissident members of other places and other tradition. Because we cannot understand God, because we are not perfect, and because God is perfect, because God is beyond time and space, and because we are stuck in our own temporalities, we cannot avoid being disobdienent—this is the exile that we live in, the absence from the divine, the being unable through our own skills, gifts, powers and understanding to receive the Eucharistic cup, the cup that was not taken away from Christ, though he asked.
This is grace and mercy, to be adopted into the citizenship of Israel, not with the awkard rules of hospitality not with the hostile word of Christ who only sought his own lambs, but if we want ot be adopted, if we want to be a member of the Abrahamic covenant, then we can be.
This choice cannot be easy, and we are still exiles from the lord—but there is power in this choice of adaptation, of adoption.
