'Joseph said to his brothers, "I am Joseph. Is my father still alive?" But his brothers could not answer him, so dismayed were they at his presence.
Then Joseph said to his brothers, "Come closer to me." And they came closer. He said, "I am your brother, Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt. And now do not be distressed, or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life. For the famine has been in the land these two years; and there are five more years in which there will be neither plowing nor harvest. God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth, and to keep alive for you many survivors. So it was not you who sent me here, but God; he has made me a father to Pharaoh, and lord of all his house and ruler over all the land of Egypt. Hurry and go up to my father and say to him, 'Thus says your son Joseph, God has made me lord of all Egypt; come down to me, do not delay. You shall settle in the land of Goshen, and you shall be near me, you and your children and your children's children, as well as your flocks, your herds, and all that you have. I will provide for you there--since there are five more years of famine to come--so that you and your household, and all that you have, will not come to poverty."
And he kissed all his brothers and wept upon them; and after that his brothers talked with him.'
--Genesis 43: 3-11, 15
We talk a lot about love in the Episcopal Church. During his stint as Presiding Bishop, Michael Curry introduced the wider Church to the Way of Love, and as he often reminded us: if it ain’t about love, it ain’t about God. But that word ‘love’ gets tossed around to and fro about everything from our spouse to our favorite sports team. The great sage Haddaway once asked: What is love? Baby, don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt me. No more.
It's worth asking, though, when we remember that ancient Greek has seven common words that we translate into ‘love,’ and they are: eros, romantic or sexually passionate love; philia, affectionate, friendship-type love; storge, love between family members; ludus, playful affection shown between two young lovers; pragma, an enduring or mature, realistic love between long-established couples; mania, obsessive love; and philautia, self-love. The eighth, less common love, is agape, which has no direct translation and is generally regarded as divine love, the love God has for us and we for God. Very few, if any, ancient Greek texts outside of the Christian New Testament use this word, which is why we often call it Christian love. It is Jesus’ mandate throughout the Gospels that we have this kind of love, for God, one another, and even for our enemies.
Years ago I was serving at a church where we changed the Prayers of the People to include a petition praying for our enemies; but not just that, we named those enemies, specifically the Ku Klux Klan and ISIS. We prayed for them. That petition was very hard for some of our intercessors to read, and at least one person told me they left the church because they couldn’t do it. Praying for and loving our enemies is next to impossible. It can’t be done; at least, not in any of the seven common ways. But God’s love is anything but common. It is agape. How do we even begin to have that kind of love?
The lectionary architects knew what they were doing when they paired the Hebrew Bible and Gospel passages this week. From the book of Genesis we get the touching reunion of Jospeh and his brothers. You remember Jospeh, he of the amazing technicolor dreamcoat; though the Scriptures only say it was a coat with long sleeves. Jospeh’s brothers had been homicidally jealous of him and sold him into slavery. He ends up in Egypt, serving under Pharaoh. His brothers, meanwhile, are facing a terrible famine in Canaan land, and so they go down to Egypt seeking aid. When Jospeh meets them, they don’t recognize him, and he has every opportunity to finally pay them back for what they did; after all, if anyone had that right it was him. Throw them in prison and make them suffer, as he suffered. But just when he has that chance, Jospeh chooses mercy. He feeds them, kisses them, and forgives them.
Meanwhile in the Gospel, Jesus continues his Sermon on the Plain with this command to love your enemies, to do good to those who hate you; to turn the other cheek if someone strikes you and if someone asks for your coat to give them your shirt too. It’s the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you – a thinly veiled refrain of Jesus’ near contemporary, Rabbi Hillel, who said that the whole of Torah was to not do to others that which would be hateful to oneself, and that everything else was commentary. The word Jesus uses is not eros or philia, it is agape, that divine love. How is this even possible? What does it even look like?
What it doesn’t look like is passivity. Too many times preachers have stood in the manner I stand and have said that to have Christian love is to “forgive and forget,” to essentially be a doormat. This has resulted in irreparable harm being inflicted upon victims – most often women – who are told that they must remain in abusive relationships and do good and pray for the people harming them; people who have no intention of seeking forgiveness for what they’ve done or dispensing any kind of mercy. I am sorry if you are someone who has experienced this kind of behavior and told that you have to remain in it, especially from clergy. Martin Luther King wrote in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail in 1963 that “freedom is never given freely by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. “Agape love is itself a form of this kind of demand for freedom, freedom from anger, bitterness, hatred, and vengeance; a means by which those who have been harmed reclaim their power and dignity, and in doing so, find a measure of healing and wholeness.
It is agape love that Joseph shows his brothers, even if that word didn’t exist at the time. They had used their power over him to sell him into slavery, but when given the choice to repay this evil with evil, Joseph chooses mercy. He leaves his brothers utterly dumfounded because they still lived by the code of “an eye for an eye,” and fully expected their brother to have them all put to death, but by using his position of power to repay evil with mercy, Jospeh shows his brothers a different, holier, and more loving way, which ends the abuse cycle and paves the way for his brothers and their families to escape the famine that was decimating Canaan land.
Unlike Jospeh, who was in a position of power and chose to use it for good, the people listening to Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain had no power at all, yet he still told them to exercise this agape love, even for those who were harming them. But don’t mistake Jesus’ words as mere sentiment or feeling. Agape love is an attitude that leads to concrete actions. If you were a Jew, and a Roman soldier hit you, they would’ve done it with the back of their left hand because one only used the left hand for unclean activities, like beating someone beneath them in life. To turn the other cheek when someone in power struck you meant they had to hit you with a closed right fist, which was reserved for an equal; so you were forcing them to either walk away or show you some level of respect and dignity. A soldier could also demand a person hand over their coat, so giving someone the rest of your clothes when they demanded your coat meant that you were naked, which brought shame, not on you, but on the ones who looked at you. In a context with such an imbalance of power between Jesus’ people and their Roman occupiers, folks could use these subversive tactics to assert their dignity and reclaim a sense of their own autonomy without returning harm with harm.
Agape love is itself subversive and powerful. Many may remember the story of an Amish community in 2007 that publicly forgave a man who shot and killed 10 children in a one-room schoolhouse. Can we even fathom such forgiveness? Not if we still believe an “eye for an eye” does anything besides eventually make the whole world blind. Sometimes prayer is our only resource. On the surface, it may seem like an excuse for bad behavior, a simple waving of the hand, but it takes strength and courage beyond measure to practice such love, even if practicing it means walking away. And it is a practice because we have to do it over and over again before we ever begin to understand. Lord knows I still have a long way to go with it.
Agape love, the radical love of Jesus, compels us to live a different way from the rest of the world. It is hard, yes, but that doesn't mean we don't try. Our Scriptures remind us that God suffers through human frailty while also working through human frailty, always for the purpose of restoring all people to one another and to God. And so we pray – which is anything but passive - to see this day come on earth as in heaven. Never repaying evil for evil, claiming our own sense of power and dignity, and in all things trusting in God’s grace freely given to all. Perhaps that is not how our version of love is expressed – English is a such a limiting language, after all - but thank God for the agape that draws us closer to the Divine Mystery, leads us to personal transformation, and heals our broken world.
