On Holy Monday we commemorate the Righteous Joseph, who, when his story begins, is the only son of Jacob by Rachel, highly favored by his father, and blessed by God with gifts of discernment and the interpretation of dreams. Envy overwhelmed his brothers however, and they treated him shamefully and sold him into slavery. Joseph was taken into Egypt, where he toiled as a slave until he was harassed by his master’s wife, then falsely accused, and thrown into a prison, presumably to rot. Through all of this, he remained faithful to the Lord.
It is God’s prerogative, and typical of the poetry of His justice, to take what was meant for evil and turn it into goodness. The Pharaoh heard of Joseph’s god-given gifts and summoned him from the prison to interpret his own recurring dreams. Joseph did as commanded, with the gifts God had given him, and through this God-appointed encounter was bestowed with authority over the entire nation, for the salvation of, not only the Egyptians during years of famine, but all surrounding nations, including the Hebrews and specifically his own brothers.
Joseph’s forgiveness of, and reconciliation with, his brothers, is a powerfully moving witness to his Christ-likeness, to one of the many ways he is a type of Christ. His whole story plays out as a prophetic prefiguring of Christ’s own, especially in Our Lord’s Passion, Death, and Resurrection, and His being given, by the Father, supreme authority over everything in heaven, on the earth, and under the earth. The one is an earthly and human shadow of the other’s cosmic and divine reality.
But the parallels do not end with Joseph’s virtues, or the events of his life, because through him, God is also judging the gods of the nations. Egypt was a land crawling with deities, a pantheon of thousands, where the very life-blood of the land, that is the expected seasonal flooding of the Nile River, which the Egyptians had long been able to harness to make their nation the most productive agricultural center of the known world, was inextricably tied to their gods’ power. Egypt's governing structure was theocratic. Society was centered on, and geared towards, one’s journey toward the afterlife. The Pharaohs were living instantiations of the gods themselves. The atmosphere was thick with worshipped entities. The Ancient Israelites witnessed this. Egypt, in Holy Scripture, became synonymous with idolatry and the overwhelming temptation of sin that leads to death.
Our Lord however, is the Lord of lords and the God of gods, and even in Egypt His hand is at work, and He raised up His chosen. Joseph was raised from the pit of the dungeon, bequeathed a mantle of sovereignty in Egypt, and in the midst of these rulers of the darkness of the present age and despite them, God made him a savior of both the nations and the People of God, a life-giver in a time of universal death. God’s chosen one stood in the midst of all these gods, and became a judgment against them, a testimony to the emptiness of their promises, the hollowness of their power, of death being the telos of their ways, their inability to save, and their ultimate destiny to be broken by the power of Jesus Christ our Risen Lord, to Whom we sing on Holy Saturday, attesting to His victory over the gods of the nations:
Arise O God, judge the earth! For you shall have an inheritance among all the nations. v. God stood in the assembly of gods; He judges in the midst of gods.