Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 243 · August 31
Who May Say It
“Now therefore be not grieved, nor angry with yourselves, that ye sold me hither: for God did send me before you to preserve life.”
Only one man in that room was allowed to say this sentence, and he was the one who had been sold.
You have probably had it quoted at you. Something was done to you, and somebody who was not there and paid nothing for it arrived with Joseph's line about God sending him ahead, and it landed as a lid. The sentence is true, and it belonged to the only person with standing to use it.
Look at what it cost to get there. Joseph has just heard Judah offer to stay as a slave in place of Benjamin, the first evidence in twenty years that these men have changed. He clears the room and weeps loudly enough that the house of Pharaoh heard. Then: I am Joseph your brother, whom ye sold into Egypt. The crime is named in the same breath as the comfort, by the man it was done to, and only then comes be not grieved, nor angry with yourselves.
He never takes the word back. Years later, with their father dead and the brothers frightened again, he says it in final form: ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive. The evil stays in. What he refuses is the judge's chair: am I in the place of God? Declining to punish is a different act from pretending nothing happened.
I have had that verse used on me, God, and I would rather learn to say it myself. Give me first what Joseph had before he had words for it: a shut door and the freedom to weep behind it. Keep me from saying it early to end an awkward conversation. And when I can say it, let me say all of it, the sold into Egypt along with the sent me before you. Amen.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 243 is New Heavens and New Earth (2 Peter 3:13).