Able to love the unlovable

Imagine being in a family where your Dad makes it obvious that one of your brothers is his favourite. He showers your brother with gifts, turns up to all his school events, talks proudly of just him when people are visiting, and he believes everything the boy says.

Joseph’s brothers were in such a family. No wonder they felt such a deep jealousy toward Joseph – and so deep they even “plotted to kill him,” Genesis 37:18. It was a perfect picture of what would later happen to Jesus, who often talked of his special relationship with the Father and his Father’s love for him (John 5:20), which also created jealousy and resentment in his fellow Jews toward him, to the point they too plotted to kill him (John 5:18).

Both Jesus and Joseph, then, were landed with people who hated them and wanted them dead. Joseph’s brothers even planned a slow and dreadful death for Joseph by throwing him into a cistern with no water (Genesis 37:24), just as Jesus’ fellow Jews demanded the slow and dreadful death of the cross for Jesus. Hate and jealousy had turned ordinary folk into vicious and thoroughly unlovable monsters. 

How on earth, then, did both Jesus and Joseph not hate in return, and instead be able to love the unlovable? Ironically, it was their father’s love that did it – the same love that had caused the hatred toward them in the first place. But now their father’s love would also be the solution. It was a word from Joseph’s father in Genesis 50:16-17, for instance, begging Joseph “to forgive your brothers the sins and wrongs they committed in treating you so badly,” that totally softened Joseph’s heart toward them (19-21). And what the Father inspired in Jesus’ heart toward those who hated him was: “Forgive them for they don’t know what they’re doing” (Luke 23:34). 

It was their father’s love that enabled Jesus and Joseph to put aside all the wrongs done to them, and to love those who had fallen victim to satanic resentment and hate against them.

And in a time like now, when it’s becoming easy to hate people in government, corporations and media for their lies, fear-mongering and censoring all but their own narratives, we too have a Father who willingly and happily enables us to love the unlovable so we too can avoid becoming hateful with them. Joseph’s story also tells us that his brothers came round eventually, and begged him so humbly for forgiveness that “They made him cry”….(next blog)