The Coat and the Empty Pit

Do you know what it feels like to be somebody's best-loved one?

Joseph did. His father, Jacob, loved him so much that he made him a coat, a coat with long sleeves and colors running all the way down, bright as a garden. When Joseph wore it, everyone could see. This is the one his father loves.

But here is the sad part. Joseph had brothers, ten big brothers, and every time they saw that coat, something hard and cold curled up inside them. Why him? Why not us?

The brothers could not be glad for him. They could not even say one kind word anymore. And the more their father loved Joseph, the more they could not stand it.

Joseph had dreams too. Strange dreams, where the sun and the moon and the stars all bowed down low to him. Long before, when his father Jacob was a young man running away from home, God had come to him in a dream too, with a shining stairway and a promise. But when Joseph told his brothers his dreams, oh, that made everything worse. Now they did not only feel left out. They felt small. And feeling small can make people do terrible things.

One day Jacob sent Joseph out to the fields to find his brothers. So off he went, wearing his beautiful coat, looking for the faces he loved. But his brothers saw him coming from far away. And before he even reached them, they had already decided.

They grabbed him. They tore the coat right off his shoulders, the coat his father gave him. And they threw him down into a pit, a deep, dry, empty pit, with no water in it and no way out.

The very ones who should have kept him safe were the ones who hurt him. His own brothers. Joseph called up from the bottom of the dark, and they sat down close by to eat their lunch.

Then some traders came by on camels, going down to Egypt, and the brothers had one more cold idea. They pulled Joseph up out of the pit, and for a little pile of silver they handed their own brother to the traders, as if he were nothing at all.

They took the lovely coat and dipped it in blood and carried it home, and they let their old father believe that Joseph was gone forever.

Hidden inside this sad story is the shape of another one.

Long, long after Joseph, there would come another beloved Son. His Father loved him more than all the colors of the sky. And he too would be handed over by his own. Sold for silver. Stripped of his clothes. Thrown down into the dark.

Joseph went down into the pit, and from there, one day in Egypt, he would keep a whole family alive. And Jesus would go down even into the grave, so that he could keep his whole family alive forever, and never come home missing a single one.

But all of that was still far ahead. For now, the camels rocked and swayed down the long road to Egypt, and Joseph rode with them, coatless and alone. Except he was not alone. God was riding down into Egypt right beside him.