Heart & Mind
In all of human existence I think there is no emotion more powerful or more destructive than that of jealousy. Especially jealousy within a family. That’s what the passage in Genesis 37:12-18 is all about: jealousy out of control among old Jacob’s 12 boys.
The Bible says that Joseph was the favorite son of his father. You can bet all the other sons knew that and resented Joseph for it. They hated him, maybe with good reason,
because the picture we get of Joseph early on in Genesis is that of a spoiled brat, bragging about his great dreams. He’s a big sheath of wheat; his brothers are little stalks of grain bowing down before him. “Do you intend to reign over us? Who do you think you are?” They hated him all the more.
And it came to pass that Joseph’s brothers had taken the family flocks down to Shechem looking for an oasis, much like the Bedouin of the Middle East do today, moving about from place to place seeking a piece of pasture in 
that arid desert land. Jacob said to Joseph, “I want you to find your brothers, see how they’re doing, and bring word back to me.”
So off Joseph went, down to Shechem. And while he was there a man found him wandering around in the open country, and the man said to him, “What are you looking for?” It’s just two words in Hebrew, mah tavaqesh, three in the King James Version, “What seekest thou?” and five in the NIV, “What are you looking for?”
“I’m looking for my brothers,” Joseph said. “Can you tell me where they’re grazing the flocks?” The man said, “They’re not here. I think I heard them say they were going to Dothan. It’s down that way.” So Joseph went to Dothan and sure enough, there they were.
The stuff of trivia
Now the first question we have to ask is: Why is this incident in the Bible? I mean, the Bible is the Word of God, right? Inspired, infallible, supposed to be about important stuff. Here’s a guy who gets lost in Shechem and meets a stranger at a filling station who tells him to take the third right after the fourth left and watch out for the speed trap past the blinking light on the road to Dothan. Trivial stuff isn’t it? What’s the big deal about where Joseph found his brothers-whether it was in Dothan, or San Diego, or Duluth for that matter? And yet this trivia takes up nine verses in the Bible. That’s more than Matthew gave to the virgin birth. That’s more than Luke gave to the ascension of Jesus. It isn’t the exodus. It isn’t the cross or the resurrection. Why is it here? And who was this man with the piercing question, “What are you looking for?”
Mark Gellman, an Orthodox Jewish rabbi, has a very interesting commentary on this text. Maybe this really wasn’t a man after all. Perhaps it was an angel-somebody God sent down to redirect Joseph. Doesn’t the Bible say that sometimes we are surrounded by angels unawares? Abraham had three visitors who turned out to be heavenly messengers. Jacob wrestled all night, but not with a Hulk Hogan kind of wrestler. “I saw God face to face,” he said the next morning. Maybe the man Joseph met was a heavenly messenger, somebody God sent to ask him the question that changed his life forever: “What are you looking for
Gellman poses the question: What would have happened had Joseph never met this stranger in Shechem? Think about it. He probably would have gone back home to his father and said, “Look, I searched for my brothers, but I couldn’t find them.” Which means he never would have been betrayed by his brothers, because it’s when he finally found his brothers that they plotted against him. If he’d never been betrayed by his brothers, he never would have been sold as a slave into Egypt, which means that the children of Israel would never have spent 400 years in bondage there. There would’ve been no exodus; no Passover lamb; no promised land flowing with milk and honey; no David or Solomon to build a temple; no psalmist to sing of deliverance; no prophets to foretell the Messiah’s birth; no exile; no return; no Jewish virgin to hear an angel say, “Blessed are you, Mary;” no Peter to deny; no Judas to betray; no Pilate to wash his hands of it all.
This was no accident
What are you looking for? Well, yes, it’s the cross after all, and the resurrection. It’s Pentecost and 2,000 years of telling the gospel story. It’s somebody 
tapping you on the shoulder and saying, “I think God has something special for you to do with your life. You ought to go to seminary; you ought to study the Bible. Have you ever thought about service on the mission field?” The question the stranger asked Joseph was not just a question about the location of his siblings. It was a question about the direction of his life, and of your life, and of my life, too.
What are you looking for? As members of the body of Jesus Christ, we are forever linked to this question and to this text. Because it’s not just a text, it’s an example. Now I’m a Southern Baptist, and we Southern Baptists like to say lots of wonderful things about the Bible. The Bible is infallible, inspired, inerrant, and we can add more “i” words if you’d like. Immeasurable, inimitable-we could just go on all day. But however highly you extol the Bible, it is not an inert artifact. That’s a bad “i” word, inert. It’s not an inert artifact from antiquity. It is a living, breathing reality, and it reaches out and grabs you and includes you in God’s grand metanarrative of His redemptive work.
What are you looking for? It was just an accidental meeting, a chance encounter by the side of the road in a byway of a place called Shechem, but heaven and hell were in that question. For there are no accidents with God.
Later on in Genesis, Joseph finally reveals his true identity to his brothers. “We are so sorry,” they tell him.
“It was not you who sent me here, but God,” Joseph answers. “You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.”
Jesus was put to death at the hands of cruel men in a conspiracy of hate. They are accountable for what they did, driving those nails into his hands, but when the early Christians looked back on that event they confessed that Herod and Pilate and all the rest did what God, by His will, had decided beforehand should happen. For Jesus is the Lamb of God, the Bible says, slain from the foundation of the world. There are no accidents, for God is at work not only in the sunshine, but in the shadows, too. And the people of God have always known that.
Comfort in life and death
One of the great classic documents of the Reformation is the Heidelberg Catechism. Here is the catechism’s first question: “What is your only comfort in life and death?” And the answer given is this: “That I with body and soul, both in life and in death, am not my own, but belong to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ, who with His precious blood has fully satisfied for all my sins and redeemed me from all the power of the devil, and so preserves me that without the will of my Father in heaven not a hair can fall from my head, and yea in all things He works together for my salvation.”
This is why we can face life with courage and hope in a culture of disarray and a world of violence and meaninglessness, because there is a God who taps you on the shoulder, who meets you by the side of the road. The God who comes to ask you the question, “What are you looking for?” The question Joseph faced from the stranger comes back to us. Why are you here? What are you looking for? Are you looking for a church, maybe? A good church, comfortable church, nice salary, fringe benefits, all that? What are you looking for? Some of you may be looking for a husband or a wife, or friendship or love. Some of you may be looking for a second chance to overcome some horrible mistake in your past. You came to seminary maybe seeking a fresh start. You believe in forgiveness, in restoration, and here you are now. Some of you have deep scars, ugly memories. You wrestle not with angels like Jacob but with demons of the dark. You’re looking for healing; you want to believe again, you want to live again. What are you looking for?
Surprise and community
As you step out into the ministry that God has prepared you for and called you to, I want to make two applications from this text. The first is this: God will always show up in the unexpected places. “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” they sneered. “We know this guy Jesus; isn’t he Joseph the carpenter’s son? Didn’t he play basketball for Nazareth High last year? There’s nothing special about him.” But God’s middle name is “Surprise.” He hangs out in weird places with strange people. And in your ministry, be aware that God will show up in the unexpected places. There’s a knock on the door at midnight. A man says, “My wife’s pregnant and we don’t have any place to stay. Do you have a room to spare?” And Christmas happens.
There’s another knock at the door. A man says, “You have that old donkey out there; if you’re not going to use him for a few hours, can you spare him for a special job I have to do?” And Calvary happens. You can never tell who you’ll meet by the side of the road in Shechem. Be alert to that, for God will always show up in unexpected places.
The second application is more difficult than the first. The stranger asked Joseph, “What are you looking for?” Well, what he was looking for, of course, were his brothers. But his brothers hated him. His brothers wanted to kill him. There’s always a fine line between hatred and violence. But the stranger knew. I think Mark Gellman is right; the stranger wasn’t really a man. He was a messenger of God. The stranger knew that the road to a new beginning always leads from Shechem to Dothan. Healing only happens in the broken places. What Joseph was looking for he would never be able to find on his own. He needed his brothers, just as they needed him.
And so it is with us. That’s why in seminaries like Bethel we talk a lot about community. We find ways to encourage and build community while we are in seminary, because community is where real life happens, community is where real ministry happens. It’s not an add-on to the curriculum; rather it’s at the core of what we’re about. But there is no community without pain. There wasn’t for Joseph and there won’t be for us. The pain of being vulnerable to one another, the pain of listening to one another, the pain of forgiving one another, the pain of bearing one another’s burdens-and so fulfilling the law of Christ.
What are you looking for?