I love a musical. This will come as a surprise to precisely nobody who knows me. Give me an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical involving a man with a fabulous coat, and I am absolutely there with bells on.

Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat is one of those shows I’ve known for so long that even with my middle-age brain fog I can still name all 29 colours of that coat…

The story of Joseph is extraordinary. He is his father’s favourite, and his brothers certainly know it. He has dreams which appear to suggest that one day they will all bow down to him and, rather unwisely, he tells them. A lot, mostly through the medium of song (although less singing in the actual book of Genesis).

Joseph may have had many gifts. Reading the room perhaps wasn’t one of them. Anyone with siblings will know that we don’t rub it in that we’re the favourite 🤣

His brothers become so jealous that they initially consider killing him, before settling on selling him into slavery instead. They take his coat, cover it in blood and tell their father that Joseph is dead. Joseph’s life falls apart at this point. He is taken to Egypt, he becomes a servant, he is falsely accused and he is thrown into prison. It would be very easy to read the story from that point and think that God has abandoned him.

Except God hasn’t.

Joseph eventually interprets Pharaoh’s dreams and rises from prisoner to one of the most powerful men in Egypt. When famine comes, the preparation Joseph has put in place means there is food. And eventually, the brothers who sold him arrive in Egypt looking for help. They don’t recognise him, but Joseph recognises them.

I think that’s the moment I find most interesting, because Joseph has power now. Would I be as restrained as Joseph if I were him? These are the people who hated him. The people who threw him into a pit, sold him and went home to their father and allowed him to grieve for a son who wasn’t dead. Joseph could have destroyed them.

Instead, he forgives them.

Not because what they did suddenly became acceptable. Forgiveness doesn’t rewrite history. It doesn’t make cruelty kind or betrayal harmless. But Joseph can see with hindsight something that nobody could possibly have seen as he sat in his prison cell: God had been at work in the mess.

Joseph says to his brothers:

“You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good.”
— Genesis 50:20

My understanding of God is that he loves us and cares for us. I don’t think God wanted Joseph abused, betrayed or imprisoned, and I don’t believe every terrible thing that happens is secretly God moving us around like pieces on a chessboard. Sometimes people hurt us because people have free will and occasionally humans are spectacularly awful with it. I do believe, though, that God can take what has happened and make something new from it.

There are things in my own life I would never choose to repeat, but looking backwards, I can sometimes see threads running through them. Experiences that gave me compassion. Pain that means I recognise pain in someone else. Wrong turns that somehow brought me to the right place. People who hurt me, people who loved me and still hurt me, decisions I got right and decisions I spectacularly didn’t. None of my experiences were wasted.

And perhaps forgiveness is part of allowing God to make something new from what happened. Not pretending the bad didn’t happen or saying the people who did it were right, but refusing to spend the rest of our lives sitting in the pit we were thrown in.

Joseph climbed out.

And somehow, after betrayal, a pit, slavery, false accusation, prison, famine and some toe-tapping songs (in the musical, not the Bible), the story ends not with revenge but reconciliation. Joseph cannot change what his brothers did to him. He cannot make the pit unhappen. But he can choose what happens next.

Maybe that’s the miracle of forgiveness. It doesn’t change the past. It changes the power the past has over the future.

The bad things don’t get the final word.

God does. Love wins.

And yes. There was also a fabulous coat.

-Laura