Back to Life: Jacob's Change of Mind

Upon hearing that his son Joseph may still be alive, Jacob reacts with understandable lack of luster.  His spirit, we are told (45:26), faints within him (פּוּג). It seems that there are at least two problems with the news his sons bring to him:  1) the unrealism of the message, and 2) the utter unlikeness of the messengers to the healing message they were to bring their father (note Joseph's exhortation right before the brothers head home, remembering something of the sibling rivalry that had already wrecked the family--"do not quarrel on the way").

The message goes against not only what Jacob knows, factually, but against an entire way that he has learned to conceive the world in light of Joseph's loss.  "My years have been few and difficult," spoken by a man of 130 years!  The cloud over Jacob's soul resists the news that of Joseph—news that is, simply enough, too good to be true.

There is also the irony of the source of this message:  the ones who brought to him sure and certain sign that Joseph was dead are now before him insisting they have seen him.  It was their testimony that led him to the grief that became his inheritance.  "Your descendants will inherit the earth":  the family blessing had seemed to fail at Jacob.  The message of God in the world is ever doomed by this failure:  its messengers are never equal, or even much like, the news they bear.  The psalmist might well speak for the exile-ridden history of his nation when he moans,

Your arrows pierced me,
    and your hand has come down on me.
Because of your wrath there is no health in my body;
    there is no soundness in my bones because of my sin...
My wounds fester and are loathsome
   because of my sinful folly.
I am bowed down and brought very low;
   all day long I go about mourning.
My back is filled with searing pain
    there is no health in my body.
I am feeble (פּוּג) and utterly crushed (Ps. 38).


The strange power in the preached word is that, for all its unbelievability and the unworthiness of its messengers, it opens our eyes to a way of reading the world that becomes persuasive in what it allows us to see.  Jacob's sons tell him everything, and suddenly the "carts" full of things Joseph had sent are enabled to speak as evidence to the question.  The juextaposition in the narrative of the bloody cloak that initially tells of Joseph's death and the carts that Joseph sends later relates the unreliability of the signs in the world until we are taught to read them.  Something happens to Jacob in their testimony, in which light the signs begin to reconnect and Jacob is "revived" (חָיָה).  What happens to his mind, that is, is what happens to Ezekiel's bones (37:5) when the Word of God summons them from their slumber into life.  When the testimony that Jesus is not dead but alive hits the ear of the world, it contradicts both all that we know of the world and of those who tell it to us.  But the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom.  Let the preacher be ever so intelligent and compelling:  what is required is death and resurrection of the mind.  It is only God who lifts the head of the faint!