Vigils Reading

Commentary on the Book of Genesis by St John Chrysostom [1]

What is read today is sufficient to teach us how great the harm of envy, and how this ruinous passion of ill-will demonstrated its typical force even to the extent of affecting brotherhood. “At the age of seventeen Joseph was tending the sheep with his brothers.” Why does the author indicate to us his age? For you to learn that his youth constituted no obstacle to virtue and for you to have a complete awareness of the young man’s obedience to his father and his sympathy for his brothers despite their savagery, and how despite his being so well disposed to them he was unable to win them over to concord with him on the grounds of his youth so as to be able to maintain the bond of love; instead they saw from the outset the youth’s inclination to virtue and the father’s favor from him and were prompted to envy of him. You see, they brought false reports about Joseph to their father Israel. See the extraordinary degree of their wickedness: they endeavored to undermine their father’s love and devised false stories about their brother, succeeding only in bringing to light their own envy.

What is meant by “he loved Joseph more than all his other sons, as he was a son of his old age”? You see, somehow the children born to one in old age seem particularly dear, and manage to attract their father’s favor in greater measure. However this was not the only factor in winning his father and causing him to prefer him to his brothers. For Scripture tells us that even after him another son was born. So what can it mean? That it was a kind of grace from on high that made the young man amiable and rendered him preferable to all the others on account of the virtue of his soul.

Envy is a terrible passion, you see, and when it affects the soul, it does not leave it before bringing it to an extremely sorry state         , damaging the soul that gives it birth and affecting the object of its envy in the opposite way to that intended, rendering him more esteemed. Notice how this remarkable man is depicted as ignorant of what was going on and conversing cheerfully in great simplicity with them as his brothers, whereas they for their part were in the grip of the passion of envy and were thus brought to hate him.

Notice how it indicated as cause of their hatred this fact that had its roots in envy: “His brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his other sons.” Their father’s affection gave rise to envy of him, whereas the boy’s virtue won the father’s favor. So they should have imitated their brother and followed his lead so that they might have won their father; yet far from giving thought to this, they displayed instead a common hatred for the one loved by their father. Whereas they, for their part, like men involved in a feud, gave free rein to the evil lurking within them and had no kind word to say to him, conducting themselves treacherously, this remarkable man, on the contrary, maintained a brotherly regard for them, suspecting nothing in his trust in them as brothers, and attributed everything to himself.

This was the passion that even in the beginning led Cain to rush headlong into murdering his brother. Do you see his brother suspecting nothing, but with full trust in his brother’s plans going out and falling victim  to that deadly blow. In the same fashion the remarkable Joseph dealt with them as brothers, unaware of their wicked complicity, he brought to their notice the revelation God had given him in a dream, foretelling the prosperity that would come his way and the subjection of his brothers.

These men, however, as I said before, neither had any respect for nature itself nor took account of the favor shown their brother from on high: from day to day they deepened their hatred, the fire that burnt secretly within them, without their father or the young man suspecting anything of the kind nor the fact that they were about to proceed to such awful folly.

Now all this happened as a type of things to come. As Joseph went off to his brothers to visit them, to those who had no respect for brotherhood nor for the reason of his coming, and who first intended to do away with him and then sold him to foreigners, so too our Lord in fidelity to his characteristic love came to visit the human race: taking flesh of the same source as ours and deigning to become our brother, he thus arrived among us. In this case things were prefigured as in shadow.

[1] The Fathers of the Church – vol 87 – St John Chrysostom on Genesis – vol. 3 – Catholic University of America Press – Washington DC – 1002 = pg 186