The Forgetting Man
Joseph named the firstborn Manasseh, “For,” he said, “God has made me forget all my trouble and all my father’s household.” Genesis 41:51 NASB
God has made me forget– One of the peculiarities of the Joseph account is how infrequently God is mentioned. Joseph doesn’t pray to God before interpreting visions. He doesn’t mention God during his captivity. He seems to accept the new identity as an Egyptian without any religious qualms, even marrying the daughter of a pagan priest. He makes no effort to insert the will of YHVH in managing the prosperity or the poverty of the fourteen year cycle. In fact, other than his final remark to his brothers (“What you intended for evil God has used for good”), the only real acknowledgement of God’s presence is the naming of his two sons. And in both cases, the names are about pain, not benevolence.
“God has made me forget,” he says. But obviously this is not true. The very fact that he names his son about forgetting means that he will constantly remember. What is it that he wants so desperately to forget but so tenaciously resists forgetting? It seems to me that the treatment by his brothers is not the real emotional or psychic pain. His brothers always treated him badly. If he wanted to forget that, he would have attempted to block it out while he was in his father’s household. I suggest to you that his greatest pain, his real trauma, is not with his brothers. After all, he eventually takes the opportunity to exact revenge upon them by putting them through the same destructive trauma that he experienced at their hands. Joseph’s real trauma is with his father. For all he knows, his father arranged for his brothers to attempt to kill him. His father sent him to the brothers. His father knew the animosity, but he sent him anyway. His father already raised objection to the dream about bowing down. And (this is very important) his father perpetrated a similar deception on his brother and on his own father, Isaac. In fact, every father in the line since Abraham betrayed his son(s). Or so it appears from the son’s point of view.
Joseph carries a great burden, a secret wound that he believes only God can remove. And so the only time he actually calls upon God has to do with forgetting the wound. This is the unbearable secret—the father wound. If he is going to be healed, he must voice it to someone, even if that someone is but a child.
“I am my secrets. And you are your secrets. Our secrets are human secrets, and our trusting each other enough to share them with each other has much to do with the secret of what it is to be human.”[1]
“If, as someone said, we are as sick as our secrets, then to get well is to air those secrets if only in our own hearts, which the prayer asks God himself to air and cleanse.”[2]
Topical Index: father, wound, Joseph, secret, forget, Genesis 41:51
[1]Frederick Buechner, Listening to Your Life (HarperOne, 1992), p. 324.
