I don’t remember exactly when it was, but there was a point in my life when I realized that things are not always as they appear, that there are layers of meaning to what I previously thought were just simple things. Maybe it started with the learning of critical thinking skills in high school. Maybe it was when I learned that a pair of glasses in The Lord of the Flies was not just a pair of glasses but a symbol for something else. Or it might have started with a biology teacher who ratcheted up my intellectual powers to draw connections that were not immediately obvious in the natural world. Or it could have been just the inevitable reality of growing older and seeing that life is far more complicated than I had ever realized.
I didn’t know it then, but I was being taught a hermeneutic of suspicion. In some ways, it wasn’t all a bad thing. The universe began to light up with multivalency, my thinking matured, and life became richer in some respects. On the other hand, I began to understand how jaded humanity could be and how a tragedy might lead some even to blame God for evil or fail to see mystery in life or lose hope. The irony is that while a hermeneutic of suspicion is intended to expand critical thinking skills and open the mind to invisible things, it can, at the same time, cause people to lose their grasp on that invisible thing we Christians call hope.
And so, I was struck this past week as I watched a TV show featuring the case of a young woman whose tragic death by murder occurred over twenty-five years ago. I was surprised that there was no malice among the victim’s family members who were interviewed. I never once heard them say they wanted the perpetrator to suffer punishment. In fact, I never heard any anger at all. Although the family didn’t talk at great length about their faith, it was clear they were Christians, and it was clear that the bedrock of constancy in their broken lives was their trust that God was still with them.
And I was especially moved by the comment of the victim’s sister as the episode was winding to a close. By this point, the identity of the killer had been discovered, and he had been duly prosecuted and convicted. But without any visible ill-will towards her sister’s murderer, the victim’s sister said that even despite the sadness and heart-wrenching loss she and her family had experienced, she couldn’t ignore that so much good had come out of everything.
If the hermeneutic of suspicion is your modus operandi, then you might think the victim’s sister to be a simpleton. We are more accustomed to expecting rageful calls for someone’s suffering in return for suffering inflicted. An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. I couldn’t help but wonder what my own reaction would be if I had experienced such a tragedy. What is it that makes us think we’ll be at peace when someone who has committed a heinous crime is consigned to an earthly hell? On the other hand, what is it that allowed the family in question to avoid being caught in cycles of vengeful thinking and resentment? And what is it that allows Joseph, of technicolor dream coat fame, not to seek vengeance against his brothers who have wronged him but rather to provide for their families and be at peace?
It's one of the most well-known stories in the Bible, and I think one of the most engaging and compelling. And its ending, where we enter the story today, is a profound testament to the loving providence of God and the power of God’s mysterious ways. If you recall, back in chapter 37 of the Book of Genesis, seventeen-year-old Joseph has a dream in which he is to rule over his brothers. They, of course, become angry and conspire, at first, to kill him, and then to throw him into a pit, and finally, to sell him into slavery to some Midianite traders.
Fast forward some years later, and Joseph becomes a favorite of the Pharaoh of Egypt, primarily because of his ability to interpret dreams. Joseph has also been storing up grain, and when a famine comes into Joseph’s native land of Canaan, his brothers—sent by Jacob his father—come to Egypt to find food. Joseph recognizes them, he but doesn’t let on to this.
Finally, Joseph lets the cat out of the bag, and he shares his identity with his brothers. It turns out that Joseph is able to provide for the physical salvation for his family, as well as many others, all of whom benefit from Joseph’s store of grain during a famine. And this brings us to the final scene of the Book of Genesis, which we have just heard. Joseph’s brothers are terrified that, after the death of Jacob their father, Joseph will finally revenge himself upon them. To which, Joseph responds with one of the most moving lines in all of Scripture: “As for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good.”
This doesn’t sound like a hermeneutic of suspicion. It sounds an awful lot like the sister of a murdered woman who has the grace to say that despite the tremendous tragedy she experienced, there was still so much good that came out of it. It must seem incomprehensible to a modern, rational mind that when something horrible happens to us, and when we suffer, that good might come out of it. Maybe it initially sounds like we’re trying to justify evil. Or maybe it sounds like we’re suggesting that God will cause evil so that a greater good can come out of it. But I don’t think either of those is the point, and we should rightly balk at those suggestions.
What Joseph intimates to his brothers in their paranoid fear is that on ground level, we usually only see evil. In our quest to evaluate life critically, we can very easily—and rather ironically—lose sight of another invisible possibility that lies behind the horrible things we encounter. We, understandably, can’t get past what is bad because we know that there’s something sick, terrible, and wrong with evil. But Joseph, for whatever reason, which we can probably only attribute to God’s grace, Google maps out and takes us to God’s view. There, from out of what we humans intend for evil, God brings great good. This is how God’s power is revealed.
Remember that Joseph’s brothers are afraid. They live in a similar world to ours, where everyone must get their comeuppance, where we rejoice in others’ downfall, where victims are given permission to delight in the deaths of others, and where we live by transaction, tit-for-tat, and eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.
And this, I believe, is why so many people simply can’t believe in a God of love, mercy, and compassion. They have wrongly assumed that God is just like us, that God seeks revenge and enacts justice by smiting some and consigning others to eternal punishment. Using a hermeneutic of suspicion, they have failed to see that perhaps God’s justice is to bring good out of what we have intended for evil.
Perhaps unintentionally, a hermeneutic of suspicion can suggest that evil is greater than good, that the presence of suffering means the absence of God, and that anyone who doesn’t desire a vengeful justice is soft and weak. Such a hermeneutic urges us to be wary of any happy ending and of seeing hope where reality lures us into fear.
But Joseph, and those who choose to forgive their enemies and who have risen above a transactional view of life, have opted for what some have called a hermeneutic of trust.[1] Those who use this way of interpreting life are hardly naïve. They aren’t stupid or foolish. They haven’t denied evil or their own suffering. Instead, they have realized that vengeance and retribution will give them no power but will instead eat them alive. On the contrary, they have chosen to adopt a posture that will help them begin to see things from God’s level, where what is intended for evil can be transformed into good, because with God, anything is possible.
What’s possible is what happened on the cross with Jesus, where a means of punishment became the path to eternal life. On the cross, Jesus prayed for his enemies. On the cross, a wide-armed posture that would cause physical death became the embrace to draw all people to God the Father. Through the cross, God swoops down to earth and lifts us up to see things from his point of view, not with a hermeneutic of suspicion, but with a hermeneutic of trust.
A hermeneutic of trust tells us this: we should leave justice to God, because God will see that justice is realized. God will do an infinitely better of job of it, too, for what we imagine is justice is usually just petty revenge. A hermeneutic of trust invites us to try to begin to see with the eyes of Jesus, who reigns from the cross and cancels all our hermeneutic of suspicions and offers us the gift of hope. And if we choose to accept this gift, we will see that there is no evil that our gracious God can’t transform into good.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 17, 2023
[1] Some have attributed the coinage of this term to Hans-Georg Gadamer.