Joseph Week 2: I am ready

The colours came first – more than the fields had ever offered him. His father’s hands on his shoulders, smoothing, adjusting, staying longer than necessary. Joseph stood very still and let himself be looked at. He had not known until that moment how much of him had been waiting for exactly this.

—  The first moment Joseph puts on the coat

He saw it before he understood it. A look passed between two of his brothers – quick, almost nothing. Joseph filed it away the way he filed everything: precisely, without knowing yet what it was for. The coat was still warm on his back. The look was colder than he had words for.

—  The first time Joseph notices his brothers’ jealousy

His father’s face, turned toward him at the entrance to the tent. The light behind him flattening everything to silhouette. Joseph remembers the exact angle of it – the way the sun sat low, the way his father’s hands rested at his sides, open. The question itself he almost didn’t hear. He was already reading the light.

—  The moment Jacob asks: are you ready?

He said it before he felt it. The word left him clean and certain, the way a stone leaves a hand. What he saw in that moment was not his father’s face but the road ahead – open, sunlit, perfectly legible. He believed, then, that the world could be read like that. That readiness was a thing you could simply declare.

—  The moment Joseph answers: I am ready

The hills held the light differently out there – spread wide, unhurried, nowhere to pool. He moved through it like a man who expected to keep moving. Somewhere ahead his brothers. Somewhere further, something larger, still without a name. His shadow stretched long behind him and he did not look back at it. He thought that was what courage looked like.

—  Joseph walking through the hills toward his brothers

He sees it sometimes with uncomfortable clarity: the cupbearer leaning toward Pharaoh, finding the right moment between courses, his voice low and careful. There is a Hebrew in the prison, he says. Falsely accused. I was there. I know what he is. Joseph has rehearsed the words so many times they have worn smooth – not his own glory, just the plain fact of what was done to him. He does not ask himself why he finds more comfort in the rehearsal than in the arrival.

—  Joseph in prison, imagining what is still possible

He has always been able to see what a thing means underneath what a thing is. The dream beneath the sleep. The wound beneath the anger. The hunger beneath the cruelty. In the prison they come to him and he listens and something in him quietly opens. He does not know if this is a gift or simply what he is. But it is the one thing no pit was deep enough to take. He believes that. Most days he believes that.

—  What Joseph imagines to be his greatest strength