Every story needs a villain, right? We need someone to boo, to blame when things go sideways. There needs to be a clear delineation between good and evil so that we know that good will win at the end, because all stories have a happy ending, right? It’s the tension between the hero and the villain that makes the story exciting. When we finally get to the moment when the hero triumphs, the villain disappears from the story. The same kind of thinking can be extended to the stories found in our scripture… but as we know, scripture tends to be a little less than straight forward.
Let’s take the story we heard read this morning. This story features one of the most hated women of the Hebrew Scriptures. Before we get into this villainous female, let’s review the story so far… Joseph, of the technicolour dream coat, is the favoured, youngest son of Jacob. While loved by Jacob, Joseph was despised by his older brothers. Long story short, Joseph’s brothers plot to kill him but end up deciding against the killing part because, well, they didn’t want to get into trouble. So they opt instead to drop their younger brother into an empty well, with the intent to leave him there for a while. When a group of traveling Ishmaelites come wandering by, the brothers revise their plan again, this time choosing to sell Joseph to this traveling group. When the Ishmaelites get to Egypt, they sell Joseph to Potiphar as a slave. God has been with Joseph and continues to be with him and as a result everything Joseph touches or does prospers. Potiphar sees this and decides to put Joseph in charge of his whole household – a position of trust and incredible responsibility.
It just so happens that Joseph isn’t hard on the eyes. It’s a rare thing for scripture to comment on the physical attributes of a main character beyond age and gender, but in this case it’s the physical attractiveness of Joseph that motivates the behavior of Potiphar’s wife – we think. For, as we found out in our scripture, Potiphar’s wife has the burning desire to sleep with Joseph. Now, to Joseph’s credit, when the first demand is made, he politely refuses. It would be wrong in God’s eyes and it would be betrayal of the trust Potiphar has in him. So, no thanks. Now, apparently Potiphar’s wife isn’t one to take no for an answer because she continues to ask him several more times, each time getting the same response. Until one day, as she asks yet again, she grabs Joseph’s clothes. In order to get away from her, Joseph drops his robe. Angry, Potiphar’s wife chooses revenge over grace, and uses Joseph’s dropped robe as proof of something more nefarious. She accuses him of rape. Now given her status as the wife of the King’s Chief Guard Potiphar had no other recourse than to arrest Joseph. So, he goes to jail and Potiphar’s wife disappears from the rest of his story.
It’s clear who the hero and who the villain is, right? A clean cut distinction between the good and the bad in this story. Not even a progressive, non literal reading of the scripture can excuse her actions. No matter how you read the story, an innocent man suffers because of an accusation. Joseph, make no mistake, is the vulnerable person in the story – he’s a Hebrew in Egypt, a slave in a powerful man’s household, and he’s Jewish. He has no inherent power, just what’s given to him, and no voice. She holds all the power, and she knows it. Which is why his refusal is so shocking to her. She knows exactly how to harm him.
I want to draw your attention to how this Villainous woman has no name. She is simply the “wife of”… no name of her own, no identity, no backstory. All we know is to whom she is connection, and she is connected to a man with power, money and status. This gives her similar power and status. We know next to nothing about her – not her age, where she was born. We can’t even guess as to the motivations driving her need of Joseph because we have no inkling of what her marriage is like. Maybe she’s lonely. Maybe this isn’t the first time she’s done this. Does she have children or want them? Is she trapped in a life that she didn’t choose and has no control over? What are her dreams, her fears, her regrets. The text tells us nothing other than she shows up, does her thing and then disappears.
The lack of information hasn’t stopped generations of readers from trying to fill in the blank. In a way, Potiphar’s wife becomes a screen onto which people project their own fears. For as long as there have been interpreters of scripture, this unnamed woman has been portrayed as the seductress, the temptress, the liar, a dangerous woman. Now, all of this might be true, but the hazard of turning someone into a characterization is that we stop seeing them as human.
It’s a side affect of being human. Sometimes we reduce to one label based on a moment in time. We reduce people to one mistake, one bad decision, one headline, one moment held on to for what feels like forever. When we do this, we stop wondering about or even thinking about that person’s humanity – their feelings, their vulnerability, their thoughts. The person becomes a character simply meant to forward the story rather than a human living in the complicated reality of the world.
Here’s what’s fascinating to me… there’s nothing in the story that points to God causing this drama. Quite the opposite, in all this mess, God is present with Joseph. Again and again, the author of Genesis tells us that “God was with Joseph.” Not just when life was easy or fair or when justice prevailed but when Joseph was enslaved, when he was falsely accused, God was with him. And somehow even in this most painful chapter becomes a part of the larger story of Joseph’s life.
Maybe the good news today is this: God is not dependant on perfect people. God is not dependant on perfect people. God is not dependant on Joseph or Potiphar or Potiphar’s wife. Not us. God works through all kinds of quirky people, broken systems, messy circumstances and painful memories. Maybe the invitation of the story is for us to resist reducing people to heroes and villains because people are more complicated than that. Including us, including the people we struggle to forgive, who we are tempted to dismiss or who have been forgotten by history. Especially an unnamed woman who appears briefly in Genesis.
It is possible that Potiphar’s unnamed wife is not in Joseph’s story merely to be the villain. What if she’s there to remind us what happens when hurt becomes harm or how easily power is misused? What if more than anything that happens in the story, this unnamed woman is there to remind us that even when human beings fail one another, god’s presence and story is still unfolding. God was with Joseph and was nowhere near finished with him. In the same way, God is not finished with us either.
Amen
