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God’s Dysfunctional Family

Genesis 37:1-4, 12-28

August 9, 2026

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The 1984 movie Amadeus was nominated for eleven Academy Awards and won eight, including Best Picture. 

It tells the story of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as seen through the eye of his chief rival, Antonio Salieri. According to the film, Salieri held an important post in the Habsburg court in Vienna, where he served as director of the Italian opera. 

 

The movie begins when Salieri is an elderly man speaking with a priest. He laments the the fact that his work had fallen so completely out of favor in his old age that, even though he had been highly influential in his earlier years and had composed more than 40 operas, he was largely unknown as he approached his death. 

 

So he tells the priest, “I speak for all mediocrities in the world. I am their champion. I am their patron saint.” The change in Salieri’s fortunes began with the arrival of  Mozart in Vienna. Mozart had been a child prodigy whose talents, even in his youth, far surpassed those of Salieri. 

 

Salieri sees Mozart as being crass and crude and yet, like everyone else, Salieri is awe-struck by Mozart’s incredible abilities. Salieri had always considered his work to be his gift to God, but he comes to believe that God had granted those immense talents to Mozart as a personal affront to him. 

 

So jealousy and bitterness begin to consume him. In one striking scene from the movie, Salieri stares up at a crucifix and says, “From now on we are enemies, You and I. Because You choose for Your instrument a boastful, lustful, smutty, infantile boy and give me only the ability to recognize the incarnation. Because You are unjust, unfair, unkind I will block You, I swear it. I will hinder and harm Your creature on Earth as far as I am able. I will ruin Your incarnation.”

 

Although that is an extreme example, aren’t jealousy and betrayal recurring themes throughout human history? We see a similar thing in the Genesis story of Joseph and his brothers. Although their father, Jacob, had four wives, he had made it abundantly clear to everyone that he felt that only Rachel was his true love and soulmate. 

 

The three other wives had given him 10 sons and one daughter, while Rachel remained seemingly barren for many years. So when she finally became pregnant and gave birth to Joseph, he instantly became his father’s favorite child and Jacob made that fact abundantly obvious to everyone. 

 

That made his brothers extremely jealous. For his part, Joseph was apparently oblivious to both his special treatment and to his brothers’ mounting resentment. Like Mozart, Joseph had been granted a special gift from God — the ability to interpret dreams and, through them, to foresee the future. That included a dream he had in which his father and his brothers paid him special honors — a dream he innocently told them about. 

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That was apparently the last straw for his brothers. They already felt like second-class citizens in their own family and now he was telling them that he would rule over them? It’s not hard to see why their anger boiled over. 

 

Eric Folkerth says, “[…] isn’t it the case that, sometimes in life, we stumble upon those who are especially gifted in some area that WE desire to be gifted in? And we find that we are intensely jealous of them. We have worked hard and long to improve our skills. Then, along comes some upstart who doesn’t seem to work nearly as hard, and hasn’t had nearly the experience WE have. And they get the great promotion that we thought we deserved. They get the notoriety and attention that we believe should have come to us.

 

“And if we concentrate too much on it — if we spend too much time obsessing over what we haven’t got, instead of what we have — our jealousy can fester into rage and anger...it can become THE force that, paradoxically, destroys our lives. And so it is that Joseph’s brothers see him coming toward them one day. ‘Look,’ they say, ‘here comes the dreamer.’”

 

It seems like the perfect opportunity. They are far away from home, nowhere near the hovering protection of their father. So they decide to take advantage of the opportunity and get rid of Joseph once and for all. 

 

Out of all the other brothers, Reuben seems to be the only one who tried to hit the pause button. He knew that family dysfunction is one thing, but murder — no matter what the provocation — is another. So he suggested throwing Joseph into an empty cistern until cooler heads would prevail or until he could sneak in to secretly free Joseph later. 

 

Thanks to Reuben’s intervention, Joseph wasn’t killed. Instead, he was stripped of his richly-woven coat and dumped into a pit. Imagine that moment from Joseph’s point of view. It’s doubtful that he was ever truly aware of the reality of his privileged position or of the simmering resentment that caused in his brothers. 

 

Putting aside the physical pain of the harsh treatment Joseph received, think of the crushing emotional weight he had to have experienced when the reality of his loveless family broke through to his consciousness for the very first time. In an instant, he felt the full burden of the pain that had dogged the rest of his brothers all their lives — pain to which Joseph had been so blithely and naively unaware. 

 

Theirs was a family that knew how to shower their love on an invisible God, but when it came to the family members standing right in front of them, they had been trained to ration out their affection like a miser having pennies painfully pried from his clenched fist. 

 

All those generations of dysfunction and buried pain lashed out at Joseph in one awful, life-threatening moment. And as he contemplates this reality, his brothers spot a passing caravan of slave traders heading for Egypt. It seems like the perfect solution. 

 

They can get rid of that self-important reminder of their father’s misplaced favoritism and make a little money on the side, all without having any literal blood on their hands. And Joseph will end up so far away from home that they will presumably never hear from him again. 

 

So they sell him into slavery, dip his special robe into animal blood and tell their father Joseph was killed in an attack by a wild animal. Then they quickly move on with their lives, putting the whole sordid incident out of their minds. 

 

Meanwhile, the bottom has fallen out of Joseph’s world. His life goes from bad to worse to worst with seemingly no hope and no end in sight. With that story in mind, Kathy Donley writes:  

 

“Perhaps some of us have been betrayed by our families or others who should have known better, who should have been there for us. Maybe they made fun of our dreams, made us feel small. Maybe they failed to protect us. Maybe they inflicted on us wounds that we will carry forever. Families do that. What goes around comes around. 

 

“My husband teaches in an alternative high school. His students have not been successful in traditional classrooms, for a huge variety of reasons. But there’s a sad pattern that he tends to see. It often happens that when one of his students starts to do well, to engage in learning, to pursue a plan for the future, that students’ family or friends undermine them. One student didn’t have transportation. A teacher’s aide bought him a bicycle. The student was using the bike on a daily basis to get to school and work. It was enabling him to get his education and to earn money. The aunt he was living with sold the bike and kept the money for herself. 

 

“Another girl was close to graduating and had done what she needed to do to be admitted to college. She had moved out of an abusive family situation and was living with her boyfriend. The boyfriend started putting up obstacles, making it harder for her to get to school, discouraging her from expecting to go to college. He had never finished high school and clearly was threatened by her attempts to change her life.

 

“It doesn’t happen just in alternative school student’s lives. It happens in all of our lives. We are wounded, betrayed by those closest to us. And we, in our turn, wound or betray others.” 

 

Everyone has been given special gifts from God. They not are the same as as anyone else’s and while there may always be someone better than us at a given activity, that doesn’t mean we aren’t talented at it as well. I may never be a William Shakespeare or William Faulker, but that doesn’t mean I can’t contribute with the gifts I have. 

 

However, there’s a perverse something in human nature which leads us to focus on the gifts of those who have greater talents in a given field rather that celebrating the gifts we do have. Much like Salieri did. That same tendency may be seen when we’re confronted with a locked door. We want to stare at that door, rather focus than the other potential doorways still remaining to us. 

 

And that leads some people to become what Julia Cameron calls “crazymakers” in her book, The Artist’s Way. Crazymakers are the people in our lives who seem to sabotage every good idea that we come up with. If we share our dreams with them, as Joseph did with his brothers, they spend far more time telling us why we can’t achieve them, than helping us to search out ways to make them come true. 

 

Like Salieri, a crazymaker is someone who tends to be deeply wounded themselves. They spend so much time focusing on others that they can’t really see the good gifts that THEY have been given. But we and they can get so much more accomplished when we all focus on doing things in our own way the best we know how. 

 

In that regard, author Stephen Covey says that everyone has what he calls a “circle of influence,” which encompasses the things that we have the ability to control. We also have a much larger “circle of concern,” that is, things we’re concerned about, but really have little to no influence over. 

 

And Covey says that most of us focus on that circle of concern and too little time focusing on “working from within your circle of influence.” He believes that if we would take a step back and ask ourselves, “Ok, what can I REALLY control in this situation?” that we would typically accomplish a lot more. 

 

I saw that long ago in my own life when, shortly after I graduated college, I worked in an entry-level position in the mail room of a John Deere factory. There was a constant flow of interdepartmental mail going in and out of our office, so we would sort it, hop into our little scooters and deliver it from location to location to location. Then we’d return and do it all over again. I would do this to the best of my ability and time after time, one factory worker or another would stop me and say, “Hey, slow down. You’re making us look bad.” But the truth was that if they looked bad, that was entirely due to their own efforts, not due to anything I did or didn’t do. 

 

Just as Salieri couldn’t control the fact that Mozart was far more talented than he was and Joseph’s brothers couldn’t control the fact that Joseph was the favored child partially due to circumstances beyond his control, there are many things in everyone’s life that they can’t control. And the more we focus on those things, the less we will be able to use the gifts God has granted us to make a difference in this world. 

 

But the good news — and there is always good news when it comes to the word of God — is that each person is given the ability to break that chain of dysfunction if they have the courage to do so — just as Joseph would ultimately do for his family. 

 

In addition, this ancient twisted tale of lingering dysfunction shows that God will remain with families and individuals even in the midst of their assorted sins and horrible choices and will still work through those people to bring about his will even if they seem to be the most unlikely of candidates to be assistants in building the kingdom of God. 

 

That reassurance applies to you and me as well as the sons of Jacob and all their family. If our lives are littered with sour consequences from our own bad decisions or the bad decisions of others, please remember that God still loves us. 

 

God wants to lead us out of our troubles and grant us wholeness. At the same time, God continues to trust each of us to turn around and share that same forgiving love with others. 

 

In the midst of heartache or fear, in the midst of joy or tragedy, God is with us, surrounding and supporting us and offering us a new and better life. Amen.  

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Jim McCrea

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