"I am your Brother"

​Jesus is laying it on us in our Gospel reading. Among many difficult commandments, the two that stick out for me are to forgive, and even to love, our enemies, the people who hate us, curse us, and abuse us. That is a tall order!
 
I’ll get to actually loving our enemies in a minute. But I want to begin with forgiving our enemies, which is hard enough. And I want to begin with the story of the famous feud between the Hatfields and McCoys.
 
When I was young, the Hatfields and McCoys were proverbial. They were the archetype of bitter enemies. (It turns out that they are no longer proverbial. My son had never heard of them.)
 
But the Hatfields and McCoys were real people, two families that feuded along the West Virginia/ Kentucky border in the decades after the Civil War.
 
Their story is complicated, with plenty of violence on both sides. But things really took off when three of the McCoys killed a Hatfield in public. The Hatfields retaliated by kidnapping and then executing the murderers. The McCoys took their revenge. And the feud went back and forth. For another fifteen years.
 
Eventually one of the Hatfields was captured during a raid on the McCoys. The captured Hatfield was arrested and sentenced to hang. The McCoys and their allies assumed the Hatfields would attempt a rescue, and they got ready.
 
But the Hatfields didn’t come. The Hatfield patriarch declared that he was through fighting. No one could be sure at the time, but the feud was over, and the McCoys had effectively won.
 
But the McCoy patriarch, the apparent “winner” of the feud, was ruined by it. His fate shows in a particularly dramatic way the costs of refusing to forgive, of holding on to our anger and our hurt. As a young man, he had been a devout Christian. But, consumed with grief and rage, he lost his faith, became alcoholic and delusional, and died alone after accidentally lighting his cabin and himself on fire while hallucinating about Hatfields coming after him. It had been twenty years since the end of the feud, but he died its last victim.
 
Nothing could show more clearly that, over time, anger and hatred change us. Amger and hatred eat us up from the inside.
 
The Hatfield patriarch who called a halt to the violence was not exactly a paragon of Christian forgiveness either. But unlike the McCoy patriarch, he did take at least the first steps in the process of forgiving. He renounced vengeance. He refused to be defined by the feud. He let go of his anger.
 
And he was able to move on with his life. He prospered. And, although he had not previously been a religious man, he was eventually baptized and even helped to found a church.
 
Looking at the different fates of those two men, we can see that the cost of winning is sometimes too high, that forgiving, or at least taking steps in the direction of forgiveness, is the way forward, the way of life.
 
But Christ commands us to go farther than forgiveness, hard though that is. Christ commands us to love our enemies.
 
And to see an example of that, we need to turn to our Old Testament lesson about Joseph. You may remember from Sunday School that Joseph had a coat of many colors or, in the immortal words of the Broadway musical, a “technicolor dream coat.” But there is a lot more to Joseph than a spiffy coat.
 
Joseph was the youngest of Jacob’s sons and Jacob’s favorite. Joseph’s brothers grew so jealous of him that they planned to kill him. Then they decided they would profit more by selling Joseph into slavery than by killing him outright. So, they sold their own brother to slave traders headed for Egypt.
 
For a time, it appeared the brothers had gotten away with it. But like the McCoy patriarch, they were haunted by their own hatred, and the guilt and shame that resulted from it. Years later, when they found themselves in serious trouble, “they said to one another, ‘Alas, we are paying the penalty for what we did to our brother…. That is why this anguish has come upon us” (Genesis 42:21). They recognized the justice in their suffering even if it was apparently unrelated to their actual sin.
 
In Egypt, at first things didn’t go well for Joseph either. He was a foreigner and a slave, and ended up in prison on false charges. But with God’s help, Joseph overcame all odds and rose to power and prominence in Pharaoh’s court.
 
And there Joseph was, one of the most powerful men in Egypt, when his brothers showed up, hoping to buy grain. Enough time had gone by that Joseph’s brothers didn’t recognize him. But Joseph recognized them.
 
And now Joseph had a choice. What should he do with his brothers? These were the people who had nearly killed him, and who did sell him into slavery. Should he go the way of the McCoy patriarch, surrender to his anger and his hurt, and crush them for what they had done to him? Or should he follow the example of the Hatfield patriarch and at least begin the process of forgiving them?
 
My guess is, Joseph couldn’t decide right away. What we know is that he didn’t reveal himself to his brothers and instead began a complicated game of cat and mouse with them that lasted over a year. And during that year, Joseph made his choice: he would forgive.
 
In our reading, Joseph finally reveals himself to his brothers. “He said, “I am your brother, Joseph, whom you sold into slavery.’”
 
It’s just one sentence, but Joseph makes two important points. First, Joseph doesn’t sugarcoat what his brothers had done. Joseph doesn’t pretend that nothing bad had happened or that all is forgotten. But Joseph reinterprets their act. Joseph has come to see God’s gracious hand at work even in what they had done. And Joseph invites them to do the same, and to let go of their guilt.
 
Second, Joseph recognizes them as his brothers. And in that single word, Joseph re-established their relationship. They were family again.
 
Joseph loved those who had treated him as their enemy. Jospeh did good to those who had hated him. Joseph blessed those who had cursed him.
 
Few of us will ever be tested like Joseph was. But I still struggle to forgive, and, even more, to love. Sometimes the best I can do is what the Hatfield patriarch did: decide against pursuing a feud.
 
But Jesus calls us to true forgiveness and divine love, the kind of forgiveness and love that Joseph showed his brothers and that Jesus shows us. And, if we let him, Jesus will help us to get there.
 
One last word on the Hatfields and McCoys. Representatives of the two families had a joint reunion in 2000, and it has become an annual event. In 2003, the two families made it official. They signed a truce that included this statement: “We ask by God's grace and love that we be forever remembered as those that bound together the hearts of two families to form a family of freedom in America.”[1]
 
It took a century, but the Hatfields and McCoys finally made true peace. Like Joseph, they recognized each other as a single family, a family of freedom, brothers and sisters under God.
 
If those proverbial enemies, the Hatfields and McCoys can make peace, surely we can do the same. May God help us to try. In Christ’s name. Amen.
 


[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatfield%E2%80%93McCoy_feud, accessed February 18, 2025.