How to let go of a grudge

Intro

They say revenge is a dish best served cold, but for some people, even the thought of revenge is enough to feed them for their entire lives. Some of us have met those people that seem to be sustained by nothing other than their resentment. It keeps them going, pushes them on, drives them like nothing else.

Many of you will know the movie Gladiator. It’s arguably Russel Crowe’s greatest movie it won him an oscar!

That famous line from the movie tells you everything: ‘My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius, commander of the Armies of the North, General of the Felix Legions and loyal servant to the true emperor, Marcus Aurelius. Father to a murdered son. Husband to a murdered wife. And I will have my vengeance, in this life or the next.’

What a line.

You know he means business.

If anyone says something like that to you, look out.

Some of us have met old Maximus.

‘I’m going to make them pay, if it’s the last thing I do.’

Of course, none of you wake up every morning plotting the downfall of your enemies.

Many of us have heard that saying about grudges haven’t we?

Holding a grudge is like drinking poison and hoping the other person dies. Or as the kids say it’s letting someone live in your mind rent free.

Many of us, we know grudges are bad for us.

And yet, who can honestly say they’ve never been just a bit tempted to imagine getting even?

One theologian I think really insightfully put it this way,

“Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back–in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.

- Frederick Buechner

Many of us know that.

We also know that Jesus says love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute us. And yet it’s so tempting to hold a grudge. To refuse to forgive. To give as good as we think we got.

Is there a way to let go of our grudges?

Context

We’re now at the end of end of the story of Joseph - he of the technicolour dreamcoat.

We saw that God can do the amazing work of taking the things people intend for our harm and twist it into good.

saw last week that’s true even when the people harming us were the ones we were trying to love

seen throughout Joseph’s life that God is always present, always with us, never finished with us, no matter what people might say.

All of that has the power to hold onto him when things are hard, when we can’t trace his hand [recall Spurgeon]. It might even let us see how God is being good and faithful to us. That might drive us to love him.

But how does all of this help us move beyond the pain of what ‘they’ did to us?

This final chapter in Joseph’s life helps us see how it all comes together...

1. God is reordering the world, so I don’t have to

State

Show

After Joseph is accused of sexual assault and thrown in prison we’re reminded that God was with him (Gen 39:20, 23). At the lowest point in his life, when everyone else has judged him as trash, dodgy, a worthless, good-for-nothing piece of rubbish, God is there with him. And as we saw last week, God is not just with him, God is raising him up. Everyone else is intent on taking him down, but God is working things out, taking the things everyone else intends for Joseph’s harm, and turning it into good.

Slide of Joseph in prison

We learn that in prison, Joseph rises to the very top. The guard puts him in charge of everything. Then in Genesis 40 Joseph interprets two dreams of his fellow prisoners. Joseph predicts that one guy is going to be restored as Pharoah’s cup bearer, and one guy, he’s going to get it in the neck. Both dreams come true - and Joseph says to the cup bearer - don’t forget me when you get back to Pharoah. But he does. For two years!

Then in Gen 41 Pharoah starts having dreams, there’s these 7 ugly thin cows that devour 7 big fat ones. Then 7 thin ugly ears of wheat swallow up 7 full ripe ones.

Pharoah demands that someone explain the dream but no one can, until the cup bearer remembers - oh yeah that guy in prison, he knows how to interpret dreams. So finally, Joseph is brought up out of prison, he correctly interprets the dream as meaning there’s 7 good years coming followed by 7 years of famine. He advises Pharoah to collect tons of grain during the good years so that it’ll last out the 7 years of famine.

Pharoah is so impressed that he puts Joseph in charge of all Egypt. Joseph becomes Prime Minister - a higher rank than Potiphar, a higher rank than anyone other than Pharoah himself.

Explain

Just think about the trajectory of Joseph’s life. He might end up on top, but he has gone through a river of manure to get there. It’d be totally understandable if he had some grudges wouldn’t it?

Joseph was the youngest, the runt. Yet he loved to think of himself as the VIP in his family. He has these dreams of his brothers all bowing down to him - and they hate him for it. He comes across as so arrogant and entitled and it drives his brothers insane. They rip off his fancy cloak, the throw him in a pit, then the sell him into slavery.

Then Potiphar and his wife bring him down further. The fact that his obvious God-given talent allows him to rise through the ranks only to become the victim of a jealous and predatory slave owner would just make it sting all the more, wouldn’t it?

And then as he is in prison, he helps out that cup bearer only to be forgotten for 2 years.

No wonder his brothers are thinking, ‘what if Joseph holds a grudge and wants to pay us back in full for all the wrong that we did him?’

Only in their darkest moments would the brothers, and Joseph dreamed that Joseph would hold their lives in his hands. It’s the worst nightmare for them, and the ultimate revenge fantasty for Joseph. He is PM of Egypt. Once his Dad is dead he has no reason to play nice anymore.

Show

That’s why, in Genesis 50:17-18 in their terror they beg him to forgive them and say ‘we are your slaves’.

I wonder what you’d do? Given the chance to get revenge. Or at least to make the people who hurt you squirm a bit. Would you?

But Joseph says ‘don’t be afraid! Am I in the place of God?’

How? How can he say that? How is it possible that after all these years he isn’t just a ball of simmering rage?

Genesis 50:20 NRSV

Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing today.

Explain

God raised him up over all of them.

God reordered Joseph’s world.

God upset the judgements that everyone made against Joseph, he shifted the positions everyone asigned him. He straightened out the crooked things people did to him and when everyone was trying to take Joseph down, God used those very things to raise him up.

Friends, this is what God does. It’s the pattern of everything God does in the world.

He chooses the unlikely, the overlooked, the downtrodden, the underappreciated, the obscure and the despised. And he raises them up and places them in the highest place.

God is reordering the world. Joseph looks back and sees God’s hand - he couldn’t at the time, but he can now.

And here’s what it means for him, and us: if God is reordering things, it means that I don’t have to.

Illustrate

When Nelson Mandela was finally released from prison and became President of South Africa in 1994, many white south africans feared that he would take the opportunity to get even. The man was in prison for decades, a political prisoner, treated with complete injustice. Surely after all these years he would be ready to take revenge. And yet he didn’t. In fact, he insisted that not only would he not try and take revenge against the people that imprisoned him, he told all those who voted for him to forgive.

Mandela is famous for this, plenty of people know the story of how he seemed to pull of a miracle - the peaceful transition to a democracy when so many former African colonies descended into military dictatorships or violent civil wars. What’s less known is that Mandela spend his years in prison reading the bible. He spent his years in prison reflecting on the gospel, the story of how God is overturning things, reordering this world not through violent revenge, but through the giving up his life for us!

Mandela spent years meditating on the fact that God is straightening things out.

Apply

Which means that you and I don’t have to!

Remeber what Joseph says, God is judge. And if God is judge. It’s his job to decide how to right wrongs. It’s his job to fix the mess of this world. And not only is it his job - it’s his joy.

We see that in Joseph’s life, how Joseph is brought up out of the pit, back from the dead as it were. But of course, we see it far more clearly in the resurrection itself.

Jesus’ resurrection is the concrete thing that we can hold onto, to know for sure that God really is reordering this world.

I love how Tish Harrison Warren puts it,

‘Jesus’ resurrection is the sole evidence that love triumphs over death, that beauty outlives horror, that the meek will inherit the earth, that those who mourn will be comforted, [or for that matter, that those who are wrongly accused and lied about because of their faithfulness to God will be rewarded]. The reason I can continue watching and waiting, even as the world is shrouded in darkness, is because the things I long for are not rooted in wishful thinking or religious ritual, but are as solid as a stone rolled away’

Restate

What can chip away at our grudges? Knowing this:

God is reordering this world, so I don’t have to?

Transition

And if he’s doing that, it also means I have a new story.

2. God is rewriting my story, so they don’t get to

State

The stories we tell ourselves, the story of our lives profoundly shapes how we feel. We are narrative beings. We take the facts of our lives and put them together in a story.

We can’t change the facts, but we can change the story. Can’t we?

All of the advice we receive ‘holding onto a grudge is like drinking poison and hoping the other person dies’, ‘feasting on anger is consuming yourself’ all of that advice is good.

But here’s the other thing about grudges, they are also a way to feel the truth that someone has wronged you.

When we have been deeply hurt, we might feel that if we let go of the grudge, we are letting the person who hurt us have the last word. They treated me as if I was dirt, and if I let go of it, doesn’t that mean I agree with them? I’m not dirt, I can’t let go!

Knowing that God is reordering the world might stop us acting out our revenge fantasies, where does that leave our story?

Show

In Genesis 42-43 we discover that Joseph’s prediction about a famine has come true. It hits up in Canaan too, and so Jacob sends his sons down to Egypt to buy grain.

So they go down and meet Joseph their long lost brother. The one they sold into slavery. The one they listened to crying out for his life.

But they don’t recognise him. He looks like an Egyptian. So in Gen 42:6 they bow down to him with their faces to the ground.

And because they can’t recognise him, Joseph is able to play with them a little. Sets them up to make it look like they stole grain and uses it to force them to go and get the rest of the family. I’ll leave you to read the details, including the tearful reunion - Joseph is a cryer.

Explain

Oh the irony! Joseph’s dream, the one they resented so much has come true. “We’ll see what becomes of that dreamer”, they said. But they dont! They can’t see what’s become of him because it’s not the story they had written!

I don’t think the reason they fail to recognise him is just because he changed his clothes and got a haircut. It’s more than that. Joseph is a different person, with a different story.

God has rewritten things. Joseph isn’t the boy sold into slavery, the son his Father thinks is dead, he’s not the man wrongfully accused and imprisoned. He has a better story than that.

That’s how, when the brothers finally ask him for forgiveness in chapter 50, he is able, not just to resist playing out his revenge fantasies, but to say these amazing words

Genesis 50:20–21 NRSV

Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing today. So have no fear; I myself will provide for you and your little ones.” In this way he reassured them, speaking kindly to them.

Explain

Whatever the facts of our lives, and whatever people have done to us, however the story of our lives has turned out, God is able to rewrite it.

That’s what Joseph’s story is really all about isn’t it?

Not just that God is good, and people are evil. It’s not just that God can frustrate the plans of the wicked - as the psalmist says. He can and does.

It’s much more than that. It’s about God rewriting Joseph’s story.

You intended it for evil. The story you wrote is a terrible one. But you don’t get to write it any more. God in his faithfulness and kindess and love, is writing a better one.

And this is not just something for Joseph. As always, because God offers to do the same for everyone who follows Jesus.

The apostle Paul says in Ephesians 2:10

Ephesians 2:10 (NRSV)

For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.

God can rewrite our story.

We aren’t what they said. We are what he made us. We aren’t what they did to us. We are what he made us. We aren’t the abuse. We are what he has made us. We aren’t the neglect. We are what he has made us. We aren’t the lies. We are what he has made us.

And even if you have never suffered the kinds of things Joseph suffered, all of us have to face death.

Illustrate

The other day I heard this terrible, tragic statement. I was talking to someone and they said ‘from the moment we are born, we are dying. We are born the to die. That’s our destiny and you just have to accept it’.

I wanted to scream, no! No that’s not how it has to be! Death should not get to have the last word!

The message we see hinted at in Joseph’s life, the one that points to the reality in Jesus is that there is a better story.

Apply

We are part of the story of God’s costly, self-sacrificial love for us. We are part of the story of God becoming a human being, entering our world, taking on all of the mess - the stuff we made, and the mud others threw at us, and how his sheer love for us drove him to take it all to the cross so it could all be left in the grave. And we could rise with him to have a fresh start, a new story.

Restate

God is rewriting my story, so they don’t get to

3. God is redirecting my purpose, so he can use me

State

When Joseph is given the chance to achieve what every natural instinct in us would say is his purpose in life, he refuses. He’s a new person.

He’s no longer beneath them, he’s no longer their victim, he’s now in a very real sense their saviour.

Because of his kindness to them, in spite of all of their evil, the promise God made to Abraham, to bless the world through his family moves forward. The family become a nation that eventually produces Jesus’ himself.

Joseph says God meant it for good, for the saving of many lives - he doesn’t know the half of it!

Explain

But in a way, that is the message of the entire book of Genesis. Every decision to trust God, every little moment of forgiveness, every choice to let go of revenge and let God sort it out - ends up having huge reverberations that none of the people making the choices could ever have anticipated.

Apply

This is the thing about letting go of grudges, it’s never wasted. No decision to allow God to dissolve our resentments and anger is every inconsequential.

No moment where we trust the gospel, that God is reordering this world, that he is rewriting my story, that he has redirected my purpose: He will not waste even the smallest and most fleeting choice to trust him.

Pray that we would be able to do just that