I have heard the Genesis story of Joseph and his “technicolor” dream coat for years. I have listened to it during sermons, at church camps, and in the quiet of my mind as I looked over scripture in my bedroom. I have visited and revisited the story for over sixty years. Yet, not until I set foot in the garden did the tale take on the meaning for me that I believe God most clearly wants us to take from it.

Joseph’s story is the last story in Genesis. That probably accounts, in part, for why I only recently noticed that it is related, like a moral bookend, to the first chapters of Genesis. Promises of dominion over his brothers seeped into Joseph’s dreams as surely as promises of dominion were whispered by God into the ears of Adam and Eve, and by them to their offspring and generations to come.

Overlook that connection and it is easy to miss the next parallel. The story four chapters into Genesis, where Cain decides to kill Abel, matches how Joseph’s brothers also want to kill him. In both cases, this is because their fathers (heavenly or earthly) revered the youngest brother over the older one(s). At the start of Genesis, Caine the older kills Able the younger. But by Genesis’s end we find a remarkably New-Testiment ending for such an Old-Testiment story. Joseph’s brothers change their minds. Eventually, they decide to let him live, selling him off into slavery instead. That is one difference between the stories of Cain and Abel versus Joseph and his twelve brothers.

The more important difference occurs when God confronts Cain about his missing brother. Cain replies with the question that is at the heart of Genesis and is the tie that binds the entire biblical narrative, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Put another way, Cain sounds like the teenager he might well have been as he impudently asks, “Really dad? Are we really going to do this? You’re telling me the dominion you gave me by birthright, is limited? You’re insisting that I should give the first fruits of my land to you? And look out for other people, too? You’ve got’ a be kidding me?”

Joseph’s brothers would probably have ended up asking God the same self-justifying question had the boy died by their hands. But he lived. And years later, when his brothers came calling on him in Egypt for food amidst a regional famine, circumstances posed a very similar question, but this time to the aggrieved Joseph, “My brothers sold me off into slavery and lied to my father about it. Do you really expect me to forgive them? Do I have to be their keeper, too, just as you have asked me to be the servant, steward, and keeper of Pharoah’s lands and crops?”

Genesis closes with the Bible telling us that Joseph chose the new dominion of love, forgiveness, and “not counting the power of God as a thing to be used for his own advantage”. It provides a fitting end to the morality tale of Genesis and the perfect gateway into the holy journey of the Israelites up through Christ as they break down the gates of the old-dominion-understanding favored by Cain and Satan to establish the reign of God’s new-dominion-understanding, exemplified by Joseph and fulfilled, in time, by the lamb of God.  

Why I never noticed this pattern before, I cannot say for sure. I remain flummoxed by the changes to my perception of the Bible that tending to the garden has worked on me, in a way no amount of intellectual study had done to this point. I have entertained a few guesses as to why, but nothing I am yet willing to put pen to paper to try and fully explain. I do, however, have one new suspicion to add to my growing pile of insights.

People talk about these types of gardens as “community” gardens. There is plenty to be said for the positive effects being part of a garden community can have on a person. But I tend to favor a different word. I like thinking of them as “communion” gardens.

For me, it is impossible to tend a garden for any length of time without beginning to let one’s mind drift beyond time and place. There are moments when, if I lifted my head, I would be unsurprised to find Cain, Joseph, or an old slave couple working beside me. Something ancient and elemental – in the heat, the damp soil, the backbreaking tilt of the body and soul as they work the land – seems to breathe life not just into seeds and plants but, as well, into all those who have tilled the land before me. In those moments, something of their presence is also with me, as if in communion. I have begun to wonder if this is a part of the change that is happening in me, if it is only in true communion with earth and others that we begin to come home to the deepest whispers of the Holy Spirit and God’s new dominion.