God’s mercy is from the deepest place within him. That’s what it means. It means that God’s mercy is as true and sincere as it possibly could be. There’s nothing held back. This is ultra mercy. This is mercy extreme in its compassion, and it’s so surprising and unexpected that we really can’t wrap our heads around it.

Moms, you have the most important calling in all the world. And one of Satan’s best strategies in our world today is trying to get you think otherwise. (And that is in no way to say dads are dispensable.) We’re not sure what happened, but at some point in Jesus’s teens or twenties, Joseph disappeared off the scene. Yet Mary is there at the cross. God raised his Son, at some point, without a human father, but not without mama.

Whether you were Jewish or Roman, rich or poor, strong or weak, religious or irreligious, John preached to everyone, and he was really nobody’s man, and that’s what made him strange. But he was strange in all the ways we should expect. And Luke gives us the best explanation for this.

There are two threads that run through the text. Here is how we are going to talk about these threads. Let’s talk about them as two vantage points of Genesis 49-50, one from the ground and one from the air.

Jacob knows that the land of the Canaan is his home. That is the land that God promised his family. That’s where Abraham and Isaac are buried, and that’s where Jacob wants to be buried — because he knows that eventually his family is going to be back in that land.

God has put two Judahs before us this morning — the old Judah of chapter 38 whose words cannot be trusted, and whose morality is compromised, and who wields his authority to hurt others. And God gives us the new Judah of chapter 44 whose puts himself at risk to protect others, and whose word is as good as gold, and who stands ready to sacrifice himself for the good of others.

Joseph is putting on display being the wise man from Proverbs 5-7. And according to the Proverbs, typically when a wise person does wise things, good things happen to them, and that is true. That is the message of Proverbs. But there is also the message of Ecclesiastes which says that bad things can happen to good people.

Why Interrupt the heroism of Joseph for these wretched events? Because Judah is set in contrast to Joseph. Joseph is everything that Judah is not. the actions of Judah in this passage provide a stark contrast to Joseph’s heroism. There is another, bigger, reason.

There is another, more important reason. But I want to wait until the end of the story to tell you.

Just like we’ve already seen so many times in Genesis already, brothers are against one another. It goes back to Cain and Abel, and then of course there’s Isaac and Ishmael, and then there’s Jacob and Esau, and then in Chapter 37 we’re supposed to see right away that once again the whole brothers thing is not working out.