For example, when people ask me, “When did you come to America?” I always say, “The third of August 1983,” and I think they’re surprised that I would pinpoint it to a date.
And there are moments in time for all of us personally-the birth of a child, the loss of a loved one, great moments of success, big changes in our lives-and while they may not be known to everyone, those moments are frozen, as it were, for us. That is, for example, what people testify to when they are able to tell you where they were on the occasion of discovering the news of the assassination of President Kennedy, or in saying similar things in relationship to the destruction of Space Shuttle Challenger, or being able to recall exactly where they were when the Pan Am flight went down over Lockerbie.
There are moments in time when it would seem as though the clock stops and the action freezes, and one has the distinct impression that, as a result of what we are now experiencing, things will never be the same again.
And we’ve been held on this V7 chord here for months waiting to get to the resolution of chapter 45, and so we come to it: a moment in time-a moment in time. And in all of the ensuing events of their back‑and‑forth from their land of their birth and into Egypt and so on, we have been waiting, as it were, for this whole matter to resolve itself, in the same way that, sometimes, when at the end of a song, a group will hold everything on that V7 chord, and they hold it there on the seventh and you know that it has to resolve and come back to the primary chord, and it creates that sense of anticipation, and often the drummer drums and goes crazy and it’s going, and you know it can’t go on like this forever-at least it seems to be going on forever-and then eventually everyone breathes a sigh of relief as it finally ends in one great burst. Ever since the eighth verse of chapter 42-and you may like just to look at it-we have been waiting for the moment to which we come in these opening verses of chapter 45 because it is there in the eighth verse of chapter 42 that Joseph first encounters his brothers after all this passage of time, and we’re told there that Joseph recognized them, although they did not recognize him. Now in Genesis chapter 45, we resume our studies here in the life of Joseph-an epic story to which we have given ourselves over a number of months and to which we return with something of the end in sight.
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