Two more prisoners arrive, and Joseph, still confined himself, is assigned to attend them. Nothing suggests he resents it. When he notices their downcast faces, he asks. When they explain that no one can interpret their dreams, Joseph redirects the whole question before he has even heard them. 8"Do not interpretations belong to God? Please tell them to me." Whatever gift he has for dreams, and Genesis will show in the next chapter that he does have it, he refuses to let anyone mistake it for something that starts with him.
Both interpretations come true exactly as spoken, on the same three-day schedule, and even in the same phrase, "lift up your head," used for restoration in one case and for execution in the other. Joseph is not guessing. He gives the baker a hard word with the same plainness he uses for the cupbearer's good news, and neither man doubts him. In the middle of the good news Joseph makes one small, reasonable request: 14"remember me, when it is well with you." He even states his case honestly. He was stolen from his own land, and he has done nothing to deserve this pit.
It is a fair request, made to the right man at the right moment, and it fails completely. 23"Yet the chief cupbearer did not remember Joseph, but forgot him." Two more years pass in that one sentence. Whatever hope had risen in Joseph as he watched his own words come true for someone else goes unanswered, because the man he trusted to carry his name to Pharaoh was too taken up with his own restored life to bother.
Being forgotten by someone alive and well and fully able to remember you is hard in its own way, and no verse softens it.
The next chapter will show that none of it was wasted. If the cupbearer had remembered Joseph the week after his release, Joseph might have been quietly let out and lost from view, one grateful official's favor repaid and nothing more. Instead the delay holds him in exactly the place he needs to be for the moment Pharaoh will need him, so that when he finally rises no one, least of all Joseph, could credit it to anything but God's timing.
Joseph's plea belongs to a longer line than he knew. In a room built for two condemned men, one is told he will live and one that he will die, both by the mouth of an innocent man wrongly imprisoned beside them, and the one who lives is the one who asks to be remembered. Centuries later another condemned man, hanging beside an innocent one, made the same plea in different words. "Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom" (Luke 23:42). He did not wait two forgotten years for his answer. Christ gave it to him from the middle cross that same day. Joseph's request reached Pharaoh only after long silence. Ours never has to.
If someone has forgotten you, someone who owed you a word or a kindness, hand that to God today. Keep serving faithfully in the meantime, the way Joseph kept interpreting dreams and giving the credit to God while his own release sat unanswered.
Prayer
Father, we have made honest requests of people who then forgot us, and we have felt the sting of that, worse somehow than an outright refusal. Teach us to keep serving faithfully in the meantime. Thank you that you have never forgotten us the way the cupbearer forgot Joseph, and that the innocent man on the middle cross answered "remember me" before the day was over. In Jesus' name, amen.