The robe comes first, before either dream. Israel loved Joseph more than his other sons because he was the son of his old age, and the robe announced it. The brothers saw what had been handed to their younger brother, and 4"they hated him and could not speak peacefully to him." Jacob had grown up as the less-loved son and had been driven from home by a brother's fury he had earned. Now he repeats his own father's mistake on his own sons.
Then come the dreams, and they make it worse. Sheaves bowing, then the sun and moon and eleven stars bowing, are not subtle, and the family reads them correctly the first time. That is the problem. A message received twice was God underlining his own certainty (compare Genesis 41:32). Before Joseph leaves home and before any brother acts, the outcome has been declared. What follows is the brothers' plan becoming, without their knowledge, the road God's plan takes.
Their words at Dothan are the cruelest line in the chapter: 20"we will see what will become of his dreams." Read from the end of the book, they are the truest thing anyone says. The brothers mean them as mockery, a way to close the account on Joseph's arrogance for good. Every reader who knows the ending hears it differently. They will see what becomes of his dreams, and so will we.
Reuben's rescue fails quietly, and Judah offers what sounds like mercy. 26"What profit is it if we kill our brother and conceal his blood?" Selling Joseph keeps Judah's hands clean while making money on his brother's life, 28"twenty shekels of silver." It is murder dressed as a business deal. The man who will one day offer his own life in exchange for Benjamin's (Genesis 44:18-34) is still years from that.
Then the robe comes back and closes a circle. Jacob once used goatskins to deceive his own father into a blessing that was not his (Genesis 27:15-16). Now his sons dip Joseph's robe in the blood of a goat and let their father draw the false conclusion himself. Jacob is never told a lie. He is handed evidence and left to believe what it seems to show. The tools he used on Isaac come home and are aimed at him.
His grief is total. 35"He refused to be comforted." He is sure he will carry it to the grave, and he does not know that his son is alive in an Egyptian household, or that the providence writing this cruelty is already writing its reversal. Genesis makes us sit inside that grief as long as Jacob did.
Another story echoes behind this one. A beloved son is sent by his father to his brothers, stripped, sold for silver, and given up for dead, and on the far side of it he becomes the rescuer of the family that betrayed him. Joseph's road, the pit, the price, and the years believed dead, has the shape of one walked once more, completely, at Calvary.
Think of a dream you were told would come to nothing, or one you buried yourself. The brothers said, "we will see." Trust that God is already writing what becomes of it.
Prayer
Father, some of us are still waiting, like Jacob, for word of something we buried and grieved. Teach us to trust that you were writing the answer before we asked the question, even when we cannot see past our worst moment. Thank you that the sold and buried Son did not stay in the pit. In Jesus' name, amen.