It was a necessity that Christ should be made “perfect through sufferings.” As men suffer, so it was an important part of His charge that He should be the permanent Sufferer. It is said—and if not true, as the Italians say, ben trovato—that when the devil, pretending to be Christ, appeared to St. Martin in his cell, the saint asked him to show his wounds, whereupon the adversary fled. These wounds are among the signs of the true Christ. Paul loudly claims that he bears about in his body the stigmas of the Lord Jesus. When Lepaux told Talleyrand that he purposed founding the new religion of Theo-philanthropy, the cynical diplomatist replied that to found a new religion was a very difficult matter; but that if he could preach long enough, do miracles, and then be crucified and raise himself from the dead, he might possibly succeed. It is in the “sufferings and glories” that Joseph typifies the Son of God, and especially in one character of suffering—he was rejected by his brethren.
It may be thought that all sufferings are very much alike, and that there is little use in distinguishing them; but this is not correct. “In the world ye shall have tribulation;” this is true of every saint: “Yea, and all that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution;” this is limited to a certain number. Persecution is a cumulative suffering: to the pain and inconvenience of ordinary tribulation is added the pain of seeing, and being the object of, the malignity and injustice of one's fellow creatures; and the more noble a disposition is, the more keenly it will feel this, the more it will be grieved at the malignity and shocked at the injustice.
That is of ordinary persecution, which is the inheritance of all, in every sphere, who do their fall duty—misrepresentation, calumny, hatred, opposition: “Woe unto you when all men shall speak well of you.” The man that is daunted by being slandered a little, is not fit for any responsible work. But persecution from one's own brethren is a far more virulent and concentrated affliction. Of this Joseph was the prototype, and so it is fit that we should read that God endowed him with an affluence of hidden benedictions— “on the crown of the head of him that was separate from His brethren.”
To be separate from one's brethren is no affliction at all to some natures. In Corinth there were those that seemed to revel in schisms. Jude speaks of such as separate themselves, having not the Spirit— wanton schismatics, who have no love-tendrils, uniting them to their brethren, to be broken; who would rend the church from the Baltic to the Pontus; to, carry some crotchet of their own, such as the shape of a priest's tonsure; or put their brethren wholesale to the sword for dropping their h’s, and calling the word “Sibboleth” instead of “Shibboleth.” But all that is not of God Who gathers, but of the enemy that scatters. Indeed nothing is more emphatic in scripture than the countless exhortations to unity, mutual love and forbearance; and the condemnation of heresies and schisms, among the people of God. Joseph was certainly no wanton separator; he followed his brethren forty miles to be with them and serve them, but “they hated him without a cause.” He was to prefigure One Whose deepest human sorrow was that “His own received Him not:” “He was wounded in the house of His friends:” Who said to those whom He had cherished in His bosom, “One of you shall betray me;” Who knew that, besides this, another of them would presently deny Him, and the rest desert Him. These events were signally foreshadowed in Joseph's history, and in it we have revealed to us the keenest of conceivable distresses to which a sensitive and noble nature can be subjected—to be separated from those whom he best loved, to be misunderstood, hated, and wronged by them. They said afterward, “We saw the anguish of his soul, when he besought us, and we would not hear.”
The physical effect of a blow is the same from whose hand soever it comes, but the moral and mental effect is widely different. The mental effect of a blow from an open foe is exhilarating and bracing; but when it comes from “mine own familiar friend, in whom I trusted,” then is the heart likely to be cast down in the deepest discouragement. When Casca struck Csesar in the neck with his sword, the veteran warrior turned to defend himself with the dexterity and prowess that had carried him through his five hundred battles: the odds he saw against him he cared little for, and, undaunted, took from his assailants two and twenty wounds; but suddenly his close friend Brutus steps from amongst them and stabs him in the groin. He says, “Thou also Brutus”! It is enough: he covers his face with his mantle, and sinks dying before them. David could calmly face “the complicated wrong of Shimei's hand and Shimei's tongue"; but he never recovered from the blows dealt him by Absalom and Ahithophel.