There is a phrase going around: leopards eating faces.

It comes from a Twitter user named Adrian Bott who, on October 16 2015, tweeted this:

‘I never thought the leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.

It has been applied to British people who voted to leave the European Union –sometimes called Brexit – and later regretted the consequences of that vote.

In the USA, it has been applied to people who voted for politicians who pledged to cut wasteful spending and later regretted that the cuts were to programs on which they relied or to jobs that they or family members had.

It turns out that consequences don’t only apply to “those other people.” They seem to apply to most people.

---

Let’s go to God in prayer.

God of wisdom, may the words that I speak, and the ways they are received by each of our hearts and minds, help us to continue to grow into the people, and the church, that you have dreamed us to be.

Amen.

---

There’s a German word that I will mispronounce:

schadenfreude

It means taking pleasure in the misfortune of others.

Pure schadenfreude is just enjoying other people’s hardship. It’s laughing at the video of the parent hit by the baseball bat of their child, or the video of the car that slides off an icy road, or the video of the turkey fryer that sets the house on fire.

It’s not the best of human reactions.

But we sometimes engage in what we feel is justified schadenfreude: the person who makes unfounded accusations against an employee of a store, eventually calling police on the employee, only to be arrested by the police.

They got what they deserved, right? I mean, they called for the face-eating leopards, and their face was eaten by the leopards. It feels like justice, AND it lets us enjoy someone’s misfortune guilt-free.

I don’t know why people are wired to enjoy the misery of others. And I think sometimes we just try to find excuses for our glee for seeing people suffer.

But then there are situations where we have some control over what happens.

Our reading from the Hebrew scriptures this morning might be familiar to those who learned it in Sunday School, or who have seen ‘Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.”

But for those who don’t remember the story, here is the context:

Joseph was Jacob’s son, and Joseph got special attention from his father because he was born in Jacob’s old age.

Dad gave him a special robe. Joseph also had dreams that implied his brothers would bow before him,

His brothers decided Joseph was a pain.

They decided to kill him, but one of his brothers convinced them to throw him in a pit instead. They later sold him into slave traders who took him to Egypt. Then they put blood on the robe and took it to Jacob so he would think Joseph was killed by a wild animal.

Maybe a face-eating leopard?

Through a series of events Joseph rose to an important position in Egypt. Then a famine comes, and Joseph’s family has to rely on aid from Egypt, administered by Joseph, the brother they sold into slavery. And eventually Joseph has the brothers come to him in Egypt, though they don’t know it’s Joseph.

And then comes this morning’s reading.

Somehow Joseph has the kindness to not tell his brothers

“You sold me into slavery. I have no pity for you. Go away and starve.”

Instead he sees that he has the opportunity to do something good for his family in a time of need.

What good would there be in turning them away? Maybe some feelings of righteous schadenfreude: pleasure at the suffering of his brothers bolstered by the belief that this was all on them.

Being sold into slavery was bad. Letting his entire family – including his nephews and nieces who had no part in selling him – starve to death would be worse.

It would be an escalation. It would be adding misery to misery. And maybe there was already enough misery.

Imagine how the brothers felt seeking help from Joseph after they had treated him so cruelly. Their faces were already marked by metaphorical leopard tooth bites. In giving grace, grain, and grazing ground to his brothers, Joseph was getting even with them.

In our lives we will encounter people who will harm us directly and indirectly.

We don’t have to expose ourselves to danger by putting ourselves in situations where someone can harm us, but we can offer some level of grace to those who have hurt us.

And in situations where someone made a choice intending for it to hurt us, but it ended up hurting them as well, we can recognize that they may have learned a lesson about consequences, and perhaps even what it is like to be on our side of the conflict.

Our country is going through some great upheaval that will harm most people. Only the richest and most powerful are likely to profit. The rest of us: those who did not want this change, those who were uninterested, uninvolved, or ambivalent, and those who thought this change was what they wanted, are likely to suffer to some degree – some more and some less.

To those with whom we disagree, we can choose to say

“This is what you asked for” or “This is your fault.”

Or we can say

“I understand you’re hurting too.”

We can respond with schadenfreude, or we can respond with compassion.

So my challenge this week, in meeting those who have suffered in these past five weeks, is to try to follow the teaching of Jesus:

Love your enemies; do good to those who hate you; bless those who curse you; pray for those who mistreat you.

– Luke 6:27-28, NRSVue

They are suffering too. And we can’t make the world a better place by being more cruel to each other.

Amen.

* Scripture quotations marked NRSVue are taken from the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition. Copyright © 2021 National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. https://www.friendshippress.org/pages/about-the-nrsvue

* Scripture quotations marked KJV are taken from the King James version of the Bible.