I expect many readers here in the UK will be familiar with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical, Joseph and his technicolour dream coat. You should at least have heard the main song “Any dream will do.” In fact, there is a risk that a lot of people will know the story and have learnt the supposed lessons more from the musical than the Bible.
Now, I love a good musical but the problem with them is that they, for all sorts of artistic reasons don’t stick closely to the original story, whether a historical event (Sound of Music, Evita ) or a story (Mary Poppins). Add to that, Lloyd Webber comes at the story as a humanist, not a Christian or Jew and this shows. For example, he has Joseph promising to do his best when interpreting dreams rather than pointing to God alone who can do this.
The song itself has a jolly tune but some of the lyrics make little sense. For example, I would advise keeping your eyes open rather than closing them if you want to open curtains and see what the world outside is up to. Otherwise, you are likely to bump into furniture and injure yourself.
However, the big problem with the song is that its conclusion is all wrong and certainly is not the point of the story. It’s not that “any dream will do.” The message of Jospeh is not to nod off to sleep and dream dreams, especially dreams that promote your own personal desires and ambitions. There is of course a place to “dream dreams” in that we both want churches and individuals to have passions and aspirations. Going further, as a Charismatic, I would expect people to have specific dreams, visions and prophecies. Still, we are meant to weight them, it isn’t that any dream will do.
To be clear, though, the main point of Joseph’s story is not to do with having lots of dreams, nor, sorry Andrew is it really about his coat which is rather incidental to the whole story beyond provoking his brother’s jealousy. The point is that there is a specific dream or vision that is needed. Joseph’s dream is crucial because it aligns with the big dream or vision given to Abraham, Issac and Jacob of God’s plan to bring his people into a land where they can know God’s goodness together, a plan that will take them through exile and exodus, through suffering and conquest, through death and resurrection.
So, Jacob’s meeting with God in a dream at Beersheba (see Genesis 46) on the way to Egypt is not incidental. This is after the story of Jacob’s genealogy still. In that dream, God in effect renews the covenant promise and reassures Jacon that he is going with him down into Egypt and even more importantly that he will bring the people home again.
We are not meant to learn from Joseph’s story that any dream will do in order to dream our own dreams. Rather, we are meant to discover the one big dream of God’s purposes hat through death and resurrection, bringing low and exalting high, grace and judgement seen as common threads through all the dreams of the story means that in Christ and his death and resurrection, God is working out his goodness.
Faithroots 