John Calvin Commentary Genesis 48:1

"And it came to pass after these things, that one said to Joseph, Behold, thy father is sick: and he took with him his two sons, Manasseh and Ephraim." — Genesis 48:1 (ASV)

After these things. Moses now passes to the last act of Jacob’s life, which, as we will see, was especially worthy of remembrance. For, since he knew that he was invested by God with an extraordinary role, in being made the father of the fathers of the Church, he fulfilled, as death approached, the prophetic office concerning the future state of the Church, which had been entrusted to him.

Private individuals arrange their domestic affairs through their last wills, but the method pursued by this holy man was very different. God had established his covenant with him, with the attached condition that the succession of grace should flow down to his posterity. But before I enter fully into considering this subject, two things to which Moses briefly alludes should be noted: first, that Joseph, being informed of his father’s sickness, immediately went to see him; and, secondly, that Jacob, having heard of his arrival, attempted to raise his feeble and trembling body to honor him.

Certainly, the reason Joseph was so eager to see his father, and so prompt in discharging all the other duties of filial piety, was that he regarded it as a greater privilege to be a son of Jacob than to preside over a hundred kingdoms. For, in bringing his sons with him, he acted as if he would emancipate them from the country in which they had been born and restore them to their own lineage. For they could not be counted among the descendants of Abraham without making themselves hated by the Egyptians. Nevertheless, Joseph prefers that reproach for them over every kind of wealth and glory, so that they might become one with the sacred body of the Church.

His father, however, rising in his presence, pays him appropriate honor for the kindness received from him. Meanwhile, by doing so, he fulfills his part in the prediction that had previously inflamed his other sons with rage, so that his act of constituting Ephraim and Manasseh as heads of two tribes would not seem grievous and offensive to them.