KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 17 October
“What have you done?” God asks Cain, “Your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground.” There is darkness at the heart of our humanity. It is one of the important take-away points from the infamous story of Cain and Abel. It is part of the fall-out from the Fall. We tend to read this story moralistically and as such largely misread it. It is really about the primordial and mythological state of our humanity outside the Garden of Eden. It is what our humanity looks like withoutmorality,withoutlaw and order. As such it points us to the absolute need for a moral order, for justice and truth.
We forget that Cain is actually the first farmer, the first to found a city, the first to inaugurate sacrifices – an attempt from our side to negotiate between ourselves and God, however understood – and that in Cain’s lineage are the originators of the arts and technology. Jubal and Tubal-Cain arise out of the seventh generation of Cain. And yet the point is that at the heart of our humanity, at the heart of civilisation, there is darkness, the darkness of the human heart.
What we are given to see are the primordial emotions of revenge, of fear, and of anger. What we are given to see are the forms of pride and self-regard that negate and deny our common humanity. It is, to be sure, about fratricide and it begets, if you will, the long, sad and sorry tale of all of the ‘cides’ of human history: patricide, matricide, regicide, homicide, genocide, and the much later (1648) modern Latin word, suicide. There is no word interestingly for the killing of sisters – sororicide? just doesn’t work. It comes under fratricide.
We know and in many ways celebrate various kinds of rivalries especially in the sports world. We hope that the morality of good sportsmanship will be dominant and not the ugliness of violence and bloodshed. Here is a story about the most primordial form of rivalry, sibling rivalry. In a way, the whole Book of Genesis is about sibling rivalry, mostly brothers against brothers but also including some sisters: Cain and Abel, Abram and Lot, Isaac and Ishmael, Leah and Rachel, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers.
