KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 21 October
God questions
There are questions and there are questions, different kinds of questions. There are questions about God but more significantly there are the questions of God. The grand narrative of the Fall, as we have seen, is about our questions of deceit and denial in contrast to God’s questions that call us to truth and awaken us to understanding. Thus the questions of God actually teach us a lot about the idea of God and about the nature of learning.
This week in Chapel we have had a barrage of questions, first, in the classic and foundational story of Cain and Abel, and, secondly, in the powerful questions of God to Job (and to us) in The Book of Job. The questions of God open us out to wisdom and understanding about creation and about ourselves.
It is always a bit of fun with the Junior School Chapel to ask students and faculty if they have any brothers and sisters and then to ask them if they have ever said to their brother or sister (and with a certain intensity), ‘I hate you!’ or ‘I’ll kill you!’ A fair number are honest enough in their response! The point is that we are all in the story of Cain and Abel, the story of the first murder, at least in terms of our thoughts and words. We hope not in terms of our deeds!
The story is part of the fall-out from the Fall and belongs to the transition from the purely mythological and poetical to the beginnings of something like history and civilization. Abel is a keeper of sheep and Cain a tiller of the ground. There is just a hint of criticism about our assumptions in our mastery of nature by way of agriculture over and against the more nomadic qualities of shepherding. At issue, perhaps, is a deeper sense of dependence upon God as opposed to the illusions of our control and management that contribute to exploitation, violence, and abuse. The image of keeping the sheep is the classical image of care and in a way that is transcultural. Genesis, along with much else in the Hebrew Scriptures, is quite sceptical of human presumption.
It is not by accident that the overarching icon in the Chapel is the image of Christ the Good Shepherd whose care is sacrificial love. In the story of Cain and Abel, there are, as with the story of the Fall, five questions of which four are God’s and one is Cain’s. His question echoes the same kind of question of denial as the serpent’s question, “Did God say?” God asks Cain, “why are you angry?” and “why has your countenance fallen?” and challenges him about the necessary control of his emotions, the need to master our desires.The division between our knowing and our willing is often so deadly and destructive. We so easily take offense at a perceived slight or sense of being ignored and lash out in anger sometimes because of envy and jealousy.