What have you done?
It was the last question of God in the story of the Fall in Genesis 3, one of four questions that awaken us to self-consciousness and so too to our accountability as rational and spiritual creatures. The self-same question appears in Genesis 4 in the equally significant story of Cain and Abel. With this story we step into the violent and disturbing world of human sin and evil, a world of murder and destruction. We step into human history.
Genesis in one sense is the story of sibling rivalry, of brothers against brothers and, perhaps, of the possibilities of their reconciliation. Cain and Abel inaugurate the long tradition of fratricide and thus the sordid tale of humanity’s constant inhumanity towards one another. It won’t do to reduce this story to a conflict between shepherds and farmers, a kind of shallow sociologism. The story builds exactly upon the story of the Fall, even to the point of the repetition of questions. But it offers the beginnings of a philosophical and psychological account of human pride and envy that leads to murder and exile, and to the animosities and hatreds that are so much a part of our fallenness.
It begins with Cain being angry. At what? At Abel. Why? Because his gift was accepted rather than Cain’s. In other words, he is upset at the good fortune of another. This will later be named as envy: our inability to be happy at the good of another. There is nothing more destructive of human life in community than envy. We resent the good of another not just because we want that good for ourselves but also because we don’t want it for them. It is division and animosity over the good of another which we choose to see as an evil that harms us.
God’s first set of questions to Cain highlight the contradiction. “Why are you angry? Why has your countenance fallen?” We sometimes wear our hearts on our faces. “If you do well will you not be accepted?” This question is about our commitment to what is good and right and true. To reject it leaves us open to exactly what follows: the giving in to sin which seeks to master you rather than you being responsible to truth and honesty.
Cain lures Abel into the field and kills him. God asks, just like he asked Adam in the Garden, “Where is Abel your brother?” It isn’t as if God doesn’t know. The question, as in the previous chapter, seeks to convict us in our consciences. It belongs to our awareness of ourselves as selves. Cain’s response highlights the underlying assumption: placing ourselves above one another and at the expense of one another. He responds with a rhetorical and dismissive question. Not just, “I do not know;” itself an obvious lie, but “Am I my brother’s keeper?” That question is the denial of our common humanity and of the vocation of our humanity towards one another, the vocation to care for and love one another. Cain affects an indifference towards his brother and thus towards the human community of which he is a part.
The great question of God calls him simply to account and to the reality of our interdependence and relationship with one another within the good order of God’s creation. “What have you done?” God asks, and then adds the profound words which simply highlight the outrage of the deed. “The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground.” It is not just that God sees and knows all the things of our hearts, our minds, and our deeds; it also reminds us of his care and concern for all living creatures and as such recalls us to him in whose image we are made. Cain has contradicted his own humanity in killing Abel, not just his own brother but one who, like himself, is made in God’s image.
The story is simply and powerfully told. It reveals the radical meaning of the Fall in terms of the divisions and hatreds within the human community. It is told to convict our consciences. It is a cri de coeur, a cry from the heart of God to our hearts. “The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground.” Nothing falls outsider God’s eternal knowing. The blood of our common humanity cries out to God in the violence and destruction that belongs to our world in its conflicts and bloody disarray, of brother against brother. The story is meant to convict us, on the one hand, and to convince us of other possibilities and a better and more honest way, on the other hand. Such is the journey of redemption, of repentance and forgiveness which can only happen if our hearts are moved as God’s heart is moved out of truth and love.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy