Cain Unable

An ancient story both mysterious and relevant

Cain murdered his brother Abel.

That’s not how you dreamed the story would go if you’re Cain or Abel or their mom and pops, Eve and Adam.

The ancient tale of Cain and Abel is one whose enchantments have not worn off for me. Perhaps because it’s visceral and stark, a gritty, Cormac McCarthy styled tragic tale of anger, envy, entitlement, violence, bloodshed, transcendence, Divine confrontation, speech, consequence, wandering, and lament strewn across a rough and tumble ancient landscape—a story mysterious in the existential uncertainties and interiority it illuminates, a story relevant in the emotions and desires we recognize.

If you aren’t familiar, the story is recorded in the Hebrew torah, in the scroll of Genesis, the story of beginnings.

Is this historical recall or true myth, or something in between? Were Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel really the only humans walking around in those days? Why was Abel keeping the flocks? Why was Cain keeping the soil? Why were they bringing offerings to God? Why did YHWH look upon Abel’s offering with favor, and why was Cain unable to please God with his? Is it significant that the firsborn slays the second born? The text doesn’t directly address these modern questions, at least on the face value plain reading in English. The contextual chasms from the ancient near East and 21st century America yawn wide and long.

But we do know YHWH sees and knows Cain, sees his anger and downcast face, and then speaks with Cain:

Then the LORD said to Cain, “Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it.”

Genesis 4:6-7

I recently finished Chuck DeGroat’s Healing What’s Within, in which he organizes the content around the three questions God asks Adam and Eve in Genesis 3, in response to their eating of the forbidden fruit:

First, “Where are you?”, then “Who told you that you were naked?”, and finally “Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”

Chuck writes that many of us have heard these questions through harsh tones and scowls of shame and judgment. He admits that was how the questions initially filtered into his ears as well. But what if God came to Adam and Eve with a gentle, tender, merciful, compassionate face and tone, like a mommy or daddy scooping up their child who has just experienced a trauma. What if God was, as he tells Moses later on the Mount, “The LORD, the LORD, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in loyal love…”?

Where are you? Who told you? Where have you taken your hunger?

The questions aren’t too distant from the questions God poses to Cain:

“Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do right, will you not be accepted?”

Anger, envy, resentment, desire, entitlement, violence. We recognize the tune here. It resonates. There was a creature, a body of sin, crouching at Cain’s doorstep, lurking, seeking to devour him. That body of desire, unruly and ravenous, requires some checking and taming or we’re toast.

But, what was the “right” of which God speaks to Cain? Was it because he was an agrarian and Abel held a stake in animal husbandry? Maybe it was the size and scale of their generosity—Abel just tipped the material scales that day with his first fruits outweighing his brother’s for first prize? Was God just a petty potentate who needed Cain to perform and jump through right hoops to win approval?

I wonder if there’s deeper magic at work here, as it were. Rathan a mechanistic or performative evaluation, perhaps it was something in the mysterious but consequential realm of desire. Cain’s desires, Abel’s desires, the desires of this beastly body of sin crouching the the threshold, and also God’s desires for his imago Dei—the co-ruling icons he formed from dust to be loving earth-keepers.

Cain leads Abel out into the field and murders him.

The narrative continues with more questions from God (again, how do we hear the tone and imagine the expression of YHWH with Cain?):

The LORD said, “What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground. ¹¹Now you are under a curse and driven from the ground, which opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. ¹²When you work the ground, it will no longer yield its crops for you. You will be a restless wanderer on the earth.”

¹³Cain said to the LORD, “My punishment is more than I can bear. ¹⁴Today you are driving me from the land, and I will be hidden from your presence; I will be a restless wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.”

¹⁵But the LORD said to him, “Not so; anyone who kills Cain will suffer vengeance seven times over.” Then the Lord put a mark on Cain so that no one who found him would kill him. ¹⁶So Cain went out from the LORD’s presence and lived in the land of Nod, east of Eden.

The story goes that Cain became a restless wanderer, an unmoored and unrooted human, living a disintegrated and fragmented existence marked by the trauma and bloodshed of his past.

But there is something else for us, too. Something that is to be held near to the realm of our own disordered and unruly desire landscape. Yes, there’s far more that we could unpack from this narrative, more than I have the space for—or am equipped for—in this post, but I do pause and marvel at the mercy of YHWH in response to Cain’s fear of the violence that will boomerang back to him out on the open road. I believe the only way to read scripture is backward, through the window of the Cross—the luminous blood-stained glass of grace and mercy marking the end of scapegoating violence and the redemption of all of our restless wanderings and wayward desires.

(And for those who are wondering, yes, I also am curious: where do those other people come from that Cain was so worried about? :)

Shalom,

Jonathan