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Holy Week resources and reflections

Sibling rivalry (Jan. 2, 2022)

Uniform Lesson for January 2, 2022
Scripture passage and lesson focus: Genesis 4:1-16

This week, we begin a new calendar year and a new unit within our study of justice. Unit II is entitled “God: The Source of Justice,” and we go back to the beginnings to work our way forward. While there may have been issues of justice in the garden, these issues increase as the family of human beings grows larger. In Genesis 4, the first brothers appear on the scene. We are introduced to the first case of sibling rivalry in Scripture, and it gets deadly quickly. What can we learn about God’s approach to justice from this early story in the Bible?

An etiology of sin

While the early stories in Genesis can be read as simple yet marvelous stories, they also function as origin tales or sagas. How did sin enter God’s story with the world, and how did this sin spread out to all the world’s spaces and species? This is what is often called “The Primeval History,” in Genesis 1-11. At the beginning, everything seems to be “good.” By the end, God has “scattered” humanity across the “face of all the earth” and “confused” their language (Genesis 11:9). The story of Cain and Abel is one step along the way.

If justice is primarily a matter of right relationships, then it makes sense that the story of God and justice requires a community for such justice to either take root or be ignored. So, this story of the first family begins with great promise. Here we have two sons: one a planter, the other a herdsman. Though one is necessarily born before the other, this story seems filled with great potential. They share the same parents. They both have constructive vocations. The whole world is available to them. Everybody’s got room! And yet — maybe sharing blood, being given good work and having all you need of the world’s resources is not enough. This is a story about yesterday, and today.

The Lord had regard

Perhaps the greatest mystery of this story is God’s preference for Abel’s offering over Cain’s. Much ink has been spilled on this. Is it a sign of God’s preference for plant-based versus meat-based economies? Did Cain offer God his leftovers while Abel brought his “firstlings”? Was there some hidden difference in their motivations, one based on calculation and the other grounded in gratitude? Let’s be clear: The story doesn’t say. It simply observes that God had “regard” for one over the other, and thus a chain of events begins.

Some might thereby infer that sin is God’s responsibility. If God had shown equal preference, none of this would have happened. But let us slow down. If there’s one infinite and renewable resource in this world, it’s God’s love. There’s more than enough of God’s “regard” to go around. But as one birth precedes another, so God’s love is spread around according to God’s own inscrutable purposes. This, like the story before it, is a story of trust; trust between God and God’s creatures, and trust between the creatures themselves. God warns Cain against the threat of sin lurking at his door. God responds to the spilling of Abel’s blood with an inquiry and a verdict. God provides Cain a mark of protection as he is sent on his wandering way, a mark that he doesn’t deserve but that grows out of the gracious and merciful “regard” of the Lord. Injustice (including murder!) is not necessarily a mark of the human community according to this story. But it can grow out of rivalries around power and property and wealth. Every human family knows these stories, and thus every human family must be on guard.

Anger

Most of the time I hear this passage preached, it’s on the theme of being our brother’s and our sister’s “keepers” (v. 9). Yes, in this deeply interconnected and mutually dependent world, we are one another’s keepers if this human family is to not only survive but thrive. The justice we meet in God’s character is one of covenant-keeping loyalty, to those both in and outside one’s tribe.

However, Cain’s query about “keeping” is simply a way of covering over a crime already committed. How did one of the very first brothers become the world’s first murderer? Through anger/jealousy/rivalry. James later talks about the fruit of envy and selfish ambition: “You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder” (James 4:2). If Genesis 4 is an etiology of sin, what origin does it offer?

For discussion:

Do you think the sin of envy can be “mastered” (v. 7)? 

 

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