Your brother’s blood is crying to me

There is something incredibly moving about the story of Cain and Abel. It belongs to the fall-out from the Fall, the fall from the harmony between our humanity and God and between our humanity and the created order. The fall-out also means division and animosity, envy and murder among ourselves. The story is the beginning of the long, sad story of our inhumanity towards one another.

The questions of God call us to account but only so as to awaken us to self-consciousness and understanding, and thus to the radical meaning of human freedom and dignity, albeit through the forms of negation. “Where is Abel, your  brother?” God asks Cain. Cain lies, “I do not know”, he says, only to add the telling and dismissive rhetorical question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” This leads to God’s further question that echoes his question to Eve in the previous chapter. “What have you done?” Again, it is not that he doesn’t know, rather he wants Cain to acknowledge what he has done and to realize its significance. This comes out in the amazingly heart-felt statement of the Lord: “Your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground”. So simple and yet so profound. God knows and God cares. This underlines the whole meaning of the Creation stories and suggests the profound reciprocity between the Creator and the created as well as the ethical demands that belong to the truth of our humanity as part of that created order, indeed, an essential part.

God’s statement reminds us that our obligations towards one another in the human community belong to our relationship with God. To violate one is to violate the other. This underlies what will become the commandment to love God with the whole of ourselves and to love our neighbour as ourselves. It has come to be known as the Summary of the Law, in the Christian understanding and as building upon the Jewish Shema, the commandment to love God with the whole of one’s being. The story of Cain’s killing of Abel is precisely about the negation of what belongs to the truth of our humanity as made in God’s image. In killing Abel, Cain kills what belongs to his own being and truth. But it cannot be denied and dismissed. It is known by God and God cares because we are made in his image. The dialogue between the Lord and Cain highlights this truth which has been negated by Cain’s action.

In the face of our troubled world of war and destruction, with the mind-numbing number of deaths that come in its wake, this statement by God is particularly compelling. Why? Because it says that God knows and cares, that those who are killed are known and loved in God regardless; their blood cries out to him from the ground. There is no escaping this divine knowledge. Yet the God who knows all the secret desires of our hearts seeks to draw us into his goodness and love. This is the counter to all of the horrors of our hearts and world. It simply recalls us to the truth of ourselves in God which in turn convicts us about our relations with one another, each as made in the image of God, each as known and loved by God.

The point of the questions and statement by God is to awaken us to truth and to love. At the very least, it suggests the beginning of a way to transcend the divisions and hatreds in our hearts and our world. It challenges our thinking and changes our entire outlook. In this sense, the awakening to self-consciousness is also an awakening to ethical responsibility and genuine care for one another. A counter indeed to our culture of death and destruction, of division and animosity.