How do you win favor with someone? This may be a sub-conscious, unconscious, and even sometimes a very conscious question. From a negative standpoint, a conscious version of this question could involve manipulation. As humans, we are prone to competition, which is not a “bad” thing. However, when inflated it can become something very destructive. Unfortunately, many times competition is born out of mis-placing our identity, i.e., Who we are, within the strict confines of what we do, and even more so, what we produce, or how productive we are.
In today’s story from the book of Genesis (Gn 4:1-15, 25), we hear the story of Adam and Eve’s children Cain and Abel. Cain took care of gardening, whereas Abel was in charge of the animals. Offhand there doesn’t appear to be any inherent “inequality” with regards to what these two “do.” When the two of them present offerings to the Lord, Cain bringing “fruit of the soil,” and Abel bringing the firstborn of his flock, we hear that the Lord looked favorably upon Abel’s offering, but on Cain’s he did not. For some unknown reason, there is a preference given with regards to the gifts that the brother’s presented to the Lord. The result of this preference seems to ground the experience that Cain has towards the rejection of his gift over that of his brother Abel’s. This is a way to look at this story of the two “competitive” brothers as the “genesis” of resentment, and the potentially violent outcome when it takes over us completely – we kill each other, just as Cain kills his brother Abel in the story.
I’m not sure that the only take-away from this story is that Abel was good, and produced something better for the Lord, whereas Cain was bad and did not produce something good for the Lord. There’s some psychology going on in this story I believe, and I think it has something to do with the mystery of the “sin” of resentment and the disastrous effects it can have. As the Lord tells Cain, “sin is a demon at the door…yet you can be his master.” Cain’s resentment results in his killing his brother, and then the Lord confronts Cain about this, “Where is your brother Abel?” And then we hear perhaps the most well-remembered line from this story, “I do not know, am I my brother’s keeper?” We hear then how the Lord punishes Cain by making him “banished from the soil…a restless wanderer on the earth.” In this, though, the Lord curiously “marks” Cain in a way that will protect him from being killed so easily by others in his wandering. So Cain, like his parents before him, is moved into further exile, yet with some hope in life.
On one level, the discordant dimensions of this ancient story can contribute to our subscribing to the unfortunate idea of a God who is wrathful and looking for us to favor “him” and in doing so to compete with each other. But what if the story is about precisely how we mistake who we are, resulting in the disastrous effect of mistaking Who God is. Once we go down the road of identifying ourselves by what we do, who others think we are, who we think we are, what we must do to maintain this “thought” self, and even how to manipulate others to accomplish the same, the ego self is in full control. We cannot help but see God as one whom we must please, because we think of our identity strictly in terms of what we do and what we produce. Then the comparisons with others “naturally” occur along with competition and the inevitability of resentment. The ego will never let up, because there’s never a “good enough” when you are trying to “win favor” over and against everyone else. Someone has to get “killed” – but even that is not the end.
What if the story of Cain and Abel is about how we mistakenly think that in order to be “good” or more precisely to be loved, we have to “win” God’s favor, i.e., make God happy with us, and indeed make God love us? This is a total antithesis to the creation story where at every point along the way, we hear how God “…saw that it was good.” It’s the reversal of being created in God’s image and ironically “creating” God in our distorted image of ourselves, whom we see as lacking in being loved by God from the start. In our own self-assessment, fueled by the stubbornness of the ego, we can only “see” God as someone who “judges” us by what we do or do not do. We miss the most significant thing right from the start. We will not “see” that it is good, that we are good, and that all is good exclusively on account of LOVE! The sign of Love is there in creation so to speak, but we miss it, and continue to miss it, competing for a “prize” that has already been given, that we keep trying to take away from each other, many times by killing.
Continuing with the story, as Cain is driven further east of the beautiful Eden that his parents were first exiled, the “hope” that he has is this mysterious “sign” or “mark” that God has given him. This “tattooing” will serve as a “sign” of God’s loving protection of Cain, a mark of being created in love and somehow re-creating or transforming the death-dealing resentment of Cain – the mistaken identity of being loved only insofar as we can “secure” the favor of God – into the mercy of facing life with an undying hope in the Love which cannot forsake. The mysterious “mark” was a tattoo of love and fidelity on God’s part, not Cain’s. Despite what Cain has done, and will do in the future, what will ultimately bring him Life is this “sign” of God’s love. The “mark” is not one of shame, but a sign of God’s presence in this person, who succumbed to the jealousy of resentment and committed murder, and must wander in life, yet still Loved by GOD!
But we fail to see these type of “signs” from God – those that mark us as the Beloved – and instead require God and everyone else to show us something “more” than this. It just doesn’t seem to be enough. We can hear Jesus’ frustration in today’s Gospel (MK 8: 11-13) regarding this very point:
The Pharisees came forward and began to argue with Jesus, seeking from him a sign from heaven to test him. He sighed from the depth of his spirit and said, “Why does this generation seek a sign? Amen, I say to you, no sign will be given to this generation.” Then he left them, got into the boat again, and went off to the other shore.
We, like the Pharisees, refuse to see the REAL thing, Love itself, now in the person of Jesus Christ “visiting” with us, interacting with us in the most intimate manner. Instead we seek something else that our egos “need” – validation based on productivity and favorability – seeking it at all costs to others and ultimately to ourselves. Resentment reigns always when we interpret our lives and the love we can receive strictly within the boundaries of “counting blessings and curses.” When we consider ourselves “blessed” by God only within the framework of “successes” in this life (productivity and favorability), then the unpleasant things that happen to us can only be signs of God’s disfavor with us. We may convince ourselves that it is God granting these “blessings” and “curses,” without considering the possibility that we are trying to cut ourselves off from the pure graciousness of God’s love. This is how we try to conceive of God in our own image, i.e., our ego’s image.
Cain and Abel are both all of us. The mark of “Cain” by God serves to protect Cain from others as much as from himself. We could even call it a mark of “mercy,” that can transform us if we let it, by seeing it in ourselves and in others, i.e., in all creation. The loving mark of a Creator God Whose mercy knows no bounds can, if we allow ourselves to SEE, show us the way beyond resentment and into a world where Christ is the sign and the signified, and right there in front of us all the time waiting to be received and embraced!
Peace
Thomas
The soul is the delicate yet durable cloth woven and laced together in loving pattern by the merciful strokes of God’s Passings…
And the sheen of our soul is the ever-glowing awareness we have of this sacred-stitched fabric.