The Power of Blessing
By Charles Rush
February 26, 2006
Genesis 4: 1-8
[ Audio
(mp3, 3.7Mb) ]
r scripture translation this morning comes from the Schocken Bible, translator Everett Fox:
The human knew Havva, his wife,
She became pregnant and bore Kayin (Cain, which means 'Spear')[i]
She said:
Kaniti/ I-have gotten
A man, as has Lord God.
She continued bearing- his
brother Hevel (Abel which means 'fleeting breath' and
is associated with the abstract concept of futility)[ii]
Now Abel became a shepherd of
flocks, and Cain became a worker of the soil.
It was, after the passing of
days
That Cain brought, from the
fruit of the soil, a gift to Lord God[iii],
As for Abel, he too brought-
from the firstborn of his flock, from their fat-parts.
Lord God had regard for Abel
and his gift,
For Cain and his gift he had
no regard.
Cain became exceedingly upset
and his face fell.
Lord God said to Cain
Why are you so upset? Why has
your face fallen?
Is it not thus:
If you intend good,
bear-it-aloft,
But if you do not intend
good,
At the entrance is sin, a
crouching-demon,
Toward you his lust-
But you can rule over him.
Cain said to Abel his
brother, "Let us go to the field"[iv]
But then it was, when they
were out in the field
That Cain (spear) rose up against Abel (futility) his brother
And he killed him.
Lord God said to Cain
Where is Abel your brother?
He said:
I do not know. Am I the
Shepherd of the Shepherd?[v]
Lord God said:
What have you done?
Your brother's blood cries to
me from the soil!
Which opened up it's mouth to receive your brothers blood from your hand
And now,
Damned be you from the soil,
Which opened up it's mouth to receive your brother's blood from your hand
When you wish to work the
soil
It will not henceforth give
its strength to you.
Wavering and wandering must
you be on earth!
…
Kayin went out from the face of Lord God
And settled
in the land of Nod/Wandering, east of Eden.
This story
asks of us humans some of the fundamental questions that we pose for ourselves.
Why is it that we are so violent and so defined by violence that it seems to be
almost hard wired into the moral fabric of our being? How is that we can be so
loving and kind on the one hand, and so jealous and burning with rage on the
other? Why is it that we have such a hard time finding satisfaction internally
when we start comparing our lives with those people around us?
It has an evocative
power that grand mythopoeic sagas possess. There is
the ominous duplicitous invitation of Cain to his brother, "Come let us go
to the field". You can palpably feel that tension of one brother
internalizing menace and the other naively indifferent to the plot unfolding
before him. And there is God, functioning in one of God's best roles, that of
Rhetorical Conscience- "Where is your Brother?" It is a question that
every single one of us raises internally at some point in our life as we are
all responsible for someone. And Cain's evasive response that deflects
responsibility by changing the subject, a line of defense that has literally
echoed in every generation of children from creation until now, "Am I my
brother's keeper?" There is Lord God's thunderous clarification, probably
best spoken in a tremelos quiet tone, "Your
brother's blood cries to me from the ground." And the
curse of Cain to wander for the rest of his life- so figuratively and literally
the case (from an eternal perspective) when we fundamentally violate our
internal moral code. We hide from ourselves, anxious, nervous, unable to
ultimately be rid of these images that come back to us at the oddest times, the
most inappropriate times, like a curse, the whole of our lives.
I had a colleague
tell me of visiting a man who knew he was near death, asking him if there was
anything he would like to say to him in confidence before the end and after a
long, faltering silence, this upstanding, respectable gentlemen recalled a needless,
wanton felony that he committed in his youth, the graphic image of which he was
never able to rid himself despite the fact he was never a suspect and no one
ever thought for a moment that he would be capable of such an act. He fled from
the scene but the scene never fled from him. Though everyone who knew him saw
him as a pillar of respect and sensibility, internally his whole life had this
dimension of wandering, estranged from himself and from God. Sometimes the
hardest person for us to live with is ourselves.
And there are
a number of questions that we pose to the story itself that the story refuses
to answer. Why did the brothers decide to bring an offering to God in the first
place? God never asks for one.[vi]
How do they
discern that God accepts one of the gifts and not the other? In the ancient
Near East, the nearly universal method, was the
examination of the entrails of the slaughtered animal but we have no indication
that this simple human method was used or whether God somehow communicated to
them?
And why would
God accept one gift and not the other? Does God prefer animals over grains for
some reason? And why wouldn't God just accept the very best of our independent
talents in our respective fields? Or is there already something about the fact
of a division of labor that suggests our essential spiritual harmony has been rended into a permanent state of competition and
aggression?
All these
questions unanswered and interesting in their own right, are superceded by the
wider question of the primordial nature of blessing and curse. The depiction of
God in this Saga is somewhat arbitrary. We are not given the internal reason
that the Almighty accepts one gift and not another, there is no lesson for us
to learn about how to please God, so to speak.
In one sense this
is fitting in a wider sense that is somewhat lost on us today, the sense of awe
and reverence before the Mysterium Tremendum.
When Moses asks God for God's name, an indication of what God is like in
Exodus, God simply responds "I Am Who I Am" or "I will be Who I will be". At a later point, God puts it slightly
differently to Moses saying "I will be gracious to whom I will be
gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy" (Ex. 33:19).[vii]
It is lost on
us today because we are too ready to jump in and remind the Almighty that
arbitrariness is not fair and we need to have the rules properly explained. We
are all too ready to assume the posture of Job calling God to task like first
year prosecutors. As a culture, we too easily presume God's grace towards us, too easily presume that we are in the generally
acceptable category. In the long march of human history, our ancestors were not
so sure of their ability to question the given nature of the world into which
they were born. They were not so sure that God would handle them gently either.
Of course,
there is an important sense in which God must be the final source of justice
and fairness, but I strongly suspect the reason God's actions are not explained in this case
has to do with a fundamental transcendent spiritual issue that we all have from
our childhood and youth, a general sense of blessing or curse.
Most of the
time, we carry this around with us in unspoken fashion until some occasion
arises, sometimes not until the death of elderly parents, when one the siblings
says, "Mom always loved you the best." This line is almost always
delivered with a tinge of resentment, a hint of regret, the faint odor of
self-pity, and a whispered tone of resignation.
It is a funny
thing about these mid-life interpretations of childhood and youth that the
actual events are no longer really accessible to any of the primary players.
Memory and interpretation have so fused in each persons mind that brother and
sisters can have quite dissimilar recollections of the same lived events.
Counselors brought in to adjudicate these conflicts know of the frustration
that this produces and frequently find themselves paying attention more to each persons interpretation and how that functions for
them in the present, rather than trying to sort out who has the more accurate
memory of the past. No, with each passing year, we are increasingly left only
with our interpretations and those are defined in large part by whether or not
we thought ourselves to be lovable, to be accepted, to be blessed and valued.
Whether we got
what we needed or not appears to come to us is one of those things that is usually not ever actually explained. We can't really know
whether we were really not blessed or whether that was just our interpretation of
actions that we filled with our own meaning and intention. Like God's blessing
and lack of blessing, it is just there.
And our
question for ourselves, like Cain's question, is what are we going to do about
it? God warns Cain that sin couches like a demon at the soul of his heart. Paul
Tillich used to say that anxiety we feel, in the case
of Cain, that he is not going to be blessed, is the precondition for sin. It
disposes towards a morally vulnerable context.
For the
majority of us, our subliminal reaction to a lack of blessing is subtle even if
a powerful motivator. If we are relatively well adjusted and
from stable surroundings, it comes up for us as something to compensate for.
It becomes a motivator for success that we might prove to other and to ourselves
that we are not only worthy, but that perhaps others should have recognized
this more fully, earlier than they did. At any rate, our motivation is that
once we have a certain career success, a certain economic prosperity, a certain
range of power, we presume that internally we will have that sense that we have
earned a blessing for ourselves that we did not get.
In some cases,
more crippling to ourselves, we play out that lack of blessing in scripted
scenarios that have a regularly recurring pattern, even if we do not see it
ourselves for years. We develop ways of undermining ourselves, of setting
ourselves up for failure, so that just when we are on the brink of stasis and
stability, it eludes us again. It is as though we keep acting out to ourselves
and others that we are not worthy. Or we develop unhealthy habits or drug and
alcohol dependencies that keep us from achieving our potential and divert our
attention away from our fundamental spiritual issues so that our actual time is
spent keeping these dependencies running and there is precious little left over
for dealing with these bigger, fundamental issues.
In our saga
Cain kills Abel. In almost a kind of naivete, Cain
lures his brother into the field, and covers him with violence and death. It is
a profound observation that our violence towards each other is symptomatic of
our alienation from God and others. Yet the way that this works out for us is
usually more complicated than Cain's simple and direct approach.
In the movie Legends of the Fall contains more of the
kind of complexity I'm talking about. The movie is about a Father and three
brothers who live in Montana at the early part of the 20th
century.
The father is
emotionally stoical, reserved, strong and domineering as a figure. Is this the
mode he has always been or is this what he became after his wife died way too
young leaving him to raise his sons alone? We are not told. It just is.
When the boys
are grown, the youngest one dies in the trenches of World War One. Loss is
compounded with more loss, tragedy is heaped upon with
tragedy. An undifferentiated anxiety pervades the remaining two brothers and
their father. Now, there are silences are deafening, there are things shared
that are too painful to speak about that make for emotional distance between
them. They grief silently and separately.
The family
itself begins to rend apart. The youngest son, haunted by the anxiety of death,
is desperate for adventure, for romance, for travel. He takes off on a journey,
stays gone for years, occasionally writing a note from somewhere in the Sea of Japan. He is part wanderer like Cain, part
Prodigal Son.
The older
brother, haunted by the anxiety that he is not lovable enough for his Father,
sets out to become a success. He works his way to the top in business, gets
involved in politics and becomes Governor of the State of Montana. But nothing that he does really
brings him any closer to his father. Indeed, they only live about 50 miles
apart but they rarely see one another.
Meanwhile, the
fathers health slowly fades. He is left alone on his
enormous ranch, lonely as that haunting Big Sky that is Montanna.
After years,
the younger son comes home for a visit. He moves back to the ranch with his
father. Eventually, he goes to see his brother. Even though many years have
passed, there is just too much emotional baggage that they have with one
another. They want to speak to each other but they just… can't. It is
complicated miasma of shared loss, guilt, remorse, anger at one another over
poor choices from their youth. Sometimes it is just better to move on and let
the past go. And they do.
Until, the
younger brother gets involved in the crime of bootlegging and accidentally
kills a policeman, setting in motion a man hunt. The older brother hears about
it as Governor of the state. Without having talked to his father in years, the
older brother returns home to try to talk to his younger brother about the man
hunt. When he gets there, three policeman are already
at the ranch to arrest the younger brother and the policemen are obviously
ready to kill the younger brother.
Their father
comes out on the front porch into this tense standoff- the father, his two
sons, three policemen with guns. The father is caught
in a moment. He wants to protect his younger son; he is wistful for a fatherly
love that they haven't shared enough of since they were all grown; and he has a
dangerous abandon having lost any real reason to live. He is capable of doing
anything in that moment.
He pulls a
rifle from under his long jacket to the astonishment of the police officers and
shoots one of them, then another. The third draws a gun to kill the father and
suddenly the police officer is shot and falls to the ground. It was the older
brother, the Governor, who had been packing a pistol the whole time and stepped
in at the critical moment and killed a policemen
rather than let him shoot his father.
The three of
them stand there for a long moment, just listening to the wind across the
prairie. They are reunited again. And it is something like reconciliation but
it is not the real spiritual reconciliation because it was skewed by their
mutual participation in violent crime. And it is something like love but it is
not exactly love because it was skewed by instinctual blood protection. They
just shared a moment of that was something like self-sacrifice, only it wasn't
quite self-sacrifice because it was skewed by the abandon that comes from years
of disappointment unto cynicism.
Now, and this
is the power of what Christian theologians mean when they speak of the Fall,
they had a bond together but it wasn't the bond of fellowship because it was
skewed by the fact that they all had to hide a secret together, the three
corpses that they will all bury together, along with any other incriminating
evidence. They don't love each other in a way that blooms one another, but they
do cover for one another and they lie for each other. It is the inverted fealty
that is, in spiritual fact, the perversion of the love that God intends for us.
Keeping the secrets together is the "Shadow" (the schatten
existenz that Karl Barth
described) of genuine loyalty that the Klan handed down for us before we were
able to know how much we were shaped by it. It is the common participation in a
crime we all have a vested interest in covering that is the shadow legacy of
our extended families from out of the primordial mists.
They all stand
together for a moment in sorrow. It is the closest emotional moment they have
had together for years. It is the most alive they have felt in years. It is the
most love they have felt. And they know that they only way they will escape
punishment is for the younger son to leave forever, so that the authorities
will just assume the policemen were killed by the younger son and eventually
stop looking when they figure out he is off in Asia somewhere. This one moment
of unity and then the rest of their lives sadness and loss, wandering and
separate… until they die and their shared secret dies with them.
It has a
powerful bonding power that is kind of like love… only complicated with
conspiracy, deception, shame, guilt, disrespect. It is a bond but it has a
spiritual and emotional weight to it that you want to be free of. It is a bond
but there is a high cost of distance and self-protective insulation that
isolates.
Real blessing
is the spiritual antidote to this weight. It communicates, like the Father who
runs down the road to meet the Prodigal Son and embraces him, a sense of
fundamental acceptance that moral failure cannot rend. In those who receive it,
real blessing releases weight; it frees them from a self-imposed bondage; it
liberates us from the stifling secrecy that has defined our inner psyches.
Opposite the negative bond that is formed in conspiracy and shame, it is a
positive affirmation that is more meaningful the more public it is. It heals
rather than binds. It inspires rather than controls. It points people towards an multiplicity of outcomes grounded in self-actualization. It
frees.
I should
venture also to add that real Spiritual blessing is grows out of our actual
lived life together. There are events that happen, moments where our loved
ones, our children are particularly open to hearing the life affirming blessing
that we can confer upon them.
Standing in
the back of the church with my daughter just before she was to be married, in
the midst of all the commotion and activity, there was this brief moment where
there was just the two of us. At moments like that grooms and brides are
thinking about what is immediately in front of them and their whole future- at
some level they have to be wondering 'what am I doing?' 'Is this the right
thing?' There is a moment there, a natural moment to bless them. Don't let it
pass by.
There are lots
of lived moments ripe for your blessing: when they are getting ready to leave
the house to go off to college, when they achieve some important skill as a
very young person that gives them real self-confident pride, when they do the
right thing and strengthen their character. With every child, there are lived
opportunities that are unique to them and the challenges that they are born
into. It is important that we bless them that they might know of our
fundamental acceptance and God's fundamental acceptance. It is important that
we remind ourselves and them that we turn again towards God's freedom and light
together, knowing that at the most profound level, we are also unable to
transcend the binding, controlling dimension of human existence that the Fall speaks about. But, we turn towards the light and
towards freedom anyway and ask God to direct us and lead us.
We turn
towards the Christ. Jesus said, "I am the Way, the Truth and the
Life". Jesus said, "You shall know the Truth and the Truth shall set
you free". Jesus said, "I have
come not only that you shall have life but that you shall live it abundantly.
That is what we want ultimately for ourselves and those around us- light, life,
freedom. We want the abundant life that comes from
being blessed and that blesses others. My brothers and sisters,
Choose Life. Amen.
[i]
The translation of this name is cited by Gerhard Von Rad.
I am not aware of any contention regarding the translation, but neither did I
review the literature on it. If Von Rad is correct,
the names are suggestive for the literary flow of the narrative. See Von Rad, Gerhard, Genesis in the Old Testament Library
Series, trans. John Marks (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1966), p. 100
[ii]
ibid. Von Rad
[iii]
I've changed Fox's translation from YHWH to Lord God to reflect the Yahwist tradition which authored this story.
[iv]
This line is not in the original text. I've included it because of it's
familiarity to those following later translations that included it for smoother
literary flow. It also has an ominous foreboding to it that speaks to the
complex duplicity of human motivation.
[v]
This line follows an observation by Von Rad on the
play on the word shepherd.
[vi]
These questions come from Miles, Jack in God A Biography, (New York:Vintage Press, 1996) pps. 39-43. The book is one of the
more creative efforts of biblical scholarship I've read in quite a while.
[vii]
The observation is from Von Rad, p. 101.
© 2006
Charles Rush.
All rights reserved.
