Adam Raised a Cain
November 04, 2013
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Genesis 4: 8
‘Now Cain said to his brother Abel, “Let’s go out into the field.” And while they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him.
What is it that motivates such base instincts in the human person? What is it that takes us to the heart of darkness in ourselves? Why such evil abroad, that brings enmity, brother against brother, the jealous and rejected heart, that leads to an over-spilling anger? Where is the imago dei in the clenched fist? And so the pattern is established, and the Mark of Cain begins its long and inglorious descent down through the ages. Abel’s blood soaked ground still cries to us of our inhumanity and our own inability to rise above the darkness at the heart of human life. A darkness that taints and distorts. A darkness that seeks vengeance and retribution and for a wrong to be righted in blood. And so enmity between God and man, and man to man, echoes loudly and bitterly across the ages and ‘Rachel can still be heard crying for her children’ (Jeremiah 31, 15) in every sob and whimper that accompanies the heartache and the shock, the horror of another life lost in the enmity at the heart of humanity played out over the continents in every time and age. As Solzehnitsyn reminds us, ‘there is a line at the centre of every human heart between good and evil.’ (The Gulag Archipelago)
Lord God, we feel numb at the shock and awe which encounters each and every action in war. Human hands bringing to pass adarkness so deeply seated in the human heart. Why? For want of a common understanding; for want of an ability to share resource, the human heart taints and distorts truth. It uses it as a weapon to get even and to get ahead, to take and to will to power. It is a distortion of the digestion of the fruit of the tree of good and evil. Yet, God of all good, that is not how your Kingdom was designed to operate or to be established. Remind us that there is a tree of life, and a Kingdom where there will be no more suffering and in which war will come to an end. A Kingdom where brother will once again be united to brother, where love of our enemies, and the enmity at the heart of humanity, will be soaked in the redeeming blood and love of our Saviour. A kingdom in which our shock and awe will be at the mysterium and tremendum which you are, and have gifted to us in grace, in this life, and for the next. Amen.
Padre David Anderson
Chaplain to The Royal Scots Dragoon Guards
Padre David Anderson is currently serving in Kabul on Op Herrick 19. He has taken a series of well-known verses or passages from across scripture which expose and express our human nature in response to war and our hope for something better, God’s peace.
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