Cain, Abel, and Us

Passage: 1 John 3:11-15

In his ongoing discourse on love, John brings up the old story of Cain and Abel.  It’s the story of the first siblings.  It’s also the story of the first murder.

In the story, Abel the shepherd offers God the gift of his best sheep.  God is delighted.  Cain sees God’s delight and, thinking he’d like some too, goes to his garden.  He picks some of the fruit of his own labors, and brings it to God.  He stands back, waiting to bask in the praise he has coming.  It doesn’t come.  Cain’s surprise is replaced with disappointment, then rage.  Abel becomes a constant reminder of the prize Cain wasn’t given.  Cain has to erase the reminder. 

John says that God rejected Cain’s offering because Cain “belonged to the evil one.”  Cain in turn murdered his brother because “his deeds were evil.”  It’s too simple an explanation.  Could it be that murder comes not from a wicked heart, but a broken heart?

What are the places in our own hearts that give birth to murder?  The desire to see a celebrated sibling fall from grace?  Or a successful colleague slip?  Where does that instinct to verbally dress down a neighbor or friend or fellow churchgoer come from, if not the same place in our hearts that harbors our own deep senses of inadequacy and failure?  And what good can come of actions that are driven by a sense of inadequacy? 

Cain’s offering came up short not because Cain didn’t produce good fruit.  But because Cain used it to try to pull himself up in God’s eyes.  Cain never got the truth Abel believed out of hand: God loves his children equally.  God’s love comes to us not as a condition of a contract, our half of which is hard work and stellar performance.  God just loves us.  And no amount of performance can improve upon it.  Cain used his offering to get something that was already his.  His fatal error was failing to believe it in the first place – doubting that which God offered freely. 

God gives us his best.  And this is what enables us to be our best.  Ironically, when we’re convinced of the truth of God’s love, we don’t need to be better than we really are.  We certainly don’t need to be better than our siblings.  We can love – wholeheartedly and unreservedly – because we’ve been filled to overflowing with the love of God the Father.  

Love One Another

The Letters of John revolve around a simple command: Love One Another.  It’s not John’s command.  It’s something John heard from his dearest friend right before that friend died a horrible death in John’s place.

“Love one another” is something Jesus says at the last supper.  Jesus and his disciples sit around a table enjoying Passover, the feast commemorating the miraculous way God spares his people from certain death.  At a certain point in the meal Jesus sets down his napkin and says,

A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.  By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.  (John 13:34, 35)

Have the disciples even registered Jesus’ words?  Peter says immediately, “Lord, where are you going?”  This is because Jesus prefaced the command – the center of the Christian life and, it turns out, the center of the entire universe – with a statement that seems, in the moment, more pressing:

My children, I will be with you only a little longer. You will look for me, and just as I told the Jews, so I tell you now: Where I am going, you cannot come.

Jesus and Peter have this exchange:

Jesus: Where I am going, you cannot follow now, but you will follow later.”

Peter: Lord, why can’t I follow you now? I will lay down my life for you.

Jesus: Will you really lay down your life for me? Very truly I tell you, before the rooster crows, you will disown me three times!

And here we get to the heart of Jesus’ command.  A simple, impossible command: Love one another.  For us, love is a feeling.  Deep affection.  All-consuming passion.  All too fleeting.  For Jesus, love is an eternal commitment to the giving up of his very life. 

Peter declares, in the moment, that he would give up his life for the object of his affection.  How many minutes has it taken for him to forget that it was Jesus, not Peter who stripped to the waist and washed the waste of the day off his friends’ feet?  How many more will it take for Peter’s all-consuming passion for Jesus to be replaced with an all-consuming passion for his own security?  Love is not a feeling.

Decades later John – the beloved disciple of Jesus – recalls this exchange as the words and actions of Jesus coalesce for him on the page.  Love is not a feeling.  It’s a force.  It’s the force through which the universe was made. 

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life.  The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. (1 John 1:1-2)

That force took on flesh, and in the flesh spoke and showed and served up love in dimensions not seen since the beginning.  And through him a way was made – a way out of life in two dimensions into three; out of life in black and white into life in vibrant Technicolor.  Life as it was always meant to be lived.  Love.

So John, a lifetime later, repeats the command that was almost forgotten.  A command so old it predates human existence.  A command so new it undoes the current world order and ushers in a new one:

Dear friends, I am not writing you a new command but an old one, which you have had since the beginning. This old command is the message you have heard.  Yet I am writing you a new command; its truth is seen in him and in you, because the darkness is passing and the true light is already shining. (1 John 2:7-8)

Love one another.  As I have loved you – laying aside my pride to meet your basest needs; laying down my life to preserve yours – so shall you love one another.

This isn’t a marching order.  It’s an invitation.  We respond like Peter because we’re afraid of what we stand to lose.  Jesus knows what we stand to gain.  Trust him.  Trust that your act of (and your active) self-sacrifice will change someone else’s life; your life; and the world.  Love one another.