Children have an innate sense of fairness. I remember watching a set-up in which a friendly adult presents a small child with one of those translucent suckers that the doctor used to give kids after they had been given a shot. The child smiles broadly. To another child standing on the other side, the adult presents one of those large, multi-colored lollipops about the size of a dinner plate. The first child’s smile quickly fades. The child knows that, somehow, “This is not fair!”
The accusation belongs on the lips of Cain. Cain was not inherently evil. You remember the story from the opening pages of Genesis. It was Cain who “invented” religion: he invented sacrifi ce. Cain was the first to engage the Divine Presence. Perhaps he said, “God has been so good to me, I will show my thanksgiving.” Or, “Surely it is God who blesses my harvest by sending the soft rain and the warm sunshine. I will offer a sacrifice showing that it is upon God that I depend.” In addition, Cain’s religion set an example for his younger brother, Abel. Abel, too, then offered a sacrifice. The Lord had regard for Abel’s offering, but not for Cain’s. The Bible doesn’t say why. It doesn’t seem fair. “So Cain was very angry.”
But God pays attention to Cain’s troubled state of mind and says to him, “You know, Cain, you have a choice about how you will handle this.” That’s what God said. “If you do well—if you love your brother regardless of how life treats you, this is acceptable. But if you do not, sin is crouching at the door; its desire is for you, but you can choose to master it.”
Cain chose otherwise. “Cain rose up against his brother, Abel, and killed him.” The terribleness of Cain’s sin lies in the fact that it does not catch him in a condition of separation from God, but precisely at the point where he lifts his hands to God! So God tells Cain that now the ground is cursed to him and will no longer yield and that he will be a wanderer on the earth.
Cain cries: “My punishment is greater than I can bear. I shall be hidden from your face. Anyone who meets me may kill me.” However, Cain is not altogether forsaken in the land of Nod (wandering). Even now God throws a circle of protection around him and puts upon him a sign, “the mark of Cain.” Even the guilt-laden person remains God’s property!
The first murderer goes “away from the presence of the Lord.” That he still is not abandoned by God but lives expressly in a protective relationship is the most mysterious part of the story; and one may well ask, “Is this fair?”
Gerhard Van Rad, in his commentary on Genesis, shares this anecdote: In centuries past, the judge who had condemned a murderer to death would partake of the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper with him before his execution. By doing this he was saying to him, “You poor, lost sinner, whom we are about to put to death, are nevertheless something totally different from what we human beings see in you. You are not merely one who has been branded with the curse of society; you are still a part of another, invisible order that can grant you a grace and pardon over which we human beings have no control. You bear the mysterious mark of Cain that makes you the property of Another.”
Sometimes life is not fair, but we can choose to master the fact. Sometimes it seems God is not fair, but perhaps that is our salvation.
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