Heroes and Villains: God the Merciful and Lamech the Arrogant

Genesis 4:1-16; Genesis 5:17-26 

July 6^th/7^th2019 

St. Mark Presbyterian Church 

D. Mark Davis 

We’ve probably all heard the story of Cain and Abel. There’s just so much about the story that is captivating, including the fact that it is the first of many stories of violence in the Scriptures. I want to say from the start that the story simply doesn’t work if someone tries to read it from a literalist’s point of view. The questions are simply too many: If Adam, Eve, Cain and Abel were the only living persons on the earth, who did Cain marry? Who are the people that might take vengeance out on Cain as he wanders the earth? If it were only Adam and Eve in the world who might do such a thing, God could have simply gathered them and said, “Hey, Adam and Eve, don’t take vengeance on Cain.” Problem solved. So, on the face of it, this is not a story that works literally and that was just as obvious to the communities telling and writing the story as it is to you and me. When a story is so evidently not literally possible, that is the storyteller’s way of inviting us to hear it otherwise. 

And so, this story opens up a lot of possibilities: 

- We could be reading about an ongoing cultural struggle between agricultural and livestock communities. Those two types of farming communities have often been at odds with each other, particularly in times of land or water scarcity. 

- This story could reflect an ongoing struggle between rural and urban people. Cain goes away and he and his descendants establish cities. If you are an nomadic or rural people, constantly being harassed by city folk – who can stash arms or send out raiding parties or simply bully you away from their own lands – then it would make sense that you see cities as an offshoot of an act of violence. 

- Many early writers reflected the complexity of Cain’s personality and saw him either as an unredeemable murderer or as a repentant sinner. Often Jewish writer who would see him as repentant and Christian writers would see him as irredeemable – let that tendency trouble your minds for a second. 

- Augustine made a typological com­parison between the evil Cain and the Jews. The story seemed to provide an argument that Jews were guilty of killing Jesus and yet should be allowed to exist. 

– And the story introduces something without really spelling out what it is: The “Mark of Cain.” Was it a protective mark or a curse? Some people saw the mark as a physical sign, often depicted as a mark on Cain’s forehead or cheek. Some people have interpreted it racially – although since they were literalists they had to fast-forward to Noah’s son “Ham” who was cursed and re-do their racist argument. 

As you can see, there’s a long history of this story that goes far beyond what most of us have been taught about it – that is, as some kind of sibling rivalry gone extreme. I want to place the story into a different kind of context for us by continuing it with the rest of Cain’s story, making it a less familiar story about true justice. 

The story of Cain reads very much like a scene from an episode of “Law and Order.” Cain murders his brother out of jealous rage and imagines that he can get away with it. When Abel goes missing and he is confronted by God with the question, “Where is your brother?” Cain tries to push away the inquiry by asking, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Ah, but unbeknownst to Cain, there is an evidentiary witness: The dead Abel’s blood, which God says, “Is crying out to me from the ground!” So Cain’s alibi is destroyed and he is guilty and given a punishment that fits the crime: “And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you till the ground, it will no longer yield to you its strength; you will be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth.” (In some ways, this may be a commentary about agricultural v. nomadic peoples). Now Cain pleads to the judge for mercy, arguing that the punishment is too severe because he will be liable to others taking vengeance on him. And so God puts Cain into a “Convict Protection Program,” and mingles mercy with justice. God does this by placing a mark on Cain that will protect him with the threat that anyone who exacts vengeance on Cain will themselves suffer a sevenfold vengeance. 

There is no accident in how God is depicted in this story. The actions are very similar to the earlier story of Adam and Eve disobeying God, God asking them questions, they try to push the blame elsewhere, and then they are convicted, punished by the toil of working the ground and childbirth, and finally being evicted from the Garden of Eden. But, here too God mingles mercy with justice by clothing them and, by driving them from the garden, ensuring that they would not eat from the Tree of Life and live forever in their fallen state. I don’t understand everything that is at play here, but it is clear that the eviction is both a punishment and a display of mercy. 

That is who God is and how God executes justice in these stories. For that reason, I invite you to see God as a “Hero” in this story, because even when God is executing justice, God enables the convicted to have a way of making a life with hope.Justice without mercy is vengeance. Mercy without justice is permissiveness. In God’s actions, when justice and mercy are together they fulfill each other. 

So, what would a villain look like in this world where justice needs mercy and mercy needs justice? That’s what the second part of the story of Cain is all about – the part that none of us ever reads in Sunday School. It is the story of Cain’s descendants, particularly the villain called Lamech. [Read Genesis 4:17-26].  

Here’s the particularly devious part of Lamech’s evil: He sounds almost just like God. He uses God’s formula, God’s method, God’s words and amplifies them. But, in doing so, he turns God’s mercy upside-down and makes it a claim of sheer arrogance. Do you see that? This may be the most insightful commentary in all of the Scriptures about what happens when a quest for power takes God’s words in vain. They sound “goddy” enough. They seem to reflect the same sort of principle. It feels religious. But it is nothing but Lamech’s arrogance. And that, the story concludes, is when people began to invoke the name of the Lord. Ho. Ly. Smokes. 

So, what value is there in reading this story, not just as the “Cain and Abel, brother kills brother and gets caught and punished” story, but as the “Cain and his descendants” story, a story of God’s heroism and Lamech’s arrogance? Frankly, the “Cain and Abel” story that we all have heard over and over is just another episode of “Law and Order,” where in the end justice is making sure that the bad guys get punished. If we read it as a “Hero and Villain” story, with God as the hero and Lamech as the villain, it forces us to reckon with who we are, both legally and religiously. 

Did you know that over 2,200 juveniles in our country – people age 17 and under – have been sentenced to life in prison without parole. Dozens of them are as young as 13 or 14. Most of those sentences were mandatory, because of legislation that has been passed forbidding the court to consider a person’s age or life history. Some were charged with crimes that did not involve homicide. In other words, it was a crime like the “young man” of Lamech’s story, who struck and injured him. Many of these teenagers lacked legal representation, and in most cases the propriety of their cases and sentences have never been reviewed. And, of course, a large majority of them are children of color. In 2009, the U.S. Supreme Court curtailed the practice somewhat, ruling that sentencing a juvenile offender to life in prison without parole for a non-homicidal crimewas a violation of the 8^thAmendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. But a crime like Cain’s, which was a homicide, has no necessary provision for mercy. 

If we read this story as a “Hero and Villain” story, with God as the hero and Lamech as the Villain, we are able to see how someone can use the pretense of honoring God, using God’s own words, amplifying them even, as nothing more than a religious legitimation for an act of arrogance. The test is whether justice that we tout in the name of God is mingled with mercy, not how loudly or strongly we insist on our religious validation. Do we hear that? As a story of God the Hero and Lamech the Villain, this story raises the question of whether we genuinely want to imitate God or whether we are satisfied with sounding somewhat god-like as we pursue our own ends. 

We’ve all heard the story of Cain and Abel growing up, where Abel is the innocent victim and Cain is the heinous murderer. But few of us have heard the story as a whole, where God is the hero for tempering justice with mercy; and Lamech is the villain, because he dares to execute justice without mercy and to do so in the name of God. When we hear this story this way, it calls us to a live dedicated to keeping justice and mercy forever united. Thanks be to God. Amen.