I often ponder and wonder why a friend should kill “a very close friend”; why a brother should kill a brother and why a sister should kill a sister. I have reflected on the gospels especially Matthew 10, 22 that a “Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child; children will rebel against their parents and have them put to death.”
I have loved literature from childhood and I have tried to see if I can find the answers there. All I have seen points to the human pride to subject others under his or her ego. William Shakespeare also battled with a similar problem of the ambitious nature of the human person in his dramas of Macbeth and Julius Caesar.
Macbeth killed King Duncan to fulfill the prediction of the three witches that he would be king while the incumbent king was still on the throne. Lady Macbeth who wanted to be a First Lady and Queen at all cost persuaded her husband to commit the horrible crime thereby staining their hands with human blood. Act 2, Scene 2 of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth captures the repercussion of this evil in a moving dialogue:
Macbeth: I thought I heard a voice cry. “Sleep no more! Macbeth has murdered sleep.”
Lady Macbeth: What do you mean?
Macbeth: Still it cried, “Sleep no more!” to the entire house. “Glamis has murdered sleep, and therefore Cawdor shall sleep no more! Macbeth shall sleep no more.”
Lady Macbeth could not sustain her braveness and her whim to conceal the guilt in Act 5, Scene 1. She confronted her guilt in the depth of her being and was tormented in her conscience. In her mental agony, she cried in her sleep, “Here’s the smell of the blood still. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand!” The doctor who was attending to her said, “This disease is beyond my practice.”
On March 15 (the Ides of March), 44 BC, Caesar was attacked by a group of senators. He was able to resist until when his best friend Brutus stabbed him. He resigned himself to his fate with the cry of anguish, “Et tu, Brute?” That is, “Even you, Brutus?” In both dramas, Shakespeare has demonstrated the truth that love and friendship can be sacrificed by some people who have made power and position their idol.
In Genesis 1-11, the inspired author delved into this urge of the human person in a cultic/religious context. The first murder that portrays the emergence of evil became a gate way for the philosophical question about a good God permitting evil in his name. This question re-echoes throughout the bible.
The story of Cain and Abel is a symbolic explanation of the inclination of the human person to kill for a selfish reason(s) and then impute the motive for killing on religion. I do not know the sense we can make of a situation where some one is killing another human being created by God either with physical weapons or psychological weapons and claims he or she is doing so in God’s name and at the same time chorusing “God is great”. You can imagine the energy some “power famished dictators” exert on seizing power from a legitimately elected person who is really called by God to serve the people and is doing his or her job well. Why are the righteous leaders who serve the good of all including the common people targets of some “malicious vultures”?
Cain and Abel in Hebrew are Qayin and Hevel. They are referred to as the sons of Adam, in the Qur’an. In the narrative of Genesis 4:1-16, Cain presented some of the land’s produce as an offering to the Lord. Abel also presented an offering of the firstborn of his flock and their fat portions. The Lord accepted the offering of Abel who was a cheerful giver and rejected that of Cain who offered the worst produce of his farm. Cain was furious, and he was downcast.
Then the Lord said to Cain, “Why are you furious? And why are you downcast? If you do right, won’t you be accepted? Instead of Cain to take the advice from God by making a better offering, he tricked his brother, saying, “Let’s go out to the field.” And while they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him. God reacted and asked Cain, “Where is Abel your brother?” Cain replied, “I do not know: Am I my brother’s keeper?”
God said to Cain, “What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground! So now you are cursed from the earth, which has opened her mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you farm, the ground shall not yield good crops to you! You shall be a fugitive and a vagabond on the earth!
If Cain desired to kill Abel for a cultic/religious reason, common sense would attain the fact that it would have been easier for Cain to look for another item or better alternative to sacrifice in order to win God’s favour than to kill his own brother. Perhaps the rotten yam offered by Cain represented his rotten mind and fatal envy.
In Cain, a curse is placed on whoever kills an innocent person for egoistic reason(s). People with guilt do not find rest when they sleep and when they die. A warring community can not expect good development and progress for a sustainable length of time.
Today, we see so much rivalry intra/inter many religious groups. The fight to become the head in a church and in a mosque is no longer news. A nun once recommended that to do a good job in inter-religious dialogue, the adherents of the various religions should first do a proper intra-religious dialogue so that they can live in peace and harmony within their religious community before inviting others to share in their intra community peace. You can only give what you have. You cannot offer the peace that does not exist in your community to others. This is the central idea behind ecumenism.
This suggestion is relevant today more than ever before given that we now live in an era when “parasites of power” and “seekers of prestigious positions” are making religion a serious object of ridicule. The story of Cain and Abel is an analysis of what is happening in the world today. There is nothing wrong with religion; it is some people who claim to dwell in the cult of God and claim to understand the mind of God better than anyone else that need transformation and a change of attitude. Can’t we really get along as brothers and sisters? Wherever brothers and sisters dwell in unity there is peace, love and joy. Then we can really understand that God is good and God is great!
Fr. Prof. Omonokhua is the Director of Mission and Dialogue of the Catholic Secretariat of Nigeria, Abuja and Consultor of the Commission for Religious Relations with Muslims (C.R.R.M), Vatican City
