Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

Our Office Reading from Genesis today is a doozy, in part because there’s so much packed into it: the conclusion of the Cain narrative, a coda to the conclusion of the Cain narrative, and, in between, a genealogical snippet that serves to re-enforce the Cain narrative. And each of these parts is densely packed with intriguing goodies and information. There’s not much time to get into all of it, but I do want to touch on a couple things.

As many of you know, I tend to be (highly) sympathetic to Rene Girard’s mimetic theory, an anthropological theory that suggests that we always desire according to the desire of another (parent, friend, mentor, community, etc.) such that the question regarding desire is rarely ever, “what do I want?” but “what is desiring in me?” or “what desire is working itself out in me, and to whom /what does it really belong?” Mimetic theory especially addresses itself to how crises of desire (and cycles of these crises) set up the social mechanism by which violence is used to resolve these crises. This mechanism is called the “scapegoating mechanism”: desire-funded tension between people or groups of people produces violence that usually falls on the head of an outsider / innocent victim (or group of victims) who are then either destroyed or banished in order to resolve the tension; the violence is then praised as justified as holy or explained away as something-other-than-real-violence by the people / communities that profit from the (temporary) “peace” that the violence appears to produce or guarantee. (In part at least, this is the process Jesus is referring to when he says that Satan cannot cast out Satan.)

A mimetic view of the fall in the Garden of Eden sees the human encounter with the snake as a way of talking about the setting-into-motion of this mechanism…and it sees Cain’s slaying of Abel as a re-telling of the fall story in clearer terms: it’s a narrative image of our ongoing fallen-ness, if not itself the unvarnished source of that fallen-ness. From this perspective, that Cain builds the first city and that his children are the inventors of agriculture, art and industry, is a way of talking about how violence and death will subsequently shape, inform and infect all aspects of human culture, civilization, and development both corporate and individual, including those aspects we highly value and esteem. As if to put a fine point on all of this, the upshot of the Cain narrative cycle is this: “At that time, people began to invoke the Name of the Lord,” which is to say, religion is invented (Gen xvii,26).

The word religion comes from the Latin re- (again) + ligare (to bind), suggesting a number of things, but chiefly the longing to restore the broken bonds of relationship with God and all of creation and secondarily the binding of religious sacrifice. To engage in a religious discipline or practice is a tacit acknowledgement that relationship has been broken and continues to be impaired, as well as an explicit hope that that brokenness and impairment can be mended, in part through some ritual activity or pattern of ritual activity. And, it behooves us, if only for the sake of honesty, to recognize that very often our religious structures can paradoxically perpetuate that brokenness we desire to mend by funding, giving cover for, or contributing to scapegoating mechanisms.

As part of my personal rule of prayer, I’m saying the 1662 Book of Common Prayer Office from a recent reprint of a heavily illustrated 19th century copy of the BCP. In the Daily Office section of the book, the marginal illustrations depict three images: the central image is from the life of Christ, and the images above and below it are from related images in the Hebrew Scriptures. And above the image of Christ being nailed to the cross is the image of Tubal-Cain, honing his smithing skills by making: nails. It seems, sometimes, that whatever we do, however good our intentions, we still wind up nailing Christ to the cross. This, indeed, is the fall. But the gloriously inexplicable Good News is that Jesus Christ rose again from the dead, with healing and forgiveness in his wings, not violence and death! The relationship we long to repair but cannot, Jesus repairs it and puts an end in his very flesh and blood to the scapegoating mechanisms that plague us. This is why we speak of our participation in the life of God as adoption into the family of God and membership in the Body of Christ: because we can’t fix our brokenness on our own, but in Jesus Christ, by God’s very grace made flesh, we are healed. This is one of the glories of Christianity: that it acknowledges that God is the binder, the restorer, the healer, not us; that a person, Jesus, is the pattern of our redemption and he has fully, perfectly and sufficiently accomplished all that needs accomplishing. Our religion, then, is not so much a seeking to repair what we cannot mend, nor a seeking to do what is impossible for us, but a relaxing into the reality of the love and grace of God by which all is healed, through which all is reconnected, by which death and its machinery is dismantled and conquered...and the impossible not only rendered possible, but finished and done.

Dear Friend, my prayer for us today is that we allow ourselves to be alive to the grace of God working in and around us, restoring all things, making all things new!

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+