Bringing your best to God is fine, but it’s not the most important thing.

Yesterday, on Sunday morning, we started our series on Heroes of the Faith. We kicked off that conversation on Abel, the first “hero” on our list. I chose Abel because he’s listed as one of the heroes in Hebrews 11- which references all the “heavy hitters” in this department. But Abel is a different kind of hero than what we will see in future episodes. Abel isn’t a hero because of what he does, necessarily, but because he passes before his time. Abel is sort of the James Dean of the Bible.

Anyway, here’s the part of the story we looked at yesterday.

Now the man knew his wife Eve, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, “I have produced a man with the help of the Lord.” 2Next she bore his brother Abel. Now Abel was a keeper of sheep, and Cain a tiller of the ground. 3In the course of time Cain brought to the Lord an offering of the fruit of the ground, 4and Abel for his part brought of the firstlings of his flock, their fat portions. And the Lord had regard for Abel and his offering, 5but for Cain and his offering he had no regard. So Cain was very angry, and his countenance fell. 6The Lord said to Cain, “Why are you angry, and why has your countenance fallen? 7If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is lurking at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it.”

~ Genesis 4:1-7, NRSV

Along with David and Goliath, the Ark, Moses, and Jonah, this story is a favorite in children’s Sunday school classes. There’s a reason this is a favorite in Sunday school classes: it’s very easy to make it into a simple moral tale that gets children to behave. “Be like Abel, who brings his best for God. Don’t be like Cain, who cuts corners and commits murder.” 

The story, I hope you’ll agree by the end of this, is far more complicated than that. You see, it doesn’t really tell us why God has regard for Abel’s offering and not Cain’s. In Hebrews, it says that Abel brought the “greater” offering. Perhaps it was a larger sacrifice to bring it, perhaps it was of higher quality, we really are not so sure. God’s decision making process isn’t clear to us- and that’s part of what makes this story so complex. 

For His part, God is also confused at Cain’s reaction. Cain was angry and disappointed- and God doesn’t seem to understand the reason for this. To me, this is significant. It tells us something about what has come before. What it tells us is: this whole ordeal with the sacrifices is not as significant as we often think. If the type of sacrifice made was so important then God would be upset with Cain for not bringing “the goods” and God would understand Cain’s anger. But God doesn’t get it. I don’t know this for sure- but I suspect the reason has a lot to do with what comes next. 

God tells Cain, “If you do well, won’t you be accepted?” We tend to read that something like, If you do better, won’t you be accepted? But God has not been upset up until this point in the story. And, God goes on to say that the key thing for Cain is how he reacts to all this moving forward- that there is the possibility that sin will get its hooks in him and that this could mean trouble for Cain. ‘But what we also learn is that, from God’s perspective, sin has not yet happened for Cain. The sin lies in the future- sin is a mere possibility at this point and whether or not it happens is entirely dependent on how Cain deals with his emotions. What this implies, then, is that the sacrifice was not a sin.  The sin is what happens next. 

So I think God’s words here are not about criticism but about reassurance. Something like, “You know you will be accepted, right? But be careful how you react to all this because it looks like you’re going to get yourself in trouble.”

This is key information for us because we tend to read this story like this: Cain brought a bad sacrifice which shows us that he is evil and it makes sense that he murders his brother. 

What I think I see is: God showed favor to Abel over the sacrifice (yet still accepts both) and Cain, in his inability to cope with all this, is corrupted by sin and murders Abel. It’s an entirely different story. It becomes a Greek tragedy- Cain gets banished because he put too much importance on this exchange (we’ll say more about this in a minute).

So there’s a few things we need to explore to really get a feel for what’s going on. 1. Humans have always cared more about sacrifice than God. Yes, there is plenty of talk about sacrifice in the Old Testament. But sacrifice itself is always secondary to the community’s ability to provide care to all members of the community.God makes this clear in Micah 6:8, and it is also something Jesus stresses in the New Testament when he says that if two of God’s people are in conflict with each other then we leave the alter (acts of worship) to go settle differences. 

Jesus also reminds his followers that the Sabbath (day of rest) was made for humans and not the other way around. In other words, we don’t serve the day of rest, the day of rest exists to serve us. This is the same idea. If we prioritize the day of rest as an act of worship above the healing of God’s people (what Jesus was doing in this story) then we have gotten the story backwards: sacrifice is not more important than people. The wellbeing of God’s people has always been more important than acts of worship. This is true in the Old Testament, New Testament, and today. (And let’s me be super clear- there is no such thing as the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament. They are the same God.)

Okay, thing #2: Why does Cain need to kill Abel? Well, here’s my hypothesis. Cain’s problem is that he views God’s love and acceptance as a finite resource. He doesn’t believe there is enough to go around. He has mistaken God’s attitude towards the sacrifice as being the same as God’s attitude towards people. For God, there is a difference. God can regard Abel and his sacrifice and not regard Cain and his sacrifice yet still accept Cain as one of his beloved children.

God’s love and acceptance are not finite resources. They are freely available. But there is some part of us that struggles to grasp this and, instead, lives like Cain, believing that we must compete for God’s love and affection because God must surely only accept a few. We want God’s pleasure and acceptance and we want to be seen as good little boys and girls who bring “the best” things to God because that’s what God likes. 

But this misses the whole point of the story: God was not particularly concerned with the sacrifice and is only upset to find out that Cain has murdered his brother and not come clean about it.  

And so we learn an entirely different lesson, as adults, than what was taught to children. We learn the importance of remembering that God’s love and acceptance are infinite. And it’s so important to learn this because, if we don’t, we end up in an endless competition for His pleasure where we will step all over each other in the hopes that we might become the good little boy or girl who stands out above all the rest. 

The hero in this story didn’t really do anything except the simple job of a farmer and, then, to die before his time. There was no act of greatness except for, perhaps, the refusal to compete for God’s love. 

Now that I think about it- that might be an almost super-human act after all.