Cain and Abel, and the Value of Human Life

I gave this talk at the Independence Day Oratory Program in Claremont in 1998.

“Am I my brother’s keeper?”  This is the age-old question that Cain asks God when God confronts him with the murder of his brother (Genesis 4:9).  Is this question still relevant today?  For us it goes hand in hand with another question, the one that the scribe cynically asked Jesus, and brought forth His parable of the Good Samaritan: “Who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:29)  Or in this case, “Who is my brother—or sister?”

The point of my talk this morning is this: all human life is sacred—or none is.  I would like to reflect for a few minutes on the archetypal story of the value of human life—the drama of Cain and Abel at the beginning of the Bible in chapter 4 of Genesis.

The two brothers represent a conflict of values, age-old land-use disputes.  The farmer versus the shepherd or the herder; the settled versus the nomad.  They are incompatible, and each side poses a serious threat to the livelihood of the other.  The grazing animals destroy the crops.  Farming restricts the movements of the herds.  This same dispute caused much conflict in the westward development of our own country as well—and provided the theme for lots of cowboy movies.

As so often the case in subsequent history, the conflict leads to violence and bloodshed.  God had warned Cain about this, and His words are very interesting: “Sin is a demon lurking . . his urge is toward you, yet you can be his master” (verses 6-7)  In other words, sin keeps after us, and once yielded to, it’s always easier the next time.  The slope towards habit or compromise, once the priorities or values are relativised, is a slippery one.

This is why it is so important to uphold a consistent life ethic, the “seamless garment” of life issues, that the US Catholic bishops articulated, under the leadership of the late (and great) Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, and Pope John Paul II has unfolded at length in his 1996 encyclical letter entitled “The Gospel of Life.”

Human life is an absolute value, and cannot be subordinated to any other value.  Whenever a choice among values must be made, and one of them is human life, the choice must be made in favor of human life.

Life-issues are related to each other as the strands that together form a woven fabric.  When human life is relativised in any one area, it becomes easier to do it in another.  A climate favoring abortion as simply a matter of choice, in which a new human individual not yet capable of survival outside the womb is arbitrarily declared not to be human, is not far distant from a climate favoring capital punishment in which it is supposed that the intrinsic dignity of human life is subject to the judgment of personal guilt or innocence.  And both are related to the climate that increasingly favors euthanasia.  In both cases, human life is no longer held as an absolute value, but is subjected to other values, ultimately subjected to the unwillingness of our society to handle the problems of inconvenient (or dangerous or painful) life in a way other than by doing away with it.

I do not mean to make light of the serious problems that occasion an attitude favoring abortion or capital punishment, or even euthanasia,  as a solution.  All I am saying is that the dignity of our God-given shared humanity, demands that we use our intelligence to collaborate in finding and employing solutions that respect the value of all life.  This is not merely my opinion; this is the consistent teaching of the Church’s magisterium.

One final note on capital punishment.  The story of Cain and Abel ends with Cain being severely and rightly punished by God for his deed—but protected from being killed for it.  In this story, God is clearly denying the legitimacy of “taking a life for a life.”  In some ways the real punishment is harsher.  It’s the deprivation of the goals that the murderer was seeking to accomplish by his deed.  The very earth on which his livelihood depended turned against him, and he had to give up the life of a settled farmer to become a wandering nomad.  But, anyone who killed him because of his guilt would be avenged by God sevenfold.  If that’s not a clear indication of how God feels about capital punishment, I don’t know what is!

Can we as a society recover a respect for the absolute value of human life, and put it into practice consistently?  Or are we doomed to continue to make compromises—compromises of both the so-called “right” and the so-called “left”—until the value of human life is completely subjected to the relativity of greed and expediency?  Or perhaps, are we already there?