The Folds of Our Minds

In Genesis 4 Lamech tells his wives, “If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy and sevenfold” (4:24, KJV.)  (We are probably reminded of how Jesus in Matthew 18 requires us to forgive others “seventy times seven,” drawing out the math still further in favor of us doing the right rather than the wrong.)  While Lamech’s attitude is disturbing, it is worth noting that God is the first, according to the narrative, to introduce the element of imbalance; by divine decree, Cain is to be avenged sevenfold—though how that might be brought about is left unsaid.  Later in the Old Testament, the notions abroad are such that one would assume vengeance would be taken against the family of Cain’s killer, but there are also Old Testament opinions that justice should be meted out only on the guilty.

I would like here to offer the notion that the cause-and-effect thinking in Jesus’ teachings and in Genesis does not square with any dispassionate calculations of proportionality.  Contrary to any assumptions we might bring, the notions of cause and effect are not characterized by proportionality, but rather by cascades of multiples.  Bad things done do not cause directly proportionate harm, and good things done do not bring about proportionate benefit.  In the Parable of the Sower, it is said that the seed that fell on good soil “bare fruit an hundredfold” (Luke 8:8).

It does not matter how logical we want to be.  The idea of a bad deed bearing evil fruit “an hundredfold” might be illustrated by a nasty and unseemly argument held between two people in the presence of four others or in the presence of four hundred.  In the latter case a hundred times more onlookers might be negatively affected, and no sense of proportionality can dampen that effect.  Surely in the latter case the people affected could not all be as close nearby as only four might be—but that does not mean that they might be any less disturbed by it all.  We might argue that the tendency for the situation to be personally disturbing to each and every onlooker is quite proportionate and unsurprising in all human individuals—with the overheard argument being merely a catalyst—but such analysis can scarcely be expected to change our human perception that the argument in front of four hundred people—in and of itself—has borne evil fruit to that extent.

Such is the implication in the words we get from Jesus, and we might find their root in God’s decree that Cain would be avenged sevenfold.  Like it or not, that is the world we inhabit; causes do not have proportionate effects—causes of good produce disproportionate good, and causes of evil produce disproportionate evil.  Things spill about in our messy world.  This might not be logical, and we might refuse to subscribe to it, but that is not pertinent to the point I am trying to make here.  Jesus acted and spoke as though disproportion is the way of the world, and there is little logic in attempting to analyze his teachings otherwise.