Abel in a World of Death

aaadwAbel in a World of Death

This is where this blog should have both its end and its beginning.  "Roused, Readied, Reaped" is not about life.  Our life is thrust upon us, and such "life" as can be measured in terms of our experiencing, and learning, and preparing ourselves for anything worthwhile is not truly life at all; it is us preparing ourselves for death--or being prepared for it by circumstances beyond our control.

We are thrust ("Roused") through the portal of life, but our "lives" make no sense other than in terms of death.  We can prepare ourselves for death, or we can try to avoid such preparation, but death will come, and with its advance we are confronted in plainest terms with what "life" is.  We can try to see life around us, but really death is all around us--"life" is our striving for a wholesome (or at least personally satisfying) imprint of our wills on our implacable surroundings.

"Roused" is a reality, but it would be futile not to see "Readied" and "Reaped" as the more compatible two-thirds of the title.  Indeed, "Readied" and "Reaped" describe the world of experiences that Jesus attempts to bring to us.  We can try to live modestly and moderately, but still our world is one of scarcity.  We live at the expense of other creatures, and we shower the world with death.

We live at the expense of ourselves, passing up innumerable chances to improve or tame ourselves, and routinely invoking the excuse that we need to "live a little."  And ultimately we must decide whether or not to prepare ourselves for death, a preparation that shades imperceptibly into acceptance of death.  We are not supposed to decide to die, yet it would be ridiculous to suggest that any of us is strong enough to avoid to the very last the capitulation--Jesus-like--of "giving up the ghost."

And so we can come to a conceptualization of Abel as a prophet.  Taken most plainly, he is a man who  brings an acceptable offering to God, and who is killed by his brother, a man enraged that his own offering is not accepted.  Taken even more plainly, Abel killed and offered creatures ("firstlings of his flock") that he was not even permitted to eat, while Cain seems to more humbly and humanely bring "of the fruit of the ground."  And then Abel is killed by Cain.  Upon what basis can Abel be called a prophet?

Abel can only be called a prophet if we remember that Genesis, like all human experience, is not a story of the lives of its characters.  It is a story of death.

Humanity has been dying since Adam was "born," and it is only in light of death that our lives make sense.  Abel killed the creatures that he offered.  He also caused them to breed, presumably, and to thrive, and to graze, and to ingest insects thereby, and to trample other creatures thereby.  Cain scratched and hacked and rent the uncooperative soil, and who knows how many creatures he killed thereby?

Death is all around us, and it is the price of life.  Purposeful sacrifice as described in the Bible is only a tiny splinter in the looming forest of death that has always surrounded us.  Sacrifice was always supposed to be a horrifying thing, and it is telling that many of the most odious characters in the Old Testament gloried in the numbers of their sacrificial victims, when the most solemn of the sacrifices of God's people would consist of single or only a few animals.  It was the death that mattered, not the death toll.

And so Abel--if we are to credit at least a continuity with the traditions that Jesus espouses--was a man who reckoned with death as a part of human existence.  Nothing about Abel's killing of animals makes him necessarily a more distasteful character than farmer Cain, and it can be seen as--at least possibly the case--that he was more mindful of death and suffering than Cain.

What then of Abel's own death?  Jesus describes often enough how his followers will be reviled, ill-treated, and possibly killed--and for what?  Usually, merely doing the right thing is enough to bring about enmity in some sizable contingent of one's fellow human beings.  Do the right things, and you will often frustrate--bring death to--others' plans and dreams.  Do the right things, and you will often threaten the very life of others' self-conceptions.  Do the right things earnestly enough and often enough, and someone may very well decide to kill you.

That is why Abel can be called a prophet, for he lived in a world of death.  We live in a world of death.