Hunter Gatherers of Men

In the Bible’s account of the murder of Abel, a man—to whom was ascribed no wrongdoing—was killed by his brother.  In the New Testament account of the murder of John the Baptist, the victim was attainted with no wrongdoing—and he was killed by a man (“Herod the tetrarch”) who purported to adhere to the same moral code as John.

In each instance, the chief detectable source (one might say “well-spring”) of the animosity of the murderer toward his victim was the fact that the victim’s very comportment served as a reminder of the latent murderer’s failings.  Abel did Cain no wrong, and John did Herod no wrong.  Indeed, Abel and John were merely doing their duties.

It would be presumptuous, however, to claim that Abel or John exhibited extraordinary virtues.  Indeed, there is no cause to assume that those murdered unfortunates could say anything other than (as Jesus might phrase it), “We are but miserable servants.  We have only done our duty.”  Abel and John are hailed as prophets, but it is their highlighting of wrongdoing (no small matter, to be sure) that distinguishes them.

The function of those prophets was to make plain the demands of God.  John’s career, especially, shows the “proclaiming” aspect of the prophets in high relief.  Famously, the Old Testament ends with the promise from the Book of Malachi:

“Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord.”

Equally famously, the gospels wrestle with the notion of the fulfillment of this prophecy in John the Baptist, who answered thus about himself:

“And they asked him, What then?  Art thou Elias?  And he saith, I am not.”

Yet Jesus says of John:

“For all the prophets and the law prophesied until John, And if ye will receive it, this is Elias, which was for to come.  He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.”

The whole notion of the return of Elijah—even of the function of the prophets themselves—is bound up with the experiential aspect of the urgency of God’s commands.  “Experiential” is the key—nothing, for example, about the career of John hinges on whether or not he saw himself as a prophet.  The “prophetic message” is a thing unto itself, not an aspect of a “job description” of a “prophet.”

There is more, however, in the commonalities between Abel and John the Baptist that illustrate the undertakings (and hardships and demands) of the prophetic function.  First, and perhaps most importantly, is the experiential effect of prophecy in a sense of urgency.  Cain, while his sacrifice has not been accepted, is not told by God that he is damned.  God tells Cain that sin is crouched in waiting for him.  John tells the wicked of the Jews that holy wrath awaits them—and that nothing in their status as Abraham’s offspring will avail them in the judgment.  Only the urgency of repentance will save them.

A sense of urgency, however, does not comport well with a sense of being settled.  When Jesus sends the disciples out on their missions, he does not send them out to found churches (or proto-churches) or to appoint local leaders in the towns and villages.  Jesus sends the disciples out to course through the territories as catalysts of experience.  His description of their journey proceeds from the mundane to the apocalyptic.  One moment Jesus is talking about tunics and staffs, the next moment about persecution, the next moment about the impossibility of the disciples completing their mission, the next moment about the end of the age.

All of this folds back into the common human experiences of exhilarating or terrifying change versus the comfort and assurance of settlement.  Abel and John are not settling characters.  Abel especially is enigmatic.  Something about that man and his sacrifice was pleasing to God.  (And let us not entertain any unsubstantiated notions such as certain artists’ desire to portray Abel as a youth set upon by a full-grown elder brother.)  What about Abel’s offering distinguished it from Cain’s?  The commentators have been forced, after all, to note that the Law considered a bloodless sacrifice to be acceptable.  Surely Abel’s role as an animal-slaughterer was not what set him above his brother.

Of course, Abel’s role as an animal-slaughterer is puzzling in itself.  Unless Abel thought up the grisly business of eating his flock—and translated that concept to the God before whom he lay their carcasses and “the fat thereof”, with divine permission to eat animals still in the post-Flood future—it must be thought that God had instructed Abel in his offering, a detail hidden from us.  The commentators have exerted themselves to find some cause by which Abel’s offering was preferred to Cain’s (as though the two brothers might not have both earned sufficient—though differing—“passing grades.”  They were not, after all, in competition with each other.)

Much has been made of Abel offering “of the firstlings of the flock,” but the salient aspect of a sacrifice’s suitability (according to “the Law”) was that it be “without blemish”—an aspect that the Genesis account omits.  Are we to know that Cain’s second-day harvesting of “the fruit of the ground” did not contain the most perfect specimens?  Or that the initial season’s harvest of “the fruit of the ground” was not its “firstlings”?

Really, we have before us in the examples of Abel and John the Baptist two men dressed in the skins of animals (assuming, as seems reasonable, that Abel was attired similarly to his parents.  Here, at least, we might have cause to imagine Abel wearing something that did not die by itself, though we are still left with "the fat thereof” being mere refuse to a vegetarian Abel—scarcely the stuff of sacrifice.)  That is to say, we have Abel and John the Baptist dressed in the skins of mammals while eschewing a diet more sentient than locusts.

What we have before us is two men who have distanced themselves from the more enticing aspects of settled civilization.  I realize that I have worked myself around to one of the favorite themes of secular analysts about the Cain and Abel story—that it is the primordial memory of an ages-long struggle between pastoralists and planters.  What is not usually linked to this school of conjecture is any concerted analysis to the effect that, for the Bible, there is really nothing “primordial” about it.  The pastoralist is not contrasted merely with the planter, but also with the urban civilizations dependent on plant-agriculture.  Indeed, the Bible begins and ends with cities viewed as sinkholes of depravity—a theme that is blunted in its development by the emphasis—for good or ill—on the persistent notions of a righteous “City of David” or some vision of Jerusalem, or on the unsurprising choice of cities as the loci of primitive churches.

Yet we must remember that evil cities (Sodom and Gomorrah, Babylon, even the hapless towns of Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum) are not just “bad apples” in the bin of urbanization.  The gathering of peoples is not the good, in the teachings of Jesus or in the scriptures to which he subscribes, that it is often imagined to be.  The tower of Babel is just the prime example.  Humanity was commanded to multiply and fill the earth, and yet people—so the account relates—wanted to make a great city and also to make a name for themselves.  The “name” part is particularly puzzling—either they saw themselves as inhabiting an earth also “peopled” by other non-human beings, or the “name” is simply a majoritarian voice of a segment of humanity wishing to secure for themselves the benefits of urbanization in distinction to fewer and lesser outlying peoples.  Neither notion, of course, would be deemed acceptable by the narrative.

Nothing about the singularity of the tower of Babel in the narrative precludes the notion that “Babel-ism” in itself defies God’s original decree.  Would one great city on each continent mean that humanity had multiplied and filled the earth?  Would a sprinkling of smaller “great cities” equal a “filling of the earth?”  And would any of this diminishment of size relate necessarily to the desire to—Babel-like—raise humanity with presumption in the face of God?  (“And thou, Capernaum, which are exalted unto heaven, shalt be brought down to hell.”)

And so, as I wrote above, we have Abel and John the Baptist dressed in the skins of mammals while eschewing a diet more sentient than locusts.  What is more, we have a logic of “mission” and of “prophetic ministry” in the teachings of Jesus that—in the all-important experiential sense—drives logically and inescapably toward the “sowing” of Jesus’ followers into the fields of the earth, rather than the “gathering” of his followers into churches.  The fact that Jesus will be present when “two or three” are gathered together in his name is a fact that draws its force from the underlying experiential premise of Jesus’ teachings.  For human beings to meet and interact fruitfully is always a rare occurrence—rare, that is, in comparison to the perpetual din of forced fellowship and of self-reinforcing convenience in thought and manners.

In the episode of Cain and Abel, the blood of the murdered brother might have cried out for vengeance, but the interaction of God and the murderer is not without hope.  God had warned Cain that evil is crouching for him, and God couched that warning—and the corollary of hope—in language that tells Cain that so much as the settled atmosphere of his tent-flap or doorway is a danger to him.  Even the “curse” of the ground refusing to submit to Cain’s tillage could be a blessing to him, as the deprivations of a wilderness life might bring him to repentance.  And Cain’s response?  To take God’s guarantee of personal protection with him as he goes off to build a city.  Inasmuch as the surrounding fields will refuse to grow for Cain personally, well, it does not take much to imagine the development of forced labor and of social stratification.

And then there is John the Baptist, immersing the repentant in the Jordan and sending them on their way.  Or dousing the hypocritical in scorn and sending them on their way.  Or splintering off disciples for Jesus.   And then there is Jesus, splintering and shattering society in virtually every way imaginable.

Family is nothing, until—when the prophetic Elijah-moment arises—it is everything.  Jesus’ mother dwells in the shadows of his life until he must draw her out of the shadows and place her in another’s care.

Friendship is nothing until—when the prophetic Elijah-moment arises—it is everything.  The disciples are sent off to minister to strangers and told not to even salute people on the road.  Then they are told that they must be ever ready to sacrifice their lives for their friends.

Marriage is nothing until—when the prophetic Elijah-moment arises—it is everything.  A spouse is (as is every other person) a source of attachment to the follower of Jesus that threatens ever to blunt the follower’s mission and concentration—until the question becomes the existential one of choosing life individually versus the welfare of the spouse.

Religion is nothing until—when the prophetic Elijah-moment arises—it is everything.  Religious obligation is indistinguishable from social or legal obligations (no matter how tenuous or obscure the relationships of obligation between those realms), until some overriding crisis.  One moment religious obligation is—to cite the example of Jesus’ time and locality—a question of obeying those who occupy Moses’ seat, and the next moment religious obligation is remembering that the earth is God’s footstool.

From the beginning of—and throughout—the story of the world told by Jesus, the emphasis has been on the scattering of his ministry by followers of his willing to trust themselves to the wind (to use Jesus’ John 3 metaphor) of what appears to us to be inscrutable fortune.  All of this is in distinction to the notions of the denominations, which by definition emphasize centrality of thought and the subsuming of real experience to whipped-up ideas about what religion should feel like.  The denominations must distinguish themselves by doctrine, which makes no sense unless what is thought proper to think and feel is contrasted to what is thought improper to think and feel.

In conventional Christianity, the field of mission is a field of hard ground that must be either tilled with hard implements or subjected in its fruits to hard examination—two notions that would not be pernicious in themselves, except that they are founded on the all-too-easy premise that following Jesus can be described in such definite sense as to be accessible and understandable independently of the momentary content of one’s experience-realm.  It cannot.  The guests cannot mourn while the bridegroom is present, the faithful cannot keep the Sabbath at the cost of others’ suffering, and the Messiah that must be David’s son cannot be David’s son—or can he?

Ultimately, the followers of Jesus—and the collective following of Jesus—cannot be afraid of splintering apart.  Denominations must emphasize centrality, and so the logic of going into the world must assume that few will respond to Jesus’ call.  Jesus, on the other hand, describes a harvest greater than may be gathered—what is lacking is workers willing to learn what they are teaching even as they are teaching it.

Jesus’ metaphor of the worker in the field is not the one who plants, but the one who gleans—the one who knows not where he or she comes from or is going.  God is the one who plants.  Jesus gave the first disciples a challenge indeed when he took them from their nets and made them “fishers of men.”  Translated to the land, Jesus made them—in shades of Abel and John—“hunter-gatherers of men.”