A valid understanding of the ideas of repentance and forgiveness in Jesus' teachings can only be approached when one begins to get a grasp on the scriptural foundations of those teachings. Those foundations are not what they seem to be when--as is conventional--the earlier parts of the Bible are viewed under the premises of Common-Era theories about the Gospels.
A good example of this is the set of quaint notions abroad in some evangelical circles about how the Protestant notions of salvation are foreshadowed (or even plainly represented) in the Jewish Scriptures. Not merely the "saving faith" of Abraham is discovered by such evangelicals in Genesis, but also the framework of "faith alone" soteriology understood in terms of the Temple that is in turn understood as a pre-figuration (and effective substitute) for Jesus. After all, Adam and Eve pass through (sort of) cherubim placed at the gate of Eden, and the flaming sword (perhaps "The Word"?) marks the distinction between their moral quandary and their lost blessed state. This is all rather vague, but it can serve as some sort of answer to the "What about people before Jesus (or even before Abraham)?" question.
This set of conventional notions can obscure some rather salient observations about what exactly was the effect of the Curse that is supposed to follow the Fall, especially in terms of Adam (who seems to be the one who really matters.) While it is true that he is sent out from Eden to scratch a sweaty living from the cursed soil, and while it is true that he returns to the dust, it is not at all the case that the larger pre-Flood narrative supports an Adam-story of suffering consistent with the doom pronounced at "The Fall."
Adam lives nearly until the Flood. It would be a grotesque connivance to imagine that he is not fully immersed in the Decline of Civilization described between Eden and Noah. And if that decline involved a decadent attachment to the fleshly, it is hard to imagine that Adam would not have soon thrown off his pitiable state of young father in wretched need. Patriarchs in that milieu were little short of kings, if not gods. He lived to see many generations, and would have been elevated presumably to the status of revered father (as was imperious Noah in his turn--being the father of all who would live thereafter.)
Moreover, since disease was presumably just arising and the pristine state of created humanity was presumably just beginning to wane, Adam could be destined to a life vigorous as well as long. Given that the only malady described then in full force was the dread prospect of childbirth, women would have gotten the worst of it. We are not told how long Eve lived, but if it was not divinely-prohibited incest for brothers to have necessarily mated with sisters, then the prospect must arise of a widowed--perhaps serially widowed--Adam imposing his perennial potency upon generations-worth of his perennially-youthful and gloriously sculpted daughters and grand-daughters. The prospect is head-spinning, but scarcely less so than the inescapable conclusion that Adam's sons spent themselves thus upon generations of sisters and daughters and nieces.
Even the horrific loss of Abel (which is described in Genesis only as it grieves Eve) would have dimmed over time, not merely by the passing of years but by the passing of apparently multitudinous other offspring (victims of the pre-Flood violence.) Adam would have seen many of his descendants die, and he would have been the father or grandfather or great-grandfather of many of them--and, if he is not to escape without warrant from the condemnation of the depraved hearts of pre-Flood humanity, he would scarcely have cared. Cursed Adam was cursed to a lifetime of reverential luxury and fleshly indulgence--at least, that would be the understanding derived from the totality of the history of his time.
And then there is Cain. Murderous Cain--or, that is to say, the Cain who we now call murderous--was cursed such that what he planted would fail him, and that he would be a wanderer, and that forever the earth would call out that Cain had sodden the soil with the blood of his brother. So what does Cain do? The murderous farmer who scattered Abel's blood proceeds to plant the blood of countless others--and get away with it. Such was the effectual function of cities in the ancient world, and the first thing Cain is described as doing is building a city (that is, after he plants his seed in a sister of his.)
Cities of the ancient world (of which such cities before the Flood would have to be considered worst cases) were essentially death-farms. The masses were bred only to serve the general cause, were worked to death, and were kept in conditions of deprivation and disease such as to make early death the expectation. A person might hope to live to adulthood, to experience a few years of blighted marriage and child-bearing, and to see as few kin as possible die of disease or be driven to death by task-masters. This might not be a fair appreciation of all cities of the ancient world (though the ostensible logic and comfort of religion would have been an indifferent benefit but surely a valuable type of crowd-control), but it must be remembered that the generations before the Flood are described as particularly heinous. There may have been riotous revelry and buying and selling and marrying and giving in marriage, but the less-seen of society's members would have borne the continual cost.
And so this is the curse of Cain--expressed most fully in his being a curse to others. The pat notions of the life-stories of people of "Bible times" usually fail scrutiny. If we are to find lessons in the ancient scriptures to which Jesus referred, and if we are to find lessons in how Jesus uses such scriptures, then we must view them in Jesus' terms. For example, there is evil aplenty in Genesis, but Jesus' use of such stories does not always fit the conventions of Christianity--and the very basic elements of Jesus' teachings do not always fit the conventions of Christianity.
When Jesus brings up the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah, and compares them favorably to persons of his own day, he is trampling on the yes-no salvation-damnation conceptuality of Christianity. Then again, when Jesus describes favorably the later inhabitants of Nineveh humbling themselves (as though the very "work" of humiliation would bring salvation and crying "mightily unto God" would bring mercy), he is trampling on the "faith alone" conceit of Protestantism. In the teachings of Jesus, there are degrees of moral status ("You are not far from the kingdom of God"), and there is the prospect of moments of looking to the light of salvation that makes it plain that such looking--both in its cause and its character--can be as ineffable as the concepts of God that conventional Christianity tries vainly to codify.
If Cain is to be damned because he kills his brother, or because he expresses not remorse for the deed but rather dread of the consequences, then such a dire fate for him is indeed imaginable--but that is not the same as to say that he is cursed effectively by God in the Genesis narrative. Cain seems to be cursed scarcely at all. Adam, of course, can be seen to have lost a blessed state of which we can hardly imagine, but it is not the loss of that blessing that is made much of in the post-Fall curses--it is the harsh life that is to happen to him. As I described above, that harsh life would not seem to be at all necessitated by the out-workings of the Adam-era story.
Of course, Adam and Cain might have suffered horribly within themselves in those crucial moments (and, of course, given the theme of this blog, I am going to emphasize the idea of moments.) This is where Jesus comes in. The commentators of today (and the theologians of every age) will emphasize salvation as a process (which becomes especially intriguing when the theologians are of the predestined-to-salvation, saved-by-faith-alone type, who are condemned to writhe about under the realization that SOMETHING must be done by the person saved.)
Jesus, however, has little to say about process. People hear something (or hear something correctly), or they don't. People see something, or they don't. Moreover, if the emphasis in the Gospels about "light" is to be taken seriously, then it is not the question of "hearing" or "seeing" that controls, but rather the far more ephemeral notion of attention--perhaps better phrased as "looking." Only the practically-instantaneous phenomenon of "looking" would make sense in terms of Jesus comparing himself to the snake raised on a pole in the desert.
I have written recently about the phenomenon of light as an important metaphor in Jesus' teachings. Jesus tells us that we must embrace the light rather than the dark, but of course I am using the term "embrace" awkwardly here. We must seek the light. We must look to the light. We must turn every aspect of ourselves and our lives to the light. What can help in all this is realizing that the very concept of attention rolls right over any notions of "faith" versus "works." Attention either happens to us, or it is a happening in which we are involved that occurs too quickly for volition to control it--which is the same thing.
Adam and Cain--and we--have moments that are critical to our eternal fates. Both Jews and Christians know this, and both Jews and Christians are capable of creating narratives of such moments and their consequences. I know I am limiting the contributions of Jews here to the "Old Testament," but as far as "The Bible" goes, neither testament spends any time on the narratives--such as proselytizers or missionaries might use--of those crucial moments as they might pertain to Adam or Cain. We get stories of curses that are in some senses only formally curses.
What might have involved Adam or Cain looking to the light? Episodes? Moments? Flashes of attention that one might describe as "moments" only by including the pre- and post-flash instants? If the phenomena of attention are what really cause us to turn our lives to the light, can they be described as moments other than by convention? When Jesus describes the word as being snatched up by Satan when it falls in the form of seed by the wayside, is what Jesus describes not really a narrative of cause that surrounds a supra-narrative, ultimately indescribable occurrence of inattention?
Here is where the debate about "faith" and "works" fails, and the theme of "the kingdom of God" rises to the fore. Something as small as a grain of sand here or there, tumbling about as Adam or Cain tried more or less successfully to obtain a crop, might have been the catalyst of a saving reflection for either one of them. Or might an impossibly brief moment of attention to the right thing have been linked for either of them with the tumbling of such a grain? In the conceptualities of Jesus, the impossibly small can engulf the impossibly huge--the mustard seed can outweigh the universe.
When it comes to turning the elements of our lives to the light, which I have described as though such elements were irregular objects orbiting a light source (the "irregularity" allowing for more surface in the light than the dark), the instantaneous and arguably involuntary moments of looking to the light can serve to achieve such orientations with the expenditure neither of time nor of work--those moments defy "faith" versus "works." Rather, all that we can hope to do is make ourselves open to such opportunities for attention-paying.
This is the sort of notion of admittance to the kingdom of heaven that makes sense in the teachings of Jesus. It is not for nothing that he speaks of the growth of the mustard seed, or of the spreading of the yeast in the dough, or of the man who finds a pearl of great price. Dimensions are of no matter in the kingdom of heaven, and it is to be expected that dimensions of time or effort make no sense in terms of any "process" of salvation. Our created nature makes us ever liable to "processes" (the things we do without thinking or without bidding), processes that are neither good nor bad--though even that is open to question. We automatically find affinity with people like us, though Jesus will deride that as being merely "like the heathen." On the other hand, we automatically find ourselves concerned about our children's needs, and Jesus finds here an apt metaphor for God's care for us as his children.
Occasionally we will find ourselves repenting for something we have done. Occasionally we will find ourselves asking for forgiveness for something we have done. Jesus telling us to seek the light is Jesus telling us to gravitate toward such occasions. Thereby we can make ourselves less far from the kingdom of God.
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