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‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’
Gen_4:9
The first murderer was the first liar (‘Where is thy brother?’ ‘I know not’); he was also an egotist—‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’
I. Apart from other serious considerations, this last utterance of Cain’s impresses a great principle, and a solemn duty.
We each of us ask in our words and in our lives, ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ God answers us—‘You are!’ The world, with all its might, answers—‘No! I am not.’ Vast multitudes of merely nominal Christians, all the army of the compromisers and conventionalists, while they say, or half say, with reluctance, ‘Yes, I am my brother’s keeper,’ yet act and live in every respect as if they were not. There is little practical difference between their conduct and that of the godless world. Our Lord illustrated this in the parable of ‘The two sons.’ If some, like the sneering lawyer, interpose an excuse, and ask, ‘Who is my brother?’ the answer is the same as Christ gave in the parable of ‘The good Samaritan.’ Yes, all men are our brothers; and when we injure them, by lies, which cut like a sharp razor, by sneers, innuendoes, slander, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness, by want of thought or by want of heart, by neglect or by absorbing selfishness, we are inheritors of the spirit of the first murderer.
II. But let us confine our thoughts to those who most pressingly need our services—to the great masses of the poor, the oppressed, the wretched, the hungry, the lost, the outcast. Among them lies, in some form or other, a great sphere of our duty, which, if we neglect, we neglect at our peril.
There is an almost shoreless sea of misery around us, which rolls up its dark waves to our very doors; thousands live and die in the dim borderland of destitution; little children wail, starve, and perish, and soak and blacken soul and sense in our streets; there are thousands of unemployed, not all of whom are lazy impostors; the Demon of Drink is the cause of daily horrors which would disgrace Dahomey or Ashantee; these are facts patent to every eye. Now God will work no miracle to mend these miseries. If we neglect them, they will be left uncured, but He will hold us responsible for the neglect. To the callous and slothful He will say—‘What hast thou done?’ and it will be vain to answer—‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’
III. There are many ways of asking the question of Cain.
(a) There is that of coarse ignorance; of men steeped in greed, who say outright that ‘the poor in the lump are bad.’
(b) There is that of the spirit which robs even charity of its compassionateness, and makes a gift more odious than a blow.
(c) There is that of the spirit of indifferent despair; those who cry—‘What good can we do?’ and ‘Of what earthly use is it?’; who find an excuse for doing practically nothing by quoting the words of Deuteronomy: ‘The poor shall never cease out of the land’; but (conveniently) forget the words which follow (Deu_15:11). This despair of social problems is ignoble and unchristian.
(d) There is that of unfaithfulness, domestic sloth (of narrow-mindedness and narrow-heartedness); if such do not challenge God with the question—‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ they act as if they were not. There is a danger lest our narrow domesticity should enervate many of our nobler instincts by teaching indifference to the public weal as a sort of languid virtue. God has made us citizens of His Kingdom. Many a man, in his affection and service to his family, forgets that he belongs also to the collective being; that he cannot, without guilt, sever himself from the needs of his parish, his nation, his race, from the claims of the poor, the miserable, and the oppressed. If he is to do his duty in this life, he must help, think for, sympathise with, give to, them. The Christian must man the lifeboat to help life’s shipwrecked mariners; if he cannot row, he must steer; if he cannot steer, he must help to launch; if he have not strength to do that, then—
As one who stands upon the shore
And sees the lifeboat go to save,
And all too weak to take an oar,
I send a cheer across the wave.
At the very least, he must solace, shelter, and supply the needs of those rescued from the wreck. The meanest position of all is to stand and criticise, to say that the lifeboat is a bad one, or that it is being wrongly launched, or wrongly manned. Worst and wickedest of all is to stand still and call those fools and fanatics who are bearing the burden and heat of the day. The best men suffer with those whom they see suffer. They cannot allay the storm, but they would at least aid those who are doing more than themselves to rescue the perishing. They would sympathise, help, and, at the lowest, give. It is love which is the fulfilling of the Law. There is but one test with God of true orthodoxy, of membership of the kingdom of Heaven. It is given in the last utterance of Revelation by the beloved disciple. It sweeps away with one breath nine-tenths of the fictions and falsities of artificial orthodoxy and fanatical religionism. It is ‘He that doeth righteousness is righteous,’ and ‘He that doeth righteousness is born of God.’ It is only by keeping the commandments that we can enter into life.
—
Dean Farrar.
Illustrations(1) ‘Of the dangers which are partly rooted in our animal nature and partly fostered and intensified by the drift of our time, the one likely to press most heavily on us is that of exaggerated individualism. Where this is not tempered by an infusion of the religious spirit, we find it working with a disintegrating power, and in various ways vitiating both our personal and social life. Almost every advance of civilisation which distinguishes our century has tended to give this principle some new hold on the common life. There is no corner of society, commercial or social, political or artistic, which it does not invade.’
(2) ‘No character in the Old Testament represents to us guilt and infamy so readily as Cain; he is surpassed only by Judas in all the Bible. For to the heart of man it is not incredible that at so short a distance from Paradise, or even at the still shorter distance from Cain’s glad childhood, so foul a deed as this was done. The heart of man knows its own deceitfulness, and how soon sin brings forth death.
And besides all this, there is no possibility of understanding the punishment that Cain had to endure if he were not a murderer in intention as well as fact. “Shall not the judge of all the earth do right?” Certainly He will never err on the side of vengeance, for it is mercy, not vengeance, He is said to delight in. If Cain receives his punishment, it may seem to him greater than he can bear, but it is not greater than he deserves.’