Now Abel kept flocks, and Cain worked the soil. In the course of time Cain brought some of the fruits of the soil as an offering to the LORD. But Abel brought fat portions from some of the firstborn of his flock. The LORD looked with favor on Abel and his offering, but on Cain and his offering he did not look with favor. So Cain was very angry, and his face was downcast.
Then the LORD said to Cain, "Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must master it."Now Cain said to his brother Abel, "Let's go out to the field." And while they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him.
Then the LORD said to Cain, "Where is your brother Abel?"
"I don't know," he replied. "Am I my brother's keeper?"
The LORD said, "What have you done? Listen! Your brother's blood cries out to me from the ground..."
--Genesis 4:2-10, NIV
Am I my brother's keeper?
It's been said that the rest of the Bible is an attempt to answer that question.
This is dangerous ground in America. Our legal system is based on the principle that the rights of the individual are sacrosanct. I'm not supposed to care about you too much. I'm supposed to leave you alone. I'm not supposed to presume to know what's good for you.
I got a tremendous chewing-out during the course of my chaplaincy training, merely for using one high-voltage word in conversation with a patient: should. As in, "Well, maybe you should [take a certain action]." I disagreed with the instructor about whether I was imposing my own stuff onto the patient, but what was communicated to me was that the nature of the offense was not about the specific patient, but that I had violated a cardinal rule of pastoral care--never, never, never say "ought" or "should." What right do you have?
Am I my brother's keeper?
- One in five people around the world survives on less than $1US per day, with few opportunities to earn more.
- More than 38 million people around the world are infected by HIV/AIDS, 25 million in Africa alone.
- One person in seven has no access to clean water for drinking, cooking or washing.
- Around the world, 104 million children do not go to grade school, because their parents cannot afford fees, books or uniforms for all their children.
- every day, somewhere in the world, approximately twenty thousand children starve to death.
2 comments:
For me, passionate anti-authoritarian that I am, there's a HUGE distinction between my responsibility to make food, water, health care, education, etc. available to everyone, and their decisions about what they "should" do with those resources.
I don't think the word "should" is such a nasty thing when we're talking about taking care of each other. The diocese I'm a part of digs water wells in Guatamala, and soon in Mexico, for impoverished villages. We also teach them sanitation, so that they won't poison their own well or do unhealthy things with the water.
But we also say things like "you should make the well community property, rather than letting a person or a group control access to it." In some cases, we'll dig the well in the town square or in the churchyard to try to prevent future squabbles.
I recognize that there's a difference between providing for the needs of another person and running somebody else's life, and that we ought to do the former and ought not do the latter.
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