“Cosmic Homelessness”: Cain, the Pattern of Exile & Grace

The theme of “exile” permeates the Biblical story.

What is exile?

To be exiled is to be cast out, driven away, a wander, alone.

The pattern is set, of course, with Adam and Eve being expelled from the garden of Eden.

But that same theme is reenacted over and over again, beginning immediately with Adam and Eve’s eldest son Cain in Genesis 4:12-17:

Cain rose up against his brother Abel and killed him. 

And the LORD said, “What have you done? … You shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth.”

Cain said to the LORD, “My punishment is greater than I can bear. Behold, you have driven me today away from the ground, and from your face I shall be hidden. I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.”

Then the LORD said to him, “Not so! If anyone kills Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold.”

And the LORD put a mark on Cain, lest any who found him should attack him.

Then Cain went away from the presence of the LORD and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden. 

However you interpret the “primeval” chapters of Genesis 1-11—literal or parabolic—the meaning is the same: the world, as the title of Cornelius Plantinga Jr.’s book reads, is “not the way it’s supposed to be.”

We are not at home.

Tim Keller puts it like this,

The Bible says that we have been wandering as spiritual exiles ever since. That is, we have been living in a world that no longer fits our deepest longings.

It is no coincidence that story after story contains the pattern of exile.

The message of the Bible is that the human race is a band of exiles trying to come home (The Prodigal God, 96-98). 

There is, however, a strange grace haunting both stories:

God’s grace to Adam and Eve took the form of sewing them clothes because they felt they needed them.

God’s grace to Cain takes the form of guaranteeing him protection because he feels he needs it (John Goldingay, Genesis for Everyone: Part One, 75). 

This grace (of course) ought to surprise us. Shock us, in fact.

In the midst of his sentencing—where guilt is beyond question—the Judge (though just) suddenly suspends the gavel, descends the bench, and (like a father) meets His defendants’ deepest needs.

To the first: “I will clothe you.”

To the second: “I will protect you.”

It is almost as if God cannot help himself.

Moreover, this grace is a pointer—a road sign of sorts—not only toward God’s gracious character itself but of the ultimate grace found in Jesus.

“He came,” as Keller explains, “to bring the human race Home. … He took upon himself the full curse of human rebellion, cosmic homelessness, so that we could be welcomed into our true home” (101-102).

“capacitating the incapacitated”

George Hunsinger, “Karl Barth’s Doctrine of the Holy Spirit” from The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth

Those who are awakened to lifelong conversion by the Spirit never cease to be sinners themselves. Yet despite their continuing sinfulness, the miracle of grace never ceases in the hearts (183).

What the miraculous operation of the Holy Spirit brings about [in conversion] . . . is not essentially restoration or healing but resurrection from the dead (184).

Since to be a sinner means to be incapacitated, grace means capacitating the incapacitated despite their incapacitation. Sinners capacitated by grace remain helpless in themselves. Grace does not perfect and exceed human nature in its sorry plight so much as contradict and overrule it.

In this miraculous and mysterious way, by grace alone—that is, through a continual contradiction of nature by grace that results in a provisional conjunction of opposites (coniunctio oppositorum)—the blind see, the lame walk, and the dead are raised to new life (cf. Matt. 11:4) (185).

Grace and Law (Revisited)

Paul F.M. Zahl, Grace in Practice: A Theology of Everyday Life

The law crushes the human spirit; grace lifts it up.

The story of the Bible is the story of this perpetual war between law and grace. Law comes in . . . and human beings become excited by it. They become excited to resist it. The law, which is any form of external command, provokes the opposite reaction from the one it is in intended to provoke. Instead of inciting obedience or submission, it incites rebellion. It provokes revolutionary resentment (1).

Any judgment, any evaluation—even if it approves and speaks a blessing—will be heard as a negation. This is an absolute first principle of this book. Law is an attack. It is heard as a negation by its recipients. All laws are negation. God’s law is the negation (6).

The gospel of Christ has to do with guilt and with the ashamed response of imperfect people to a perfect God. The gospel represents a transaction involving guild and the shame of being caught in the reality of human being and human action, which is powerfully self-deceived. The gospel is about the relation between law, which is crushing, stunning, and wrecking, and grace, which is restoring, repairing, and recreative. . . . The gospel is about force and effect, punishment and rehabilitation. The focus of this book is on the gospel, the leverage of Christianity in relation to human resistance and brokenness . . . . The focus of this theology of everyday life in on how Christianity works (28).

Law, whether biblical and universally stated or contextual and contemporarily phrased, operates in one way. Law reduces its object, the human person, to despair (29).

[T]he law dispossesses love in every place to which it speaks (32).

What is grace? Grace is love that seeks you out when you have nothing to give in return. Grace is love coming at you that has nothing to do with you. Grace is being loved when you are unlovable. It is being loved when you are the opposite of loveable (emphasis added).

Let’s go a little further. Grace is a love that has nothing to do with you, the beloved. It has everything and only to do with the lover. Grace is irrational in the sense that it has nothing to do with weights and measures. It has nothing to do with my intrinsic qualities or so-called “gifts” (whatever they may be). It reflects a decision on the part of the giver, the one who loves, in relation to the receiver, the one who is loved, that negates any qualification the receiver may personally hold.

Grace is one-way love.

The one-way love of grace is the essence of any lasting transformation that takes place in human experience (36).

One-way love lifts up. One-way love cures. One-way love transforms. It is the change agent of life.

Grace depends on the fact that its origin is wholly outside myself. This is the heart of love; it comes to me from outside myself. Moreover, while it almost always elicits a response, which is my love in return, it comes toward me without any reference to my response. One-way love does not deviate on the basis of its goal. It is determined solely by its source.

One-way love is the change agent in everyday life because it speaks in a voice completely different from the voice of the law. It has nothing to do with its receiver’s characteristics. Its logic is hidden within the intention of its source. Theologically speaking, we can say it is the prime directive of God to love the world in no relation to the world’s fitness to be loved.

One-way love is also irrational because it reaches out to the specifically undeserving person. This is the beating heart of it. Grace is directed toward what the Scripture calls “the ungodly” (Romans 5:6). Not just the lonely, not just the sick and disconsolate, but the “perpetrators,” the murders and abusers, the people who cross the line. God has a heart—his one-way love—for sinners (37-38).

The grace of God assumes the worst concerning the human situation. It assumes the lowest possible reading of our anthropology. . . . Grace, which is one-way love, happens only at the point at which hope is lost (42-43).

For grace to be grace, there must be one-way love. For grace to be grace, it is necessary that I play no role whatsoever in that love. . . . The love of God, the true love of anyone, in fact, is a one-way love that travels from the deserving to the undeserving (59).

Grace as one-way love comes out of nowhere into a world determined by two-way love (“I will love you if you will love me”) and half-way love (“I will love you but I need a little sign, just a little one”) (62).

Grace is about life from death, or better, life to the dead (63).

The Freeness of Grace

Jonathan Edwards, On Knowing Christ

The grace of God in bestowing this gift [i.e., His Son] is most free. It was what God was under no obligation to bestow. He might have rejected fallen man, as he did the fallen angles. It was what we never did any thing to merit; it was given while we were yet enemies, and before we had so much as repented. It was from the love of God who saw no excellency in us to attract it; and it was without expectation of ever being required for it.—And it is from mere grace that the benefits of Christ are applied to such and such particular persons. Those that are called and sanctified are to attribute it alone to the good pleasure of God’s goodness, by which they are distinguished. He is sovereign, and hath mercy on whom he will have mercy (37).

Now whatever scheme is inconsistent with out entire dependence on God fall, and of having all of him, through him, and in him, it is repugnant to the design and tenor of the gospel, and robs it of that which God accounts its lustre and glory (47).

Aaron Orendorff

It is a profoundly frightening thing to be exposed to the sheer graciousness of the gospel. To understand, as Edwards writes, that God might have simply rejected fallen humanity and been none the less glorious, just or perfect is to simultaneously understand that nothing (save the free and sovereign activity of God) stands in the way our rejection. There was and is no “excellency” inherent to us us that motivated God to act; not even the prospect of our repentance, which is itself an outworking and result of grace, propelled God toward us. God and God alone—through the unmerited (and, in fact, counter-merited) grace of the gospel—is all that separates us from who we are, what we deserve and the rescue of forgiveness and eternal life.

The Least of These

Matthew 25:31-33, 40, 45-46

“When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left. . . . And the King will answer them [that is, the sheep, the righteous, those ‘blessed by my Father’], ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’ . . . Then he will answer them [that is, the goats, the ‘cursed’], saying, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

Tom Wright, Matthew for Everyone (Vol. 2)

Justice is one of the most profound longings of the human race. If there is no justice, then deep within ourselves we know that something is out of joint. Justice is hard to define and harder still to put into practice; but that has never stopped human beings and societies seeking it, praying for it, and working to find ways of doing it better. And justice doesn’t simply mean “punishing wickedness,” though that is regularly involved. It means bringing the world back into balance.

Central to the Jewish and Christian traditions . . . is the belief that this passionate longing for justice comes from the creator God himself. Jews and Christians believe that he will eventually do justice on a worldwide scale . . . . God’s judgment will be seen to be just. The world will be put to rights.

Part of the biblical image of the coming of the son of man is the announcement that justice will at last be done (141).

Aaron Orendorff

We are never more like Jesus than when we care—both for and about—people for whom the world has no use. “The least of these,” which occurs twice in this passage, is a polite, though unmistakable reference to those people who, in and of themselves, have nothing to offer, nothing to contribute, nothing to add to society’s life. They may even be those who actually subtract from the relationships they enter. This subtraction may be economic, emotional or temporal; but whatever its nature, Jesus’ emphasis is clear: you attitude towards these people—these insignificant people—is a direct reflection of your attitude toward me.

Why is that?

The answer lies in the nature of the gospel itself. Jesus—in both his incarnation of crucifixion—become (literally become) the very “least of these.” And he did so in order to reach the very people he identified himself with.

Mercy Precedes

Matthew 20:30-34

And behold, there were two blind men sitting by the roadside, and when they heard that Jesus was passing by, they cried out, “Lord, have mercy on us, Son of David!” The crowd rebuked them, telling them to be silent, but they cried out all the more, “Lord, have mercy on us, Son of David!” And stopping, Jesus called them and said, “What do you want me to do for you?” They said to him, “Lord, let our eyes be opened.” And Jesus in pity touched their eyes, and immediately they recovered their sight and followed him.

Tom Wright, Matthew for Everyone (Vol. 2)

Jesus, says Matthew, was deeply moved. . . . He touched them, and they saw. And . . . they followed him. . . . They have left one life behind, and have begun new one. It can happen to anyone who asks Jesus for something and finds Jesus’ searching question coming straight back at them, piercing through the outer crust and finding the real request bubbling up underneath.

And when that real request is really met, the only possible result is real discipleship. Following Jesus will be costly. But if he’s already given you everything you really wanted, what else is there to do? (64-65).

A. Orendorff

For most of us, the natural response to encountering the gospel records of Jesus’ powerful “acts of mercy” is to immediately jump to interpersonal application. In the closing verses of Matthew 20, the pressing question would therefore be: How can I be Jesus to the beggars? However, before we move to interpersonal application, we must first question deal with the personal: How can I be a beggar to Jesus?

Notice that the beggars do not follow Jesus until after he has healed them. Jesus loves them—he has “pity” on them, as Matthew says—prior to their conversion. What moves them to “follow Jesus”—to become self-forsaking disciples—is Jesus’ miraculous act of kindness. With flattery, the blind men ask for money: “Lord, have mercy on us, Son of David!” What the get is restoration.

Surprisingly, there is no call to discipleship, no hint in the text that Jesus asks anything of them, only that they ask something of Jesus. Grace precedes commitment and even acts contrary to what the beggars think they need. And yet, grace also transforms. It gives, asking nothing in return, and in that giving grace changes its recipient.

Offensive Generosity

Matthew 20:1 & 9-16

“For the kingdom of heaven is like a master of a house who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. . . . And when those hired about the eleventh hour came, each of them received a denarius. Now when those hired first came, they thought they would receive more, but each of them also received a denarius. And on receiving it they grumbled at the master of the house, saying, ‘These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.’ But he replied to one of them, ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong. Did you not agree with me for a denarius? Take what belongs to you and go. I choose to give to this last worker as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or do you begrudge my generosity?’ So the last will be first, and the first last.”

A. Orendorff

Coming on the heels of Matthew 19:30—“many who are first will be last, and the last first”—Jesus’ parable of the generous landowner is meant to serve as both an illustration of God’s lavish grace as well as a corrective to Peter’s self-serving question in 19:27, “See, we have left everything and followed you. What then will we have?” At first, in chapter 19, Jesus responds positively, “Be assured, you will certainly be rewarded: Everyone who has sacrificed to follow me will receive a hundred fold what they’ve lost. In the new world, you will receive eternal life. Even more staggering, you yourselves will sit on upon twelve royal thrones and judge the very tribes of Israel.”

In chapter 20, however, Jesus balances these rewards with the reality that the disciples will not be the sole recipients of this generous inheritance. Many will come at the “eleventh hour” and will likewise receive the very same payment for their labor. “Be careful,” Jesus tells them, “that you don’t grumble against my Father’s generosity. Do not begrudge how He chooses to distribute what belongs to Him.”

The central thought in both passages is this: “The last will be first, and the first last.” And yet the meaning of this phrase is slightly different in each setting. In chapter 19, Jesus is telling his followers to rethink the way the world operates: namely, those who are rich and powerful will one day be displaced by the poor and the weak. In chapter 20, Jesus is telling his followers to rethink the way God operates. As Wright says:

God’s grace, in short, is not the sort of thing you can bargain with or try to store up. It isn’t the sort of thing that one person can have a lot of and someone else only a little. The point of the story is that what people get from having served God and his kingdom is not, actually, a “wage” at all. It’s not, strictly, a reward for work done. God doesn’t make contracts with us, as if we could bargain or negotiate for a better deal. He makes covenants, in which he promises us everything and asks of us everything in return. When he keeps his promise, he is not rewarding us for effort, but doing what comes naturally to his overflowingly generous nature (57).

Grace, One-Way Love

Paul F.M. Zahl, Grace in Practice: A Theology of Everyday Life (pg. 36-38)

What is grace? Grace is love that seeks you out when you have nothing to give in return. Grace is love coming at you that has nothing to do with you. Grace is being loved when you are unlovable. It is being loved when you are the opposite of loveable.

Grace is a love that has nothing to do with you, the beloved. It has everything and only to do with the lover. Grace is irrational in the sense that it has nothing to do with weights and measures. It has nothing to do with my intrinsic qualities or so-called “gifts” (whatever they may be). It reflects a decision on the part of the giver, the one who loves, in relation to the receiver, the one who is loved, that negates any qualification the receiver may personally hold.

Grace is one-way love.

The one-way love of grace is the essence of any lasting transformation that takes place in human experience. . . . One-way love lifts up. One-way love cures. One-way love transforms. It is the change agent of life.

Grace depends on the fact that its origin is wholly outside myself. This is the heart of love; it comes to me from outside myself. Moreover, while it almost always elicits a response, which is my love in return, it comes toward me without any reference to my response. One-way love does not deviate on the basis of its goal. It is determined solely by its source.

One-way love is the change agent in everyday life because it speaks in a voice completely different from the voice of the law. It has nothing to do with its receiver’s characteristics. Its logic is hidden within the intention of its source. Theologically speaking, we can say it is the prime directive of God to love the world in no relation to the world’s fitness to be loved.

One-way love is also irrational because it reaches out to the specifically undeserving person. This is the beating heart of it. Grace is directed toward what the Scripture calls “the ungodly” (Romans 5:6). Not just the lonely, not just the sick and disconsolate, but the “perpetrators,” the murders and abusers, the people who cross the line.

A. Orendorff

The more difficult it is to love someone – the less lovely and lovable they are in themselves – the more our love towards them reflects and images God’s love towards us. It is no credit to your faith to love those who are inherently lovely; it is when we love those who we would naturally and justly recoil from that we show the authenticity of our faith. To love in the name of Christ is to love those who Christ loved: not the well, but the sick, not the righteous, but sinners.