Grievance and Restoration: Lamech and Jesus
Grievance and Restoration: Lamech and Jesus
Proper 19 Year A; Matt 18:21-35, Rom 14:1-12
The Gospel this week is again part of Matthew’s “Community Discourse,” one of five long sections where Jesus teaches, giving a sort of new Torah. At the same time we are reading through a long section in Paul’s Letter to the Romans that has a parallel intention, of giving instruction for life in Christian community.
The Gospel text has Peter ask about what happens “if my brother sins against me”—which is probably not what your translation looks like. Given “the Church” has already been referenced as the context for these teachings (see v. 17), the NRSV has tried to clarify this and make it inclusive, a bit clumsily. The point though is that this isn’t Peter arguing with Andrew over whose turn it was to clean the nets yesterday, but about life in the forthcoming Christian community.
Peter’s opening bid for forgiving a brother “seven times” is intended to be a generous measure, but there seems to be an implication of posturing here (this is Peter after all). When Jesus responds with “seventy times seven” (or…see below) the point is just not to be a lot more generous, but to change the nature of the question. Jesus moves the conversation from keeping score to asking what the nature of the challenge of forgiveness is.
The qualms we might feel stirring now about people who misuse forgiveness—people whose dependencies rely on others continuing to offer the “help” that facilitates addiction, or just bad behavior—are not the subject of this passage. Jesus is not offering a formula for codependence, but for relations in the Church community itself, and he is not just allowing for a longer chain of repeated misbehavior than Peter, but suggesting that Peter and we consider the issue altogether differently.
The manuscripts of Matt 18:22 are divided about whether Jesus’ answer refers to “seventy-seven times” or “seventy times seven [times].” Ancient scribes themselves couldn’t agree. At one level this doesn’t matter very much; if anyone is still thinking this is about keeping score, they have missed the point. One reason “seventy times seven” may be appealing though can be found in a relatively obscure parallel in Genesis.
The original act of grievance—without forgiveness—in the Bible is the murder of Abel by his brother Cain. In the aftermath of this tragedy, when Cain is cursed to wander, he complains to God that his punishment is unbearable and that he will be killed. Here, as often in biblical narrative, even judgement and condemnation is moderated by God’s faithfulness. God reassures Cain of his protection: “Then the Lord said to him, ‘Not so! Whoever kills Cain will suffer a sevenfold vengeance” (Gen 4:15). This comes in the form of the famous “mark” of Cain, which despite its proverbial stigma is actually a badge of divine oversight.
A few verses later comes a curious and disturbing detail in the story of Cain’s descendants. A certain Lamech, who in this narrative is Cain’s 3x great grandson, boasts of killing someone, as his ancestor had—we are not told who this was—then adds the very first piece of biblical poetry, a gruesome song:
I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me.
If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold (4:23b-24)
Later legendary expansions of this curious passage (see illustration) imagined a fatal encounter between Lamech and Cain himself as the obscure back-story.1 More importantly, Lamech thus claims that his exaction of vengeance will exceed even the divine law that protected Cain, in just the same proportions that Jesus now urges Peter to re-think his own calculation of forgiveness.
The mathematics of the Gospel exchange may now be clearer. Just as Lamech’s seventy-sevenfold violence aggravates the situation that arose after Abel’s murder, or reflects a further decline into violence and retribution on humanity’s part, the arrival of the community created by Jesus heralds a new possibility of restoration and healing.
Jesus is not merely suggesting that Peter lacks ethical ambition by undercounting occasions for forgiveness, but hints that the inauguration of this new community is something more than a new ethical high-water mark—and after all, we know the Church and its members fail often enough in that regard anyway.
Rather Jesus suggests that God’s reign amounts to a restoration of what was lost to the world in the primordial violence, and resulting grievance, of Cain. This idea that history is being remade in the establishment of God’s reign is woven through scripture; we have noted already Jesus as a new Moses, and Paul earlier in Romans had presented Christ as a counterpoint even to Adam, father of Cain and Abel:
…death exercised dominion from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sins were not like the transgression of Adam, who is a type of the one who was to come. But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died through the one man’s trespass, much more surely have the grace of God and the free gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many (Rom 5: 12-15).
Paul in the Epistle today continues the elaboration—begun in his glorious “living sacrifices” challenge in chapter 12—of a new life that fits being in Christ. His cases have mostly to do with mutual respect or consideration rather than violence, grievance, and forgiveness, but the effect of Paul’s argument is similar to that of the Gospel. His rationale for deferring to one another and avoiding judgement—the sibling of grievance—is grounded not in measuring or finessing ethical outcomes, but in learning what it means to live in the one whose death makes our own life different:
If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's. For to this end Christ died and lived again, so that he might be Lord of both the dead and the living (Rom 14:8-9)
Stop measuring and counting, he and Jesus both say, but ask what difference it means to live as though we are given this new life. That will be different indeed. He lands the argument with a comment: “So then, each of us will be accountable to God.”
So the parable—a disturbing one— that follows Jesus’ response to Peter may likewise be understood as changing the question more than answering it. It is not, to be clear, much to do (directly) with masters and slaves or the rest of the apparatus of inequity that the story assumes (because it was the lived experience of the hearers and readers), but rather pulls the rug out from any attempt to turn the message of God’s reign into a formula that we can claim to have fulfilled by any amount of counting. It does however work just as Paul’s exhortation does, by shifting the focus from our interactions to our accountability to God.
Anyone struggling to get past the imagery could be encouraged, as always, to consider the context: Jesus has just proclaimed a world in which grievance and violence do not reign, but in which the love of God for creation and its people are being recovered, sevenfold and seventy-seven (etc.) fold. When we understand that restoration to be the consequence of the Gospel, we can stop counting—grievances, favors, wealth, whatever—and accept the free gift of this renewed life. God’s accounting is all that matters.
See https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-topics/bible-interpretation/what-happened-to-cain-in-the-bible/