Excerpted from Oliver O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order, 74–75. Emphasis added.
“‘By faith Abel, though dead, still speaks,’ wrote the author to the Hebrews (11:4), alluding to Genesis 4:10, where Abel’s blood ‘cries out from the ground’. The reason he still speaks is that God did not heed the cry: he did not exact from Cain the full satisfaction that nature demanded. Rather, he sent him to live ‘in exile from the ground’, in a civilization alienated from nature and protected from its judgments. The ‘mark’ which protects him is the artificiality of his civilized arts — including most especially the arts of justice, for every judgment passed in Cain’s city will leave Abel still crying out. Society’s justice will never be true justice, but always justice and guilt intertwined in a self-renewing cycle of injury and restitution. Offended society cries out for satisfaction, and is covered with guilt when it takes it. The hanged man defiles (Dt. 21:22–23), not by reason of his own guilt, for which his death has made satisfaction, but by reason of the guilt of those to whom the satisfaction has been given. In the simple profundity of Cain’s story there is the most searching expression of mankind’s perpetual disquiet about his own civilization and its dependence upon violence. We cannot look to civilization to satisfy nature’s claim; for always in doing justice it does injustice as well. It was the great contribution of Reinhold Niebur, earlier in this century, to understand this as clearly as anyone has done, and to restate for modern liberal society the theological truths which long since gave the Western political tradition its rationale.
“But ‘the sprinkled blood [of Jesus] speaks more graciously than the blood of Abel’ (Heb. 12:24). It puts to rest the cry of outraged innocence which Cain’s civilization could never silence. Abel was not vindicated, but Jesus was; and by his vindication put an end to the unfinished business of nature’s justice. But where Abel’s vindication would have meant the destruction of Cain’s race, Jesus’ vindication meant a new beginning for it. Abel was innocence in controversy with guilt; Jesus was innocence in identification with guilt. ‘God . . . sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin . . . condemned sin in the flesh’ (Rom 8:3). he took the place of the hanged man, which was also the place of his executioners, under condemnation; he took the place of Abel in vindication. He represented both innocent Abel and guilty Cain, and reconciled them to each other and to God. His resurrection satisfied nature’s claim on behalf of the innocent, and God’s on behalf of the guilty. That is why Christian theology speaks of the death and resurrection of Christ as an act of justice (dikaiōma, Rom. 5:18). For it is the true fulfilment of God’s justice to reconcile the world, not a fulfilment that natural justice could have anticipated or demanded, but not a fulfilment either that denies or overturns natural justice. Jesus did not appeal against divine justice when he prayed ‘Father, forgive them . . .’ (Lk. 23:34). He demonstrated a divine justice that was more complete and more satisfying than any that eye had yet seen or ear heard of. It is the task of Christian eschatology to speak of the day when that justice shall supersede all other justice.”
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