Time as an Uncertain Element

There is an interesting corollary to the notion that God lied when he said that Adam and Eve would die upon eating of the forbidden tree.  Later in Genesis, God says to the petulantly (to put it mildly) downcast Cain, "If you do what is right, will you not be accepted?"  Of course, either of those statements from God can be explained into any desired shape by the commentators, but the peddling of balderdash is not what concerns us here.  Unquestionably, Adam and Eve did not die that day, and--in the plainest rendering of Jesus' teachings--neither Cain nor any of us can "do what is right" so as to be accepted.

Saying, as many Protestants will, that what we must "do" is the non-"work" of accepting unmerited grace is just Balderdash 101, and there is no hint other than that Cain is being told to do right or be damned--or suffer whatever unbearable fate Cain might imagine.  And the Catholic approach is a melding of the unmerited grace of natural revelation with the asymmetric and grace-mediated believer-participation in the sacraments.  In the Christianity of the denominations, "If you do what is right, will you not be accepted?" would--if attributed to any other than the divine speaking--might just as well come from the most execrable heretic.

Adam and Eve deserved to die--and did not.  To be fair, faced with an eternity in Eden and with the fruit just hanging there, all of us must be thought bound to transgress.  Similarly, all of us will fail--like Cain--to do what is right.  That God in either type of instance might be said to have "lied" is a jibe ever-available to the critic, though it cannot be forgotten that mechanisms of divine mercy are in play here--even as the Scriptures describe God as sometimes regretting his actions.

As I began with above, the corollary (in the scope of Jesus' teachings) to the First Couple surviving The Fall is Cain (and all of us) being provided the mercy required to make acceptable things out of our lamentable efforts.  In the first instance, the continued existence of humanity brought with it innumerable (and Fall-exacerbated) sufferings of Jesus' Creation endured by Jesus.  In the second instance, the suspension of judgment (accompanied by perpetual mercy-opportunities such as that seized by the murderer Cain) is in contrast to the agony of waiting endured by Jesus as his crucifixion loomed.

Adam and Eve could know moments of joy and comfort as Jesus bore a ceaseless universe of suffering for his Creation.  Cain and all of us can know salvation and reassurance in any moment, even as Jesus waited millennia--and, for the final fruition, waits still--to do his unfathomable work of salvation.  This is the divine Jesus who famously told his followers that he did not know the time of the end.  As I have written before, the multiple temple-cleansings that so exercise the harmonizers might indeed have happened just so--with Jesus never knowing which year's festivities would feature his torture and death.

The question of time as an uncertain element must be a major part of examination of the Gospel narratives.