I’m setting these speculations to post on a Tuesday, the day that LOST airs in the U.S., but I am still on blog hiatus for Lent. My Cain and Abel thoughts may be outdated or superseded by events in the TV show by the time this post appears.

Cain and Abel were the first brothers. Cain murdered Abel out of jealousy.

Isaac and Ishmael were the sons of Abraham. Ishmael, the older but also the son of a slave-wife instead of Abraham’s true wife, Sarah, mocked his younger half-brother until things were so dysfunctional that Abraham had to send Hagar and Ishmael away. Some say the rivalry between Ishmael, the ancestor of the Arabic nations, and Isaac, the ancestor of the Jews, continues to this day.

Jacob and Esau were the twin sons of Isaac and his wife Rebekah. Their rivalry started in the womb and continued into adulthood. Romans 9:10-16:

10 This son was our ancestor Isaac. When he married Rebekah, she gave birth to twins. 11 But before they were born, before they had done anything good or bad, she received a message from God. (This message shows that God chooses people according to his own purposes; 12 he calls people, but not according to their good or bad works.) She was told, “Your older son will serve your younger son.” 13 In the words of the Scriptures, “I loved Jacob, but I rejected Esau.”[h]

14 Are we saying, then, that God was unfair? Of course not! 15 For God said to Moses,

“I will show mercy to anyone I choose,
and I will show compassion to anyone I choose.”[i]

16 So it is God who decides to show mercy. We can neither choose it nor work for it.

Of course, Joseph and his brothers are full of jealousy and rivalry, and as the story goes Joseph, the younger brother, becomes the most powerful man in Egypt and saves his entire family from extinction. Again, God chooses whom He will bless and how.

Then, there was at least some rivalry and bad feeling between Moses and his brother Aaron and his sister Miriam. When Moses went up Mr. Sinai to meet with God and receive the commandments, Aaron was persuaded by his long absence and by the people’s need for guidance to build them a golden calf to worship. Later, Aaron and Miriam began to speak against Moses because he had a foreign wife, and they attempted what sounds like a coup. But God thwarted their rebellion by giving Miriam a temporary case of leprosy.

I noticed something interesting as I was thinking about the Cain/Abel motif in LOST. Not many of the guys on LOST have brothers. Sayid may have had a brother, or maybe it was a cousin? No brother for Jack or Sawyer or Ben or Locke or Miles or Faraday or Richard or Boone or Walt or . . . Hurley had a married brother, I think. Mostly the rest are only children or they have one sister or half-sister.

Mr. Eko had a brother, Yemi, and in their relationship the Cain and Abel motif comes through loud and clear. Yemi is the good and chosen younger brother; Mr. Eko is locked outside of society and the grace of God. Then Yemi dies as a result of Mr. Eko’s actions, and Mr. Eko must take on the role of his Good Brother, become a priest, and later a spiritual leader on the island.

Charlie had a brother, too, and the two of them play out not so much the story of Cain and Abel as Jesus’s parable of the Prodigal Son and the Elder Brother. Charlie is the good brother at first, the one who stays off drugs, who goes straight, who goes to confession, and his brother Liam is as wild and prodigal as the prodigal in the parable. But as Liam comes to his senses, Charlie loses his. Then, Charlie wonders why Liam receives grace and a family while Charlie is shut out from everything good by his addiction and his chasing after fame and fortune. It’s not fair. God’s grace and forgiveness are never fair; that’s why we who deserve justice and the wages of sin (death) receive grace with thanksgiving.

Now as last season ended and in this final season we have another set of (maybe) brothers on LOST: Jacob and, let’s call him Esau. There is a definite rivalry between the two who have differing ideas about how the Island should be run. “Cain” has “Abel” killed, but the two come back to fight another day.

Is one of these brothers or rivals the son of blessing and the other the cursed one? Whose sons are they?