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 My Cain and Abel thoughts may be outdated or superseded by events in the TV show by the time this post appears.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?

Antagonist: “They come, fight, they destroy, they corrupt. It always ends the same.”
Jacob: “It only ends once. Anything that happens before that is just progress.”

Antagonist aka Smokey aka Fake Locke aka Dark Suit aka Esau—if the writers would just provide a name for the guy I would be pleased.

Are we making any progress at all here in terms of resolving this story?

(By the way, if you’re reading any further, there are SPOILERS!)

Tonight’s double episode was supposed to start providing answers, but all I found out was what was in the guitar case. And I didn’t care about the guitar case contents that much. I recognized the ankh, an Egyptian symbol. It’s supposed to symbolize eternal life. Interesting note from Wikipedia that may have nothing whatsoever to do with LOST: “the depiction of the Ancient Egyptian Ankh was preserved by the Copts in their representation of the Christian cross.” It does look like a cross to someone like me, bathed in Christianity and Christian symbols.

And then they went and “baptized” Sayid, practically drowning him in the process. I felt so sorry for Sayid in this episode when he was talking to Hurley about what would happen to him after death. He was so guilty, and I wanted to run in there and give him the hope of the gospel. “Yes, you’ve done horrible stuff. But you can be forgiven. You’ve been bought with a price! Jesus can redeem you!”

So has Sayid become Jacob? Or vice-versa? Sort of the way Smokey Guy has become a Locke twin? And what’s with Locke having two bodies? One dead and one alive. Was Jacob using Christian Shepherd’s body, and now he’s using Sayid’s?

I think we know for sure who the “good guys” are and who the “bad guys” are. If they’re with Jacob, even after Jacob’s death, they’re good, and if they’re with Mr. Fake Locke, they’re bad guys. And Ben’s so confused, he doesn’t know which side he’s on anymore.

Has Time itself split into two streams? The LOSTies at LAX are going from bad to worse as they pursue their not-so-merry lives. Did you notice that none of the Tailies showed up on the airplane, except for Bernard and that stewardess, Cindy. Where are Libby and Ana Lucia and Eko? And how did Desmond get on the plane? (Ha, Desmond is seeing Jack in another life, brotha!)

Meanwhile back on the island, they’re still alive even after the explosion of a hydrogen bomb. How can that be? And how did Juliet know that “it worked?”

I don’t want Juliet to be dead—again. In LOST no one is completely, totally, without a doubt, dead until they’re buried and Miles can hear them speak from the dead. Sayid wasn’t dead, and Miles knew it. Juliet is dead, at least in island time.

The book that Hurley picked up in the tunnels underneath (?) the temple was Fear and Trembling by Soren Kierkegaard. According to Eldest Daughter, who’s a fan of Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling is mostly about the story of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22. For Kierkegaard, Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac was an example of “faith” which is contrary to reason and even absurd. The Knight of Faith, against reason according to Kierkegaard, believes that with God all things are possible and works out his salvation “with fear and trembling.” (Philippians 2:12)

Jack tells Locke in this episode that “nothing is irreversible” in reference to Locke’s paralysis. Could this statement also refer to Jack’s decision to detonate the hydrogen bomb and send them all back to their miserable pre-crash lives?

Also, Lostpedia says that Desmond was reading Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie. It’s a novel about Indian history and the events leading up to India’s independence. I’ve never read anything by Rushdie, but this Booker prize-winning novel is said to feature “magical realism.” Give me magic or give me realism; magical realism confuses me.

No live blogging at Thinklings, but there are lots of comments.
Bill: “In this series we’ve done flash backs. Then we did flash forward. Now we’re doing flash sidewayses.”