Envy
Of the seven deadly sins, the one I see most today in media and culture probably isn’t what you’d expect. Lust? Greed?
Actually, I’d say envy.
At least our culture, even in the midst of its lust and greed, still acknowledges those as sins. But envy? Envy is slick in its self-justifications. And we’re so blind to envy that we even wrap it up in virtuous talk . . . Today it wears the political cloak of ‘social justice’ and even when we dodge the self-righteous spur of ‘eat the rich’, we still like to pretend we’re Jesus, listing and ready to throw all the ‘woes’ we’re so sure apply to those others who have more than we do. Our envy comes served up on platters of pride, and even some ostensibly Christian leaders dish it out as if it were righteousness.
But we don’t speak to wealth and power today like Jesus does, with concern for those whose souls may be lost by the distraction and vanity of wealth. ‘Woe’ is not a cry of anger, as if threatening a strike or declaring punishment with a scoff. “Woe” is the agonized outcry one makes when you see someone else in the midst of grievous loss. ‘Woe’ is the word of heartache and distress we might use at the sight of a fatal bus crash underway before our eyes.
The truth about our culture, and us, is that we do not look at the wealthy and think ‘woe’. We look at them and think, ‘how dare they!’ In contrast to Jesus, we want to speak to wealth and power in order to strike a blow at those that have it, even in order to grab what we think they have and give it out where we think it should go. We approach the rich not with Jesus-like love and concern for the people most proximate to the dangers of mammon, but with vengeance and anger because they got to curl up in mammon’s bed. And we do that, perhaps in part, because of the popular lie that wealth comes only by the exploitation of someone else. That is false; wealth is created when human beings apply their reason and creative work to nature, as God designed, using it in order to produce things of beauty and value.
More than falling for that lie, however, (and perhaps the reason we are so easily beguiled by it), we approach the rich differently than Jesus because we have no filters for our own envy.
The dangers of wealth are practically met first by intentional generosity. If you’re of wealth, there is no escaping the radical call of responsibility laid upon you by God. The poor of the earth are all about you, and God is going to ask you hard questions about what has been entrusted to you, and what you did with it. Your ability to create wealth is itself a beautiful gift, perhaps even a vocation, but one with responsibilities before God. Woe to you if you receive much that way, but share little – you’re in danger. Live your life that way, and it may be that you’ve already seen all the wealth you’ll ever know. Woe to the wasting of your gift! But if you give and share, I expect you’ll feel God’s pleasure as you do.
Now, if you read that paragraph above, and think it only applies to others, then woe to you too, because envy is lying to you. You know it’s because of our envy, and not really our greed, that we live in such denial about how radically wealthy we in the west actually are? Because if you live in the west, wake up, lest envy tell you that you’re not really actually wealthy, and so not so seriously obligated to give and share and care for your neighbour. Envy will try to trick you into playing the game that you’d give or share more if you just had a little more, or if you had as much as _____ does. Watch out! Woe to you! Envy has you flying down a terrible path to destruction!
And beware even more: envy also uses the wealth or power of others to whisper mammon’s lie that you would only wear it’s ring of power for good. If you think Jesus wants you to help the poor by harming someone else, or by advocating that others be harmed, taking what they have, you are not in touch with Jesus. Instead of shouting and making excuses for coercion or even theft, why don’t you lead by radical giving yourself? Of course, envy tells us that the poor are always someone else’s responsibility. And we’ve even politically systematized that lie by voting for people who take care of the whole poverty thing for us. That bureaucratic way means the ‘really wealthy’ can have their stuff taken and redistributed to those other people in a way that frees us from ever being by their side. Because the truth is that a lot of the poor are people we don’t really like or trust . . . The poor, you know, whom Jesus loves.
Not even Robin Hood fell for the lies we’ve believed. Robin Hood didn’t steal from the rich. He stole from an evil king and state that overtaxed its own people into poverty, and he lived with the poor in the forest.
Immanuel Kant said that envy is “a propensity to view the well-being of others with distress, even though it does not detract from one’s own. [It is] a reluctance to see our own well-being overshadowed by another’s because the standard we use to see how well off we are is not the intrinsic worth of our own well-being but how it compares with that of others. [It] aims, at least in terms of one’s wishes, at destroying other’s good fortune.”
That sounds right to me. Though shalt not covet. One of the big ten. Beware envy, my friends.