Did your parents ever say to you, “Don’t let the green-eyed monster get you”? I know mine did. I was reminded of that a while back when I read an essay by Katie Chatelaine-Samsen in Sojourners magazine. She wrote, “I heard this phrase quite a bit when I was growing up. It seemed to be my parents’ favorite response when my siblings and I complained about a new toy that a friend received but we didn’t have, moped about an honor given to a classmate that we felt we should have been given, or even when we pointed out an unfair amount of attention bestowed on another sibling. It was their way of saying, ‘don’t be envious of what another person possesses.”
Envy actually is in the Top Ten, the Ten Commandments, by another name: “You shall not covet.” The term “green-eyed” to refer to envy was first used by William Shakespeare in his play, Othello, and later in The Merchant of Venice. And we sometimes say that someone was “green with envy,” implying that envy can be personified as a sick person.
Simply defined, “envy” means that we want what someone else has. That desire can even become resentment that someone else has something that we want. Lloyd John Ogilvie wrote, “Rooted in a lack of self-esteem, it grows in the soul-soil of comparisons and blooms in the noxious thorns of desire for what others have or achieve.” Many centuries ago, Thomas Aquinas wrote about envy as a kind of sadness, because we wish that things were other than the way they are in our lives. He wrote, “Envy is a special sort of sorrow over another’s goods.”
I distinctly remember the first time I felt envy. I was in the seventh grade and was trying to fit in at junior high. Many of my classmates were wearing Izod shirts, you know, the ones with the little alligator on the front. But I was wearing the J C Penney brand, the ones with the little fox on the front. But the fox wasn’t as good as the alligator. I knew this, because the alligator cost more than the fox. And so I began a campaign to get my parents to buy me an alligator shirt. I talked to them a lot about this. I told them how everyone knew the alligator shirts were better, and that I was looked down on as a nerd because I had shirts with foxes on them. I wanted an alligator shirt more than anything else in the world, because I knew that when I wore it, I would finally fit in, I would be one of the in-crowd. I would be announcing to my classmates, “I am as good as you.”
My parents were unimpressed with alligators. They told me that the fox shirts were just as good as the alligator shirts. They were made of the same material, they came in the same colors. The only difference was that one had a fox on the front and the other had an alligator. They just didn’t understand. They said that there was no way they were going to pay for an alligator shirt.
I continued to state my case, to beg and to plead, and probably to whine. Finally, my dad told me that he would give me enough money to buy a fox shirt, but that I would have to earn enough money to pay for the difference if I wanted to buy alligator shirt. So I did extra chores and babysat the neighbor kids and saved my money, and the day finally came when I could go to the department store and buy my alligator shirt. It was beautiful, a pastel pink. And I felt proud. For a little while. Until I wanted to go to the movies with my best friend and had no money because I had spent it all on the alligator shirt. And until I found out that even with my alligator shirt, the in-crowd didn’t welcome me with open arms. As it turns out, the alligator shirt really wasn’t any better than the fox shirt. Which was what my parents had told me all along.
Envy changes the way we look at things. Maybe that is why we talk about it as changing our vision, as causing us to be “green-eyed.” And it turns us into people we really aren’t, people we probably don’t want to be, something like monsters. Envy has a way of corroding our ability to rightly perceive the value of things, of other people, even of ourselves. Envy can turn our closest friends into competitors and make us cruel to those we love.
I remember reading this parable in Matthew 20 about the workers in the vineyard and getting angry. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like this story at all. I didn’t like the message. And I didn’t like the implications for me. It just didn’t seem fair. It wasn’t fair that the workers who worked all day only got paid the same amount as the workers who worked for only one hour, even if it was what they had agreed to. Somehow I felt outraged at the way they were treated by the landowner. They deserved a bonus! And instead, they received a lecture.
The story is about the kingdom of God, it is about the world the way that God intends it to be. And it is a story about grace. How can I find myself resenting those who receive God’s grace, the same as I received that grace? Perhaps Will Willimon has it right when he writes in his book, Sinning Like a Christian,
Those of us who have been lifelong Christians, attempting to follow Jesus from our youth, bored to tears for decades in Sunday School and long sermons, why should we not be envious when some little wayward lamb staggers back to the sheepfold, or some once Prodigal Son turns back toward home? Our God is gracious, forgiving, abounding in mercy. Grace, mercy, and forgiveness, when they are offered to you, can be just as envied by me, or even more envied, than cars, money, and power. Grace, when it is so freely offered to any and all comers, without regard to my merit, especially when offered to latecomers, seems somehow less gracious than when it was reserved for me.
It may seem strange to talk about envy when it comes to grace, or to think of Christians feeling envy at all. But being is religious gives you no protection from the sin of envy. There is a fable that some of Satan’s agents were doing their best to cause a holy man living as a hermit in the desert of northern Africa to sin. But every one of their attempts had failed. Satan got angry with these incompetents, and so he got involved in the case himself. He told them, “The reason you have failed is that your methods are too crude for such a man as this. Watch this.” And Satan approached the holy man with great care. He whispered softly in his ear, “Your brother has just been made Bishop of Alexandria.” Instantly, a scowl appeared on the holy man’s face. And Satan told his agents, “Envy is often our best weapon against those who seek holiness.”
There is another side to envy which is even uglier. It is known as Schadenfreude, or “perverse delight in the failures and misfortunes of others.” It means that we are glad when something bad happens to someone else. Will Willimon writes,
We were all just a bit too gleeful in the demise of Martha Stewart [a few years ago], a fabulously rich woman who kept her house better than we kept ours. To have this uppity woman slide into the hands of the district attorney, this was wonderful, Schadenfreude at its most delicious. Enjoy the feast, for someday we may wake up and realize that our righteous celebration in Martha’s fall may reveal more of our moral weakness than hers, an eating away at our souls due to envy.
So what is the solution to the sin of envy? How can we avoid being caught up in this deadly sin?
First, I think it would help to avoid making comparisons. And especially to avoid comparisons where we end up on the short end of the stick. Willimon writes,
To regard our lives as diminished, on comparison with our neighbor’s life, is to despise the God who gave us our lives as they are. It is to say that God made a mistake in making us as we are, in giving us the gifts that we have been given, and by implication, in making our neighbor and giving our neighbor the gifts that have been given.
We need to be able to see ourselves – and others – as the loved children of God, who has made us who we are and given us the gifts that God thinks we need.
Second, we need to deal with our desires at their source. Christian Piatt writes, in an essay for Sojourners, that we need to confront the myth that once we have enough things, or the right things, we will be happy. We won’t be happy, even if we get them. That is because true happiness can never come from things. It doesn’t matter how many things we have, they will not give us true happiness. We need to make peace with the gap between what we have and what we want. And we need to learn to be content with the things we have.
Third, we need to learn how to love with the love of Christ. In 1 Corinthians 13, the “love chapter,” Paul wrote that love is not envious. Of course, he wouldn’t be preaching against envy if it wasn’t a problem in the church. Apparently first-century Christians were no more immune to envy than 21st-century Christians. But we need to hear the same word from Paul, that Christian love cannot tolerate envy in the heart. We cannot truly love our brothers and sisters, much less our enemies, if we envy them.
If you really want to beware the green-eyed monster, avoid comparing yourself to others; deal with the fact that things cannot buy happiness; and learn how to love with the love of Jesus Christ. In that way, we can avoid the deadly sin of envy.
