Is Envy always wrong?

You are listening to Shameless Popery with Joe Heschmeyer, a production of Catholic Answers.

Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. It is February 2024 and there’s a lot going on in the United States right now, particularly on the political and sports front. Politically, it’s becoming increasingly clear the general election is going to be a rematch against Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Sports-wise, the Super Bowl’s almost here, and my beloved Kansas City Chiefs are going to be facing off against the San Francisco 49ers. What do these two things have in common?

Well, specifically in sports as well as in politics, we often find ourselves not so much rooting for our candidate or our team, particularly if our team didn’t make it to the Super Bowl or our candidate didn’t make it to the general election, we often may find ourselves rooting against the other side, the other team, the other candidate, you name it. And so the question is, is this okay?

So another way to talk about this is what do we mean when we talk about words like jealousy and envy? Now, I know those are words that we often use interchangeably. If you want to be really technical about it, they’re not the same.

I’m not jealous, I’m envious. Jealousy is when you’re worried someone will take what you have. Envy is wanting what someone else has. What I feel is envy.

Wow, he’s right.

But within envy, it’s not just wanting something someone else has, we’re going to unpack that, but more specifically, there’s a sorrow associated with it.

Now, St. Thomas Aquinas in the Summa calls envy, “Sorrow for another’s good.” This has kind of the flip side where either you are sad that something is going well for the other person, or you have what the Germans called schadenfreude where you’re happy something is going badly for them.

So what do you think of your bestest buddy now, Marge?

Dad, do you know what schadenfreude is?

No, I do not know what schadenfreude is. Please tell me because I’m dying to know.

It’s a German term for shameful joy, taking pleasure in the suffering of others.

Oh, come on, Lisa. I’m just glad to see him fall flat on his butt! He’s usually all happy and comfortable and surrounded by loved ones, and it makes me feel… What’s the opposite of that shameful joy thing of yours?

Sour grapes.

Boy, those Germans have a word for everything,

But whether we’re talking about schadenfreude or sour grapes, whether we’re talking about feeling good that it didn’t go well for the other guy or feeling bad that it did go well for the other guy, the question we need to be facing, particularly as Christians, but really anyone trying to live a virtuous life, is that okay? Is that something we should be feeling or is that something we should be repenting of and turning away from?

Well, St. Thomas Aquinas fascinatingly suggests it all depends on why we’re feeling what we’re feeling. He argues that the kind of sorrow you may feel for another person’s good, there’s four reasons you may be feeling that. And this is also going to be four reasons you might feel delight in their downfall.

So let’s look at reason number one. We are worried about the triumph of evil. So Aquinas puts it like this. He says, “Well, when you grieve for another’s good, through fear that it may cause harm either to himself or to some other goods, that’s not really envy.” In other words, you’re not just hating the other person, you’re worried about them. What happens if that candidate wins? What are they going to do? How many people are going to suffer? That’s not envy, that’s not schadenfreude, that’s not anything of a shameful kind of emotion at all. That’s fear.

And so Aquinas says, “That kind of sorrow is an envy, but is an effect of fear,” or maybe that’s a more precise way of saying it. It’s not fear itself, it’s how we respond to the fear. “Oh, no, there’s this big threat. Now the threat is averted.” Someone tries to break into your house, they’re not able to. You’re relieved not because you’re, “Oh, I wanted their day to go worse.” No, because you were worried what was going to happen if they got in the house. That is a completely normal rational kind of response.

Now, Pope Saint Gregory the Great has a great deal to say on the issue of envy and all of the kind of related emotions, and he does this in a commentary on Job that’s pretty famous called Moralia in Job. And one of the things he says is, “It often happens that, without charity being lost, the destruction of an enemy rejoices us, and his glory, without any sin of envy, saddens us.” In other words, yeah, without a lack of love for the other person, I might still be really worried that he wins an election or that he gets a promotion or that he succeeds in the plan he’s got because I think the plan is bad and dangerous. That’s not a lack of charity for the other person, or at least it doesn’t have to be.

Now, Gregory is going to be really clear. He says, “Important for this not being something like envy is that you’ve got to have the right thought of the heart.” In other words, you’re focused not just on the individual but on what the individual is going to do towards other people, that you’re actually maybe even showing the depth of your love for the people that are going to be harmed by the bad person winning or the bad plan succeeding.

And Gregory makes a profound point that in the Psalms, we see this kind of language in really shocking kind of terms. Psalm 58:10 says, “The righteous will rejoice when he sees the vengeance; he will bathe his feet in the blood of the wicked.” Now, how do we make sense of those kind of grizzly sounding passages that look like the kind of thing we’re elsewhere forbidden to do? Well, Gregory’s going to talk about that because this is really the extreme case, and this is the damnation of the wicked. It doesn’t get more extreme in terms of their downfall than eternal separation from God.

Well, Gregory is going to say, as we think about how to make sense of passages like this, we have to think about a couple distinctions. The first one is, is this person ungodly or are they just your enemy? Because there are a lot of enemies out there who may not be ungodly. And in fact, if the person you regard as your enemy is beloved by other people and they seem to be good to everybody besides you, maybe you’re the problem. But nevertheless, Gregory stresses this because it’s very easy to assume, “Because I don’t get along with that person, that person is wicked,” and he wants to check that in us because that can be a really unhealthy spiritual impulse.

But nevertheless, he says, “Okay, let’s take the person who is the enemy of ourselves and a great many person, someone who’s just a threat to society. When they’re destroyed, we should be feeling two things. On the one hand, we should be glad for the escape of our neighbors, but not just the destruction of our enemy as such.” When Hitler kills himself, you shouldn’t be happy that a person commits suicide. That’s abhorrent. You can be happy that the Holocaust was quickly brought to an end. You should be happy about that. And so likewise, when God almighty smites a bad man, we should feel sorrow for the bad man, for the way his life was ruined, for the way he didn’t become the saint God desired him to be. And at the same time, we should be feeling joy that justice wins out, that the wicked don’t triumph, that there is final judgment and all is made right in the world.

Those two seem like competing emotions, but hopefully that’s clear enough, that when I watch football games at my parents’ house, my mom often starts to feel very bad for the other team if they’re losing in the fourth quarter. And we always kind of tease her for this, but that’s a good spiritual impulse to have that compassion, even for those you’re regarding as your opponent, or in a bigger case, as your enemy. You don’t want to just delight in the downfall of other people, whether that’s a sports team or a war or a political election or whatever that is, we should be able to balance, okay, the good outcome is going to happen now because their plan didn’t work and that’s good, and this person, who maybe is a bad person, who maybe had bad ideas, maybe they weren’t a bad person but still were going to hurt other people, we can still feel some pity, some sorrow for them and for their downfall even if we regard the downfall as good.

Hopefully that’s clear. That’s the first kind of way might feel sorrow at another’s triumph or happiness at their downfall because fear motivates us to be worried about what would happen if they succeeded.

The second reason we might be feeling sorrow or joy is because we want what they have. Now, this already sounds a lot more like envy, but Aquinas is going to say, “Not necessarily,” because maybe we want what they have and it’s something we should also have. This is called zeal. So zeal here doesn’t just mean like you’re impassioned about something. Zeal here means something a little more specific in the way Aquinas is using it.

He says, “If you are zealous about virtuous goods, that’s praiseworthy.” And then he quotes 1 Corinthians 14, which says, “Be zealous for spiritual gifts.” In other words, if you see, “Hey, that person has a great prayer life, I want that,” that’s not envy. You’re just desiring to imitate someone who’s a good spiritual example.

There’s a great line. Saint Gregory Nazianzus writes about his friendship with Saint Basil. They were two of what are called The Cappadocian Fathers. And the two of them were lifelong friends. And Gregory, reflecting upon this, says, “If it is not too boastful to say, we found in each other a standard and rule for discerning right from wrong.” You see that trying to imitate one another, they grew in holiness. They saw something in each other that they both wanted and it led them on to become holier. And as a result, both of them are saints, and that’s what friendship should be and that’s what merit should be.

You make me want to be a better man.

So when it comes to spiritual traits, spiritual goods where we ought to imitate one another, zeal is good. And there’s an important distinction here because material things are zero-sum in a way spiritual things aren’t. And by spiritual things, I just mean non-material things, like an idea is like that. I’ll give you an example.

If I like your car and I decide to take it, you don’t have your car anymore. It’s a physical good. It can’t be in two places at once. But if I like your worldview and decide to take it as my own, you don’t suddenly say, “Oh, where did my worldview go? I don’t have a worldview anymore.” No, no, because that’s the kind of thing that can spread without any loss. A spiritual idea, a spiritual anything, because it’s not material, it’s not made of matter, can spread. This is why, when we talk about God doing stuff and us doing stuff, it isn’t like, “I give this amount and therefore God only has this much room left.” Things don’t work like that. And so once you recognize that, you see why zeal is good because me wanting what you have in the spiritual realm doesn’t take it from you.

What about the physical material realm? What if I do want your car? Is that envy? Well, it can be, or it can be something like zeal, but applied to physical things.

Now, what makes this more complicated is when it’s about temporal goods, it might be sinful or it might be sinless, but either way, this, what we’re talking about here, is not of itself envy. It might be a different sin. It might be coveting. I just think, “Ah, I wish I had all of those things because I’m greedy,” right? It could be something like that. But even here, wanting the physical goods of another person isn’t inherently sinful.

There’s a really easy example: a person goes to sell their house. Now, if home sales are ever going to happen, it relies on the fact that you want a house somebody else already owns because if you don’t, no one’s going to sell a lot of houses. And so it’s okay in some contexts to want the physical goods of another. We need to constantly be on guard against greed, against covetousness, against all of those things, and not building up our treasure here below, but by themselves, those are not evil things. By themselves, it isn’t. Wanting material goods is not inherently evil, anything like that.

So the third reason we might feel sorrow at another’s success and prosperity is just because we don’t think they deserve it. Or conversely, we might feel happy when someone we think doesn’t deserve what they have loses it. So Aquinas talks about this as just them being unworthy of the good that they possess. And he said, “Okay, well, that doesn’t make sense if you’re talking about virtuous goods. That person doesn’t deserve the faith. Well, none of us do.” And so things like that, you should never feel sorrow that another person is spiritually growing. So if you see someone who’s lived a wicked life and then they convert on their deathbed and you say, “Ah, how dare they?” That is sinful. That’s not really the sin of envy, but it’s still sinful.

The term Aquinas uses for this doesn’t make a lot of sense in English because the word is nemesis and we have a different meaning of the word nemesis, but originally, the word nemesis meant something like indignation. We are annoyed when we see TikTok stars become millionaires, right? There’s just this sense of that person doesn’t deserve to be prosperous given what they’ve done. Or if TikTok stars aren’t what gets the bee in your bonnet, maybe it’s a sweatshop owner, maybe it’s an heir or heiress who’s just received their money from their parents. There are all sorts of people who don’t really deserve the fortune that they have. And I think this nemesis, this indignation, comes out in some pretty ugly ways.

So for instance, I believe it was called the Titan, the submarine that was going down to look at the Titanic, and there was a horrible catastrophe and the people on it died. I was shocked, maybe I shouldn’t have been, I was shocked at just how callous and cruel the responses I saw were to it, even while we didn’t know if they were alive or dead. People rejoicing over the fact that strangers they’d never met were dying possibly slow, painful, agonizing deaths. And you say, “Well, why? Why would they be doing that? Why would you rejoice over that?” Well, it turned out just because they were rich, that there was a hatred of the rich.

Now, that might be the fourth way, which is of course envy itself, that we don’t have money and so we want everyone who does have money to suffer because we feel a lack and our smallness makes us bitter towards those who have what we don’t. Or it might be nemesis. Maybe we think they don’t deserve to have it. That’s kind of a rationalization we do many times when we fall into envy. But either way, Aquinas says, “Don’t do this. Don’t fall into this.”

Now, he admits, unlike with spiritual goods, you might be right when it comes to material goods. Now, of course you’re right when it comes to spiritual goods. Everyone who’s ever converted gets something they don’t deserve: the mercy of God. With physical goods like money, you might also be right. The person, it doesn’t really make sense that they’re rich. But Aquinas still says, “Don’t go down that road.”

Why? Because according to what we believe as Christians, temporal goods go to those who are unworthy for one of two reasons. One, to help lead to their correction. They get prosperity in some way, shape, or form, and it helps them be saved. Or two, it leads to their condemnation, their just punishment for being wicked, that God will say, “Look, I gave you every opportunity, I gave you every prosperity, and you were greedy and selfish, and you didn’t use it.” But either way, this worldly injustice won’t remain an injustice forever. It will either turn into their spiritual good or it’ll be corrected in the justice of God. But either way, don’t get worked up over this passing injustice because the injustice will be made right one way or the other.

And so he says, “Such goods are as nothing in comparison of the goods to come, which are prepared for good men.” That’s the second point, that you can’t really logically get upset that someone is a billionaire who doesn’t deserve to be if you also realize you are predestined to eternal salvation and don’t deserve to be, you are prepared for eternal glory and don’t deserve to be. Those two things, when you realize that you are the beneficiary of an outrageous mercy of God that you do not in any way, shape, or form deserve, then getting upset that somebody else gets some money for a while before they die is trivial and stupid.

And so Aquinas says, “Nemesis,” sorrow of this kind, “is forbidden in Scripture,” and he points to two places. In Psalm 37, the psalmist says, “Fret not yourself because of the wicked. Be not envious of wrongdoers, for they will soon fade like the grass and wither like the green herb.” All of the stuff you’re worried about them having that you don’t is fleeting. It’s not worth getting upset about, not in the eternal scheme of things. And in Psalm 73, the psalmist acknowledges, “As for me, my feet had almost stumbled, my steps had well nigh slipped for I was envious of the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.” And again, the point of Psalm 73 is twofold. One, this is a spiritual danger that the psalmist was facing, and two, God will set these things right and so you don’t need to worked up about it.

That then leaves the fourth way that we might be feeling that sorrow for another and for their good, and that’s that we want to tear down those people who have what we don’t have. And this is envy itself, that we don’t have it, we feel a lack because we don’t have it, and our response isn’t zeal to get it for ourselves. Our response isn’t just, “They don’t deserve to have it.” Our response is, “I want that taken away from them so that they can’t have it either.”

Some men just want to watch the world burn.

Aquinas puts it like this, “We grieve over another man’s good insofar as his goods surpasses ours.” Let’s pause on that point because Gregory makes the same point, that envy is a small vice. I don’t mean by that that it’s not morally significant. It’s extremely morally significant. I mean, there’s a smallness to it. It’s a loser vice, that the person who feels envy is feeling a lack within themselves. And so if this is something that you find yourself feeling regularly, that should be a good diagnostic to say, “Okay. Well, look, if things are going well for you, you’re not living a life of envy.”

Now, it’s not small like humble either. You can be extremely proud and be envious because you think a lot of things are owed to you and then they don’t come to you because maybe they’re not really owed to you, but nevertheless, there’s a smallness, a pettiness, if you will, to envy. “Oh, somebody else got something I didn’t have.”

I like to share stories about my kids. I’m hoping they’re not going to regret me sharing these stories when they’re grownups, but sometimes you’ll see this, we’ll just say, among toddlers, I won’t give particular details, where one of them gets a treat and the other one doesn’t. And maybe they’ve done something to deserve to not get a treat, and the one who doesn’t get a treat will go over and just knock it out of the hands of the one who has it. They don’t steal it for themselves. It’s not covetousness. It’s envy, it’s destructive.

And that should point to there’s a darkness there. I don’t mean for a toddler, I mean like an adult who lives and acts that way, there’s something profoundly dark about that where it’s not even… The person who’s covetous might be trying to build themselves up in a really silly and dumb way by getting more and more stuff for themselves, but the person who’s envious isn’t trying to build themselves up at all. They’re trying to tear down everybody they think is above them. And so that’s the really disturbing, kind of terrifying thing about it is this is a sin that just wants to see the world burn. This is a sin that just wants to bring everyone else down.

That is, and I think I will go on record as saying, I think we see a lot of this in politics. It is reasonable to be annoyed at things like economic inequality, particularly if people are getting hurt by it. If you’re worried, “Hey, rich people are rich and they’re using their money in ways that are harmful to the poor,” that’s much more like the first way. If you’re just saying, “I’m upset that rich people are rich because they don’t deserve to be rich because they didn’t actually earn their money,” that’s like nemesis. Logically, you may be right, but spiritually, it’s bad to go down that road. But if you are just upset because people are rich and you are not, and your solution to that isn’t, “How can I become more successful,” but, “how do I tear down the people above me?” Now you’re just in envy.

And so I’ve been struck by this in terms of even conversations like about privilege, white privilege, male privilege, fill in the blank, where the problem isn’t, “Hey, here’s this group that doesn’t have access. Let’s try to build them up.” The problem, as it’s depicted, is, “This person, things are going really well for them. They’ve got privileges.” I want everyone to have privileges. Privileges are good, particularly if privileges aren’t directly harming anybody else.

So to give one example, and I always hate giving political examples, that’s not really what this is about, but I’m hoping this will help elucidate a certain thing spiritually. There’s an argument. I don’t care, for our purposes, how accurate or how true it is or any of these things. Just work with me here. There’s an argument that African Americans face a much tougher time with the criminal justice system than white Americans. And that’s a fine thing to be worried about. That is a good thing to be worried about if your concern is how do we make sure there aren’t innocent people being harmed by the system? But if instead it’s in terms of white privilege of these people are getting too easy of a pass, now it’s starting to look like envy, that, “Things are going badly for me, so I want them to go badly for you too.”

That’s what I mean by the smallness. It’s not, “How do I build myself up or build other people up?” It’s, “How do I tear the people above me down to my level?”

And so Aquinas is very clear that envy, properly speaking, which is what this fourth way is, always sinful because spiritually, that is not what we’re called to be doing as Christians, just tearing people down out of envy. And specifically, Aquinas says, “To do so is to grieve over what should make us rejoice, namely our neighbors’ good.” If you’ve got privilege and all of these things and those things aren’t directly harming me, even if I don’t also get them, I should be happy for you. If you live in a country that has a great education system and a great healthcare system, even if I’m in a place where I don’t have access to a great healthcare system or a great education system, my response should be, “That’s wonderful for you,” not, “this is an inequality I need to stop against you.”

And so the politics of envy are really dangerous and destructive. You’ll find this in cities a lot of times that, oh, the public school system isn’t very good, but the private schools and the charter schools and all of these things are going really well. We can’t give kids vouchers because then some kids are going to get a leg up. It’s like, “Wait a second. You’re going to harm these kids by not allowing them better education just because someone else might not get a better education as well?” It’d be better if one child got a better education than nobody. It’s envy that works in that kind of way.

So again, I know using any kind of political example is really loaded, but I give that just to suggest that’s something to watch out for, that you’re rooting against anyone else, whether it’s another team, another political party, another group of people, another ethnicity, another fill in the blank, watch out for that because I think it’s much more widespread than we acknowledge and it’s much more dangerous, and it’s easy to cloak it in the language of justice, but if the solution to the injustice isn’t building up the oppressed but is tearing down those who aren’t oppressed, that’s not the Christian solution.

Now, I need to be very clear here. There is a sense in which the Christian solution involves casting down the mighty from their thrones, as Mary prayed in The Magnificat. But that’s not just because, “Oh, there’s mighty people in their thrones.” It’s because God up-ends things and He does correct injustices. So if there’s an oppressor, it’s fine to root against that oppressor. That’s back to the very first way. It’s okay if you’re worried about the effect someone oppressive is inflicting, but if you’re just worried that they’ve got something and you don’t, watch out because that is not a Christian approach.

Now, what’s the danger of envy? I’ve given a lot of political examples, maybe too many political examples. Let’s give some biblical ones. The first place we see it, of course, is in the Garden of Eden. Wisdom 2, reflecting on this, says, “For God created man for incorruption and made him in the image of His own eternity, but through the devil’s envy, death entered the world, and those who belong to his party experience it.” So the devil had a shared immortality and he loses it by rebelling against God, and then he sees Adam and Eve, who are given this gift of sharing in the immortality of God.

Now, the good thing would be to celebrate that, that even if you don’t have the gift of eternal life, it’s good that somebody else does. But of course that’s not how he reacts at all. He’s envious, I want to say jealous because of the misuse of the word, but he’s envious that they’ve got something he doesn’t have and so he strives to take it away from them. That’s the cruelty that leads to the fall, leads to original sin.

Shortly after this, we get the story of Cain and Abel. They’re two brothers. Now, Cain brings to God an offering of the fruit of the ground. That language is significant in ways that we can easily overlook. He doesn’t bring God the first fruits. He doesn’t bring God the first and best that he has. He brings him basically the leftovers, just the fruit of the ground. His brother, Abel, on the other hand, brings him the firstborn. He brings him the firstlings of the flock. So Abel presents God with the best of what he has. Cain presents God with the leftovers. God accepts Abel’s offering and rejects Cain’s offering.

There’s a spiritual point there that’s very profound. God does not want your leftovers, whether that’s your money, whether that’s your time. If you say, “I’ll see if I’ve got room for God in my budget and my schedule,” no, thanks, that’s not what He’s looking for. He’s either going to be first or He’s not going to be playing the game at all because you’re treating Him as something other than your Lord at that point. You’re treating Him as a third-tier kind of line item because if it’s your Lord, you make time for Him, and you make sure He gets the first and the best. Abel got that. Cain didn’t.

And Cain becomes angry when he realizes that Abel’s succeeding and he’s not. Now, it’s irrational for him to feel angry. What he should be feeling is zealous. He should be saying, “How do I get in the kind of spiritual place my brother’s in?” But instead, he responds with anger, and God corrects him for this. He says, “Why are you angry and why is your countenance fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted?” That’s the call to zeal. Step up your game, Cain. Don’t be worried that Abel’s succeeding and you’re not. Worry about the fact that you’re not succeeding. Look to your brother as an example, not as a rival. But of course, cain doesn’t respond that way. Instead, Cain brings his brother out in the field, betrays him and kills him. That’s envy in a nutshell.

So it’s remarkable that in the first four chapters of Genesis, we’re told two really horrible stories of the effects of envy.

Jump forward, still in Genesis here. There’s plenty of other examples of envy. Jacob and Esau, there’s a great example there. But Jacob, who later becomes known as Israel, has 12 sons and he loves one of them more than the others. He’s got a sentimental attachment because his favorite of his four wives died, and this was his child of his old age. He’s actually the eldest son of his favorite wife. So Genesis 37 talks about how he makes him a long robe with sleeves, later re-envisioned as an amazing technicolor dream coat.

Now, anyone who’s been in a family situation, especially with multiple kids, probably understands how this makes the brothers feel. I think everybody has a sense of who they think their parents’ favorite kid was, whether that’s accurate or not. And if it’s not you, and it usually isn’t, you probably feel some kind of way about it. And so Genesis 37 says, “When his brothers saw that their father loved Joseph more than all his brothers, they hated him. They could not speak peaceably to him.”

Now, Joseph has done nothing wrong here. He has done nothing to earn the hatred of his brothers. They are wanting the love of their father and they’re misdirecting that emotional pain. It’s an understandable pain; it’s an unhealthy reaction to it, just like Cain’s, frankly, is an understandable pain, but a bad reaction to it. Well, it’s going to get worse because Joseph, in addition to being his father’s favorite, is also a visionary. And so at the age of 17, he has a series of dreams. There’s two. But in both of them, the same point happens, that he is elevated and his brothers are kneeling before him or bowing before him. And as you can imagine, they already are mad at him, they already are hateful towards him, and they hate him all the more for his dreams and for his words.

This ultimately leads to one of the most disturbing scenes in the Book of Genesis, and there are a lot of disturbing scenes in the Book of Genesis. They decide to kill their brother. Now, fortunately, one of them stops the others and they decide instead to throw him into a well. And originally, the one brother was going to save him, but instead they decide to sell their own brother into slavery. Now, in the great mystery of God, this ends up working out for Joseph’s good, and not only for Joseph’s good, but even for the good of his brothers who have to come and entreat Joseph, not knowing who he is, down in Egypt.

I’m getting ahead of myself in this story, but the important thing here is that envy, this sibling envy, which is very natural, I think, I mean, it’s probably not a coincidence that we see sibling envy in three of the examples I mentioned here from Genesis, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers, Cain and Abel, that this leads to, rather than the brothers building each other up, them tearing one another down. And in this case, slavery, and the other case, murder. These are things to be very concerned about. It shows the ugliness of envy in a profound way.

I want to jump out of Genesis just to give one other example that I don’t know why it isn’t mentioned more as an example of envy, but it strikes me as a very clear example of envy. This is what’s sometimes called the Judgment of Solomon. It’s in 1 Kings 3. There are two women who are living together. Both of them are pregnant. Both of them give birth to a baby. One of them rolls over on the baby in the night and kills the baby. And we don’t know which one it was because one of the women claims the other woman switched the babies. So in the middle of the night, the other woman’s baby has died because she rolled over on the baby and suffocated it presumably, and so her solution is, in the night, to switch the babies around. They’re both newborns. Just raise this other woman’s baby as your own.

It’s a heartbreaking situation. And here again, I want to stress, you can understand where a feeling of loss is coming from because there’s been a tremendous and heartbreaking loss. And it’s even understandable where you would feel a sense of envy, like, “Why do I not have a child and that woman does?” But the reaction to it, if this first woman’s story is true, is completely inappropriate, of course, to steal her baby and to lie about this and give her your deceased baby.

Well, the other woman of course says that’s not what happened. And so both women are claiming that the living baby is theirs, and the baby that’s died is the other woman’s. Solomon settles on something that, at first blush, appears horrific, and I think it’s okay for it. I think it’s intended to appear horrific. Solomon says, “Bring me a sword.” And he then says, “Divide the living child in two, give half to the one, and half to the other.”

Now this, again, looks like just sheer barbarism, but it’s not. Solomon is making a test to see which of them shows evidence of envy. Why? Because one woman says, “Oh, my Lord, give her the living child. By no means slay it,” like, “I will lose custodial rights rather than have you kill my baby.” The other woman says, “It shall be neither mine nor yours divided.” Now, that is a chilling expression to stand in front of a newborn baby and say, “I would rather see this baby cut in half than to see this woman get the baby and me not.” That is envy in its purest and cruelest kind of form because she doesn’t say, “I love this baby so much, I need to have this baby.” No, she just doesn’t want the other woman to have it. And so of course, when you see those two reactions, you see which of them is lying and which one’s telling the truth.

So there’s many more examples I could give from the Bible, but I want to turn now briefly to the question of remedies. Maybe you see somewhere in your life where you struggle with envy. Maybe you can say, “Okay, I’ve been trying to justify this as something else, but I think I’m just feeling this smallness because I feel like I’m missing something. And my reaction to it is to be envious of those who have that thing that I want and to wish they didn’t have it.” How do you respond to that? How do you grow in the opposite direction of envy?

And here, I would recommend a good book that I’ve been working through and that I think is going to make good Lenten reading. I actually mentioned it a couple of days ago in the very short episode I did on the case for Lent. Brant Pitre’s book, Introduction to the Spiritual Life. The subtitle is Walking the Path of Prayer with Jesus, and it’s just a basic primer on spiritual life and talks about the beatitudes. And one of the points that he makes is the counterbalance against envy is mercy. Why is that? Well, because as we saw, Thomas Aquinas describes envy as sorry for another’s good, and mercy is rejoicing in another’s good. And so instead of being sorry that somebody else is doing well, I’m happy they’re doing well. This is what we’re called to in 1 Corinthians 12: “If one member suffers, all suffer together. If one member is honored, all rejoice together.”

Now, I’ve mentioned this before. This is hard for a couple of reasons. One, it’s hard because we can be very selfish and a lot of the envy is rooted in self-love and selfishness. But two, sometimes it happens that two different members of the body of Christ have conflicting goods. They’re both applying for the same job. Well, you can be sorry that person A didn’t get it, and be happy that person B did, and commiserate with the one and rejoice with the other without any hypocrisy because you’re caring for the good of the person, just like we saw earlier, Gregory was talking about how do you handle something like the death of the ungodly? Well, you should feel bad for them, even if you’re happy that they can’t inflict more harm.

So we’re called to what are sometimes complicated emotions, complicated kind of orientations of the heart: to rejoice with those rejoicing, to grieve with those who are suffering, and not only to grieve with those suffering, to suffer with those who are suffering.

And so in the book, Dr. Brant Pitre makes a nice, easy chart: envy grieves over another person’s good fortune, mercy grieves over another person’s misfortune; envy is rooted in love of self, “I want stuff, and I’m selfish enough that if I can’t have it, I don’t want you to have it,” mercy is rooted in love of neighbor.

Hopefully you can see how these are really important kind of counterbalances. So I would encourage you, if you’re someone who struggles with envy or if you see a particular area where you see envy has taken a place in your heart and you don’t want it to have that place, and you shouldn’t, then work on mercy. Work on mercy broadly if you need to, and then direct that mercy towards maybe the person or persons you find the hardest to be merciful towards. As you grow in that, I think you’ll find that envy has less hold over your life.

Last thing. It should be abundantly clear here, but envy is not doing you any favors. It is not making your life better. It is making you more bitter and more unpleasant, less enjoyable to be with, and it’s not getting you good things because envy isn’t even about getting good things. Zeal is about getting good things. Covetousness is about getting things you think are good that really aren’t. But envy, that’s just being mad somebody else is doing better than you are. You are made for more than that. So have enough self-respect to say, “I want more for my life than envy,” and let’s work this Lent on growing in something like mercy.

For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.

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