The Seven Deadly Sins - Envy

There’s a story told about a poor farmer who was visited in a dream by an angel. And the angel said ‘I’ve got good news for you, my friend. God has decided to bless you. He’s going to give you three requests, and within reason you can ask for whatever you want. There’s only one condition. Your neighbour will get a double portion of everything that’s given to you.”

When he woke up, the farmer told his wife what had happened and she said “well, we’ll have to put this to the test.”

So together, they prayed – “Lord, you know we’re only poor farmers. But if we had a hundred head of cattle, life would be so much better – we’d be able to make a good living. Can you please see to that for us? Amen”.

They’d no sooner finished their prayer than there was mooing and bellowing from outside the window. And they went outside to find a hundred good sturdy beasts grazing on their land.

Naturally they were overjoyed and thankful, and they spent the next couple of days making provision to cope with their new herd and praising God for his goodness. But while he was out putting up some new fences, the man happened to look up to his neighbour’s land and there he counted 200 head of fine cattle.”

He’d forgotten that part of the bargain. And as he trudged back home through the animals that just an hour earlier had given him such satisfaction, a spark of envy began to burn in his heart.

“Never mind” said his wife. “There’s more to life than cattle. What about children? Maybe if we ask the Lord, he’ll help us conceive, even though we’ve not managed to, these past ten years”.

And so they made that prayer. And sure enough, in time they were blessed with a healthy son to carry on their name and their line. And after all of that waiting, they couldn’t have been happier….

Until they turned up at Church to have the boy baptised and found their neighbour there as well. “Sure there must have been something in the water nine months ago” he said. “God’s blessed us with family too!”. And indeed he had. Twins. A boy and a girl.

The farmer smiled through gritted teeth as the children were baptised. But somewhere inside, that spark of envy grew into a flame, consuming his happiness and making him angry not just at his neighbour but at God as well.

Fool that he was, he kindled those fires instead of trying to douse them. And by the end of the week he was ready to make his last, terrible request of God.

But you’ll have to wait til the end of the sermon to find out what it was!

Of all the seven sins we’re going to look at in this sermon series, Envy is unique because it’s the only one which doesn’t bring us any pleasure at all. 

Pride makes you feel good about yourself; greed bolsters your sense of self worth and security. Sloth lets you check out and bury your head in the sand; anger lets you vent your fury at someone. There’s fellowship and enjoyment to be had in gluttony, illicit pleasure in lust.

But envy offers nothing by way of compensation. As Billy Graham once said “I defy you to show me an envious person who is also happy person”.

Strange, then, that something which offers so little should still exert such a big hold over us. But we’ll get to that in due course.

The eighth-century monk and theologian John of Damascus says that ‘envy is discontent over someone else’s blessings’ while Thomas Aquinas defined it as ‘sadness at the happiness or glory of another’.

But my favourite definition is this one  – “Envy is the art of counting the other fellow’s blessings instead of your own.” Exactly the mistake the farmer was making in the story I was telling you.

Envy is the only one of the seven deadly sins that’s directly addressed in the Ten Commandments. We’re told in the last of the ten not to covet our neighbour’s home or partner or possessions. 

And when, as sometimes happens, people go through the exercise of trying to update the ten commandments for use in our secular society, they drop all the ones relating to God, but the one about envy always seems to stay in there. People still know that there’s something profoundly destructive and ugly about envy.

The novelist Zadie Smith puts it this way:

That the concept of envy as a sin should retain its weight despite the present debilitation of the church and God himself is, I think, a part of our contemporary self-centredness. We don’t mind being seen to be angry or lustful or even lazy, but we dislike being seen as envious. It is unattractive. And our vanities superseded our virtues some time ago.

And yet it’s exactly that vanity which makes us so susceptible to envy. The desire to look good, to have whatever makes us look good, to be associated with whatever makes us look good is a huge factor in human motivation, and one that’s played on mercilessly by the advertising agencies as they strive to sell us the Emperor’s New Clothes.

Is a £35 designer T-shirt really that much better than a £5 one from Markies? Are the £150 trainers that much better than the £40 ones?  What are you paying for? The brand. The image. Because you want to look good, and society tells us that owning these things, wearing these things will make you look good.

It’s best not to play that game at all, I think. To rise above that kind of superficiality. That certainly seems to be Jesus’ way  – “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat; or about your body, what you will wear. Life is more than food, and the body more than clothes. But seek first God’s kingdom and these things will be given to you as well”.

The best option is not to play those kind of games at all. But the worst option is to be taken in by them and end up looking on enviously at those who seem to be doing better. To live in a constant state of unhappiness and anxiety because others – according to the world’s standards – are doing better than you. That’s just a recipe for misery.

And so in our times, we find this strange dichotomy at work. Whether religious or not, we all agree that envy is a bad thing. And yet so much of our society and our economy positively encourages envy, because it’s easier to sell things to people when they’re jealous of what other folk have.

It’s a modern problem, but its roots are ancient. Right back there in Genesis 4. If pride is the original sin, then envy is its grumpy younger sibling and we first see it manifesting in the life of Cain, the oldest son of Adam and Eve.

Cain tends the land, his brother Abel tends the flock, and when it comes time to sacrifice, Abel’s offering of a firstborn lamb is accepted by God, but Cain’s offering of grain isn’t.

And there’s no explanation given for that in the story; why was one sacrifice acceptable and the other wasn’t?

Well, we can only guess, but given that elsewhere in the Bible God seems quite happy to accept crops as well as animals in sacrifice, I don’t think it can be what was offered that was the problem. It’s more like to have been how it was offered. Was it given generously, sacrificially? Or was it given grudgingly? Was it the best of his crop Cain offered, or the leftovers?

In verse seven God tells Cain “If you’d done the right thing, you would be smiling, but because you have done evil, sin is crouching at your door.”

The issue is with the heart of the one making the offering, not the fact that it was grain rather than a live animal.  God seems to sense some ingratitude or holding back within Cain, and he’s not pleased by what he offers.

And that, we’re told, makes Cain furious. But who’s he furious with?

Well it’s possible that he’s angry at himself. We all know that when we get caught doing wrong, there’s a part of us that wants to kick ourselves for being found out. But the human ego being what it is, we always manage to find a way of pinning the blame of someone else.

Cain’s shame at his poor offering turns to envy and anger at Abel’s acceptable one, and so poor Abel – who’s done no wrong - finds himself in the firing line. Cain envies his acceptance by God, resents it. Possibly even thinks it’s unfair. And though he wouldn’t dare say it, God’s in his firing line too for humiliating him in this way; for exposing the paucity of his gift and embarrassing him in front of his younger brother.

But even as Cain fumes and scowls, God still leaves the door open for reconciliation. Cain can still make things good. He has choices.

He can ask God where he went wrong. He can repent and offer a better sacrifice. He can swallow his pride and learn his lesson. He can still do the right thing.

But he does none of those. Instead he turns his back on God and walks away. The envy festers and spills over into anger, hatred and murder.

Cain kills Abel, but in doing so, he manages to destroy his own life at the same time. God places him under a curse and sends him away from the land for good; though even in God’s anger there’s still room for mercy. Even as he sends Cain away, he has some sympathy for him and places a mark on him so that no-one will be tempted to kill him.

It’s a salutary tale; and it goes some way to explaining why the Church Fathers took envy so seriously. It’s dangerous not just for what it is in its own right, but for the more serious sins it can lead to if left unchecked.

In a world like ours, there will always be occasions for envy. We’re always confronted by the glass that’s half empty and half full at the same time. We’ll always have opportunities to be grateful for what we have, or resentful for what we don’t have – and bitter that others should have more than us, or have done better than us.

Like Cain – we too have choices, when we feel envy beginning to take hold.

So how do we fight back?

Well the ancients suggested three strategies.

When we find ourselves getting angry at God because of what others have – the health they enjoy, the breaks that seem to come their way, we do well to remember that God isn’t a cosmic puppeteer – pulling all the strings all the time. Much as we would like him to, he doesn’t seem to reward the good and punish the wicked, in this life at least. In this life, he seems to send blessings and woes on both. This is how things are.

You can’t look at the good things your neighbour has and wonder why God’s blessing him and not you. And you can’t look at your own problems and think they’re all sent by God to test you. Life doesn’t work that way, and it doesn’t help to think that way.

Secondly – we need to train ourselves to value the right things. If the culture we live in values things that are superficial – celebrity, wealth, possessions - we need to keep reminding ourselves of what really matters. That’s why getting to church, keeping in prayer, reading the scriptures, being in fellowship with others who think the same way is important.  It keeps you grounded in God in a culture which tells us that God’s an irrelevance.

The apostle Paul says that only three things last forever – there’s nothing else we can take with us when we go  - only faith, hope and love. It’s a wise man or woman who invests in those commodities.

And then, thirdly, remember that the secret of contentment is to have something that cannot be taken away from you and cannot be bettered. And we have that in Christ.

Do you remember the story Jesus tells about the man who’s out digging in a field and finds a hoard of treasure. He goes and sells everything he has to secure that field, and make the treasure his own. And when the deal’s complete – he’s over the moon, because he has his heart’s desire and he knows that nothing will ever better it.

It’s just the same with a man or a woman who’s decided to risk everything on following Christ. You only make that choice if you’re already convinced that it’s the best possible choice for your life. That everything else pales into insignificance beside the immense joy and privilege of knowing him.

If we are in Christ, we don’t need to envy anyone anything, because we already have what matters most.

I have a story to finish, don’t I?

I need to tell you about the farmer’s final wish. The one he made when he was almost totally consumed by envy.

“Lord”, he prayed – “I want you to pluck out my right eye. I’d gladly go through life half blind for the satisfaction of knowing my neighbour will never look again on all that he has”.

There was a long silence, and then a voice from heaven said “No. This shall not be. Only sin could turn an offer of blessing into an occasion for evil. What you are proposing is the devil’s work, my son, not the Lord’s”.

 The Jewish folk have a saying – “ as rust corrupts iron, so envy corrupts the human soul.”

Friends, don’t give envy any space in your soul. Your jealousy may not hurt others, but I can guarantee it will end up hurting you.

Amen, and thanks be to God for his word.