Envy and Easter

Remember that guy who did commercials for Men’s Wearhouse in which his last line was, “You’re going to like the way you look”? This brief internal audit doesn’t begin that way. A couple months ago I saw a Tweet on the topic of envy that piqued my interest. I got to reading around on the topic, and quickly and unexpectedly found myself in a deep hole lined with mirrors. While I definitely do not like the way I look, I do believe that Jesus is the Master Clothier who helps us come out looking far better than we deserve.

 

One of the clearest explanations of envy that I’ve come across is in Cornelius Plantinga’s book, Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin. He writes, “Envy is the resentment of someone else’s good, plus the itch to despoil her of it. Its natural corollary is what the Germans call Schadenfreude, the enjoyment of someone else’s despoilment. The envier not only sorrows over another’s good fortune and wants it to change; he also rejoices in another’s misfortune and wants it to persist” (p. 169). That’s a pretty despicable look, isn’t it? And yet, sadly, it fits.

 

Now try this on for size: “Enviers want to be envied: they want to turn the tables on the people whose success makes them so miserable” (p. 170). And then, “The envier gossips. He saves up bad news of others and passes it around like an appetizer at happy hour. The envier grumbles. He complains that all the wrong people are getting ahead. Envy appears in the lists along with debauchery and dissension (Rom. 13:13); with quarreling, factions, anger, and slander (2 Cor. 12:20); with friction, suspicion, and malice (1 Tim. 6:4). These are devastating anti-community sins, the sins of attack on communal peace” (p. 171).

 

When I read that extensive description, there are parts of it I do not currently identify with. Which tempts me to then conclude I’m not guilty of any of it. But I know better. Think of the scope of any one particular sin as if it’s pants with an elastic waist band. Try as I might to shrink it down, the damnable thing still fits.

 

Upon further inspection, the look gets worse. In his book, Taking the Word to Heart: Self and Others in an Age of Therapies, Robert Roberts refers to pride and envy as, “invidious twins.” He writes, “The proud person is nothing without someone inferior to himself from whom to get his sense of worth. And who fits this role better than one who voluntarily shows, by his envy, that he recognizes the proud person’s superiority and hates it because he wants the very same thing the proud person cherishes—ascendency? The envious one would not suffer this particular self-hatred if he did not join the proud person’s game of making his personal worth depend on how well he is doing in the competition” (p. 178).  

 

Within a matter of a few minutes I can be in a place where I’m feeling rather proud of something, and with a little piece of information the script can flip and I find myself wracked with envy. Let’s say I learned that one of my kids just got hired by the Amazing Dream Company, and I couldn’t be more proud. I want to tell you about it. But then you tell me your youngest child just got accepted into the Amazing Dream University after I just learned the day before that mine did not. I then find out a short while later that the wife of Mr. Uber Successful had a stroke last week, which brings his life down a few notches and I somehow feel ok with that.

 

Here’s the crazy thing: I can experience a version of all that during the meet-and-greet at church on Sunday.

 

It was no different during Jesus’ day. For one example among many, in the parable of the vine-growers, Jesus makes the point that, “when the vine growers [the Jewish leaders] saw him [Jesus], they reasoned with one another, saying, ‘This is the heir; let us kill him that the inheritance may be ours’” (Luke 20:14). Which, when they were finally able to execute their plans, the Scripture could not be clearer regarding their motive: “For Pilate knew that it was out of envy that the chief priests had delivered Jesus up” (Matthew 27:18; Mark 15:10).

 

What are we to do with this hot mess of envy going on in our hearts? In the book, The Laws of Human Nature, author Robert Greene, who makes no claim to being Christian, makes an insight worth ironing out. “Schadenfreude, the experience of pleasure in the pain of other people, is distinctly related to envy, as several studies have demonstrated. When we envy someone, we are prone to feel excitement, even joy, if they experience a setback or suffer in some way. But it would be wise to practice instead the opposite, what the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called Mitfreude—'joying with.’ As he wrote, ‘The serpent that stings us means to hurt us and rejoices as it does so; the lowest animal can imagine the pain of others. But to imagine the joy of others and to rejoice at it is the highest privilege of the highest animals.’”  

 

Now we see the beginnings of the end of envy. The serpent of Genesis 3:15 will inflict his sting on Jesus, stripped of all clothing, at Calvary. Yet, at the very same time, our Messiah “imagines the joy of others and rejoices at it” as he nails our envy to his cross. The work we see Jesus doing on the cross on our behalf is anti-envy. For all the hellscape that our competitive envy would create if left unchecked and undefeated, Jesus paves the way to Paradise by taking our sin on himself and triumphs over it. Where our envy is anti-community, Jesus makes a way for us to be clothed in his perfect righteousness and welcomed into his family.

 

Now that Christ has done his work, my work is to spend time thinking over, studying, meditating, internalizing, and praying into my heart Jesus’ love for me. I’m not competing with you, I neither need to look down on you in pride nor take joy in your misfortune for me to be good. I can love you for your sake, even as Jesus loved me. I can rejoice when you rejoice, and weep when you weep. And when that impulse of envy springs up inside me, which it surely will, I can put it to death just as quickly by reminding myself of all that I am and have in Christ.

 

Because when your heavenly Father sees you clothed in Jesus’ sinless life, He likes the way you look.