[image error]When I was growing up, my parents used to buy our shoes from a little shop at the end of our block.  There was something about the store’s big chairs and the smell of leather that made the place seem luxurious to me. This was before the days of big box stores and discount shoe chains. Getting a new pair of shoes was always a big deal, an event that warranted a family expedition. It was also a minor drama whenever the new shoes were for my brother or sister instead of me. “But honey you don’t need a new pair of shoes,” my mother explained, in a vain effort to stem the flood of tears I unleashed. Her reasoned argument brought me no comfort. Not as long as the shiny gleam of a sibling’s new shoes was in plain sight. My anguish was not about need. It was about possession. As long as they possessed what I did not, I was certain that I could not be happy. I might never be happy again.

There is more to envy than desire. In the end, envy is about displacement. The Bible commands, “Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn” (Rom. 12:15). But envy compels us to do the opposite so that we mourn when others rejoice and rejoice when they suffer misfortune. Envy unites itself with our ordinary desires in a way that blinds us both to its own deadly nature and to the true nature of those who possess what we want. The fifth-century monastic leader John Cassian made this observation about those who envy: “Tormented not by the faults of the people they envy, but by their prosperity, they cannot admit the truth about others and are always on the watch for trivial and silly causes of offense. These imaginary causes of offense cannot be overcome so long as the deadly virus is in them and they will not bring it to the surface.”

Like all “capital” sins, envy is a gateway to a myriad of other sins. In order to find fault with those we envy, we must elevate ourselves over them. In order to justify the anger we feel about their success or their prosperity, we must accuse and judge. Envy is more about the way we see ourselves in relation to others than it is about the things we desire. This makes envy especially the gateway to pride, the one sin that the ancients considered to be the fountainhead of all other sins. It was out of envy of God’s glory that Satan aspired to usurp His throne (Isa. 14:13-14). Envy drove the religious leaders to hand Jesus over to Pilate (Matt. 27:18).

Envy is untreatable as long as we remain in this blinded state. “The disease is so incurable, that it is made worse by treatment; the sore is inflamed by ointments” John Cassian observes. Consequently, recovery must begin with recognition. God has to open our eyes so that we come to understand that what we have been calling ambition is actually jealousy. It is a kind of ambition to be sure, but it is “selfish ambition” (James 3:14). What we thought of as our considered judgment is really only malice. We do not see others as they truly are, because we do not know ourselves as we truly are.

Despite this, I do not think that we can simply talk ourselves out of envy. We must be delivered from it. The answer to envy is happiness and ultimate happiness (what the philosophers used to call Felicity) is obtained as a gift, not by effort. “No one can obtain felicity by pursuit,” theologian Josef Pieper observes. “This explains why one of the elements of being happy is the feeling that a debt of gratitude is owed, a debt impossible to pay.” The path to happiness does not begin with a vision of what we can achieve but with a sense of what has been given to us. Likewise, envy cannot be tamed, it can only be thrown down. The longing for what others have, along with its corresponding desire to dispossess them of those things, can only be eliminated by suffering a kind of death. We must accept the loss in order to discover the gain. This is the message of the beatitudes (Matt. 5:1-12). It is key to understanding Christ’s warning in Mark 8:36: “What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul?” This is how ambition works in the strange economy of the Kingdom. Only the losers win.