I’d like to make a confession. Over the last several years I’ve come to realize what a strong impulse envy is within my heart. Time and time again I have discovered in myself an inability to celebrate some good or benefit I see another person enjoying. Often that leads to a feeling of bitterness. I think though that the bitterness is really a manifestation of fear – fear of not having what I need, fear of lacking love, or safety, or joy. And the implication is that this other person is somehow taking some measure of the goodness that I should have. It’s a way of seeing the world entirely rooted in scarcity. It’s as if there’s only so much delicious cheese on the plate, and the other guy took too much; now, there’s not enough left for me. Somebody’s getting my share of the queso!  

If that’s the truth about reality – that goodness is a severely limited commodity and there’s not enough to go around – then we’re in big trouble. That is a terrifying way to live, isn’t it?  

I think of Mark 9:38-41. This is the moment the disciples, perhaps triumphantly, approach Jesus and announce that they have put an end to the ministry of someone driving out demons in Jesus’ name. The reason they stopped this guy? Because he wasn’t “one of them”. He wasn’t in the club. Jesus seems a little astonished that they would feel the need to undercut someone ministering in his name just because he wasn’t in their particular clique. Are the disciples being a little possessive of Jesus? As if God is a limited commodity that must be hoarded. Did they envy this guy because he was dipping his chips in their queso?  

Now, it is a terrible thing to run out of queso. Nobody wants that. But God is infinite and his goodness is not a finite resource, nor is his love a commodity to be bought or sold. Our modern market mentality is a system of economy apparently foreign to the Kingdom of God – a kingdom Jesus assured Pilot was not from this world. The riches of God’s grace are only limited by our willingness to respond to Jesus’s invitation to trust him.   

There is a warning in Scripture that goes like this: “If you hear his voice today, do not harden your hearts.”  Just today I was reading in the later parts of John’s Gospel about the leaders of Israel and their willful rejection of Jesus. The signature of God was written all over Jesus through the signs he’d worked among them; by this point he’s even raised Lazarus from the dead. In the end, like Jesus tells Nicodemas, people often simply prefer darkness to light. It’s an easy way to keep the structures of safety and power we’ve come up with from being disrupted; if you don’t turn the lights on nobody has to clean up the messy room. But the light himself had come among them, and by the end of John’s Gospel it’s clear that the leadership for the most part had in fact recognized Jesus. But it wasn’t a problem of recognition, it was a problem of acknowledgement. They knew, but they refused to admit it. The vineyard owners knew that the heir had been sent among them to collect the fruit. But, what if there’s not enough fruit; how can we secure our portion? 

I can’t help but wonder if they weren’t suffering from the same sort of envy that I feel swell up in my own heart? I’m afraid that I don’t have enough, and so I feel that I must defend my little pile. Not only that, but when I see God’s glory shine in the lives of others around me, it feels like a threat to me personally, rather than a cause to rejoice. Everyone is a threat; everyone is competition.  

I won’t tell you who, but there’s a certain songwriter that I admire. But I didn’t always admire him. For a long time, I couldn’t admire him, because I was mired in jealousy. Let me play with those words for a second to illustrate my point – admire and mire. Mire or to be mired means to have your legs stuck in deep mud, right? The psalmist talks about God pulling us from the mire. To be mired is to be in a state of boggy, bogged-down, muddy paralysis.  That’s where my envy of this songwriter kept me, because I felt like giftedness in songwriting was a limited resource; that meant, if he had a lot of the gift then it wasn’t possible for me to have as much. God’s blessing on him subtracted from God’s ability to bless me. So I couldn’t admire this brilliant songwriter – all I could see was how he was a threat to me! And he really is brilliant, but the light was lost on me. I was mired.  

But thank God one day the Lord showed me how wrong I was. I was self-sabotaging and because of my envy I was cutting myself off from so much beauty and opportunity to grow. Here was a wonderful songwriter, and instead of wasting my time mired in envy, I could be growing my own craft by learning from and enjoying his songs. I had told myself that I didn’t like the songs, but I was fooling myself. Once the Lord made my sin obvious to me, I had to admit that I really thought this guy’s songs were beautiful and life-giving, and I began to study his writing and learn from it. Through that, God added to my stagnant puddle a new flow of water and my feet came unstuck from the mire. 

Here’s where the word admire comes in – admire means to regard with wonder. Admire literally means to smile upon, and smile shares the root, mirari, which means wonder or awe. Guess what other word mirari shows up in? Miracle. Admire, smile, and miracle are all words about having eyes that are open to God’s wonderful, abundant grace poured out in this world. To learn to see this way begins to dissolve envy, because God’s grace is not a scarce commodity. On the contrary, God’s love is superabundant. In fact, the entire created cosmos exists as an overflow – every atom of it is excess, superfluous (which is a word that means the chalice runneth over with very good wine). 

If that’s the fundamental truth about reality – that our lives are not, in fact, measured by competition and defensiveness, but rather by the miracle of grace, the economy of gift, and the blessing of God’s inexhaustible beauty and love – then envy is out of a job. Coveting has no purpose. The quagmire of fearful scarcity can undergo the graceful conversion becoming a fruitful field, smiled upon by the sun.