Midweek Lenten 4 – April 2nd, 2025
Trinity Ev. Lutheran Church, Block, Kansas
Rev. Joshua Woelmer
Text: Matthew 27:15–26
“Envy and Kindness”
Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father, and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
The interactions between Jesus and the Jewish leaders are very interesting to pay attention to as your read the Gospels. They can also be quite comical as Jesus criticizes them for their hypocrisy. It started out just fine. At twelve years old, Jesus was just a boy, but he amazed the teachers in the temple with his wisdom and understanding. I wonder how many of them took note as he grew and began his ministry.
Things went downhill in a hurry though. Of course, his cousin John went first. John would scold the Pharisees and Sadducees, labeling them a brood of vipers. Jesus may not have been as fiery, but he chided them for trumpeting their good works in the synagogue, praying on street corners to be seen by others, disfiguring their faces while fasting, and much more. Meanwhile, as Jesus healed the sick and lame, cast out demons, ate with sinners and tax collectors, pardoned prostitutes, and calmed storms, his popularity with the crowds grew and grew. The common people noticed a big difference between Jesus’s preaching and that of the Pharisees. For example, after he finished the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew says this: “And when Jesus finished these sayings, the crowds were astonished at his teaching, for he was teaching them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes” (7:28–29). Jesus did not hem and haw about this interpreter or that rabbi’s thoughts. He simply told the people God’s clear truth.
Everything came to a head when Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey to loud shouts of Hosanna, and shortly thereafter told the Pharisees that they were no more than whitewashed tombs. Things had reached a breaking point. They desired Jesus’s status, his popularity with the people. But instead of recognizing his identity and believing in him, they plotted his downfall and orchestrated his death. And Pontius Pilate who had just moments before asked Jesus: “what is truth?” in that moment knew this truth: that “it was on account of their envy that they had delivered Him up” (Matt 27:18). We now arrive in our series at the calculated vice of envy and its place in the passion story. It was this vice that tipped the scales and compelled the religious leaders to deliver Jesus over to death.
Envy is unlike every other vice, and many consider it the “coldest” vice of them all. Every other vice can be seen as a twisting of something good into evil. Recall how we observed prior that pride usually occurs when people perform at their best, not their worst—no less sinful, but far more understandable. And lust and gluttony, they pursue otherwise good things, but only in the wrong way. Sex is a good thing within the context of marriage. Food is a gift from our Creator by which He sustains us. Even money is not evil in and of itself, only greed, the love and never-ending desire of money, twists it into something that harms our soul. And anger, which we’ll cover next week, anger is often present in our lives when we see others harmed or wronged, and rightfully desire justice. All of these vices excessively pursue things which in and of themselves can be quite good. But envy—envy has absolutely no redeeming value.
It’s worth noting that while we often use jealousy as a synonym for envy in today’s speech, they have different original meanings. Jealously is wanting something that rightfully belongs to us. That is why the Old Testament often talks about God being a “jealous” God. We are rightfully God’s creatures. He rightfully desires us. And so, when we follow other gods, He is right to be jealous. Envy, on the other hand, desires those things which are not rightfully ours. And further, as the ancients recognized, it’s not just that we wish we had what is our neighbor’s, but we wish they didn’t have it at all. Envy, at its base, is nothing other than sorrow over the joy of others.
It’s not just wanting a nice car, it’s wanting my neighbor’s nice car to be in my driveway, and for them to have no car at all. Envy is therefore quite different from greed. Greed just wants more stuff, because more stuff makes me feel more secure. Envy doesn’t just want stuff—it wants someone else’s status. Here’s one way to distinguish the two. If you ask a greedy person, “How much is enough?” they probably wouldn’t know. All they know is they just want more. But if you ask an envious person “how much is enough,” they know exactly: “just to make ten dollars more a month than my brother-in-law makes.”
So when envy doesn’t get what it wants, it ends up hating the other person for what they have. At its worst, envy plots the downfall of others, sometimes by taking from them, but more often by gossip and slander. Envy wants to harm the reputation of those we feel are superior to us. When we see what they have, and feel inferior, we hope that by engineering their destruction we’ll begin to feel better about ourselves. But here’s the trap of envy that no one sees coming—the person that envy truly ruins is the one doing the envying. Proverbs 14:30 expresses this well: “A tranquil heart gives life to the flesh, but envy, [envy] makes the bones rot.”
The ancients realized that deep envy can actually cause physical illness. That’s where the expression “green with envy” comes from. In the Ancient Near East, in Jesus’ day, people had an expression for envy, they called it the “evil eye,” and it was considered a poisonous trait that was to be avoided at all costs. Jesus even uses this phrase in one of his parables. It’s worth asking ourselves: who do we envy? Who is making your bones rot?
There is a reason the Ten Commandments conclude with two consecutive prohibitions against coveting what is another’s. Envy is destructive. Frederick Buechner once remarked, “envy’s trademark is to desire that everyone else be as unsuccessful as you feel you are.” Dorothy Sayers noted: “at its best envy is a climber and a snob, at its worst a destroyer, rather than have anybody happier than itself, it will see us all miserable together.” The Germans developed a special word for envy, Schadenfreude, literally: “sorry-joy.” It means taking pleasure in another’s failure or loss. An envious person who wants the greenest lawn on the block seeks not to fertilize his own yard but rather to poison the neighbor’s. It’s a cold, cold vice. “It was out of envy they betrayed Him.”
But, as destructive as envy can be to the reputation of others, and as damaging as it can be even to the physical health of our own bodies, the worst part of envy is the danger it poses to our souls. Because you see, when we are dissatisfied with our lot in life as compared to others, it’s not truly our neighbors that we have a problem with. They bear the brunt of our sabotage, to be sure, but they are merely a mask for the person we really despise. And that is God Himself. When we envy others, we are really taking out on them rage that would more honestly be directed towards God, the one whom we feel has “stacked the deck” against us. Envy tells God we are dissatisfied with what He’s given us, but since we can’t touch God, we’ll content ourself with destroying others around us instead. Envy idolatrously tells God: “if I were in charge, I’d have done a better job than you—I’d have put myself above all these others.”
The envious see the world as the kind of game where every time there is a winner, someone else must lose. One person’s success means another must fail, and where one person’s gain must result in some kind of loss for themselves. So they try to rearrange the rankings in an attempt to come out ahead. The problem is, this never works.
The only solution to envy—the only solution—is to get out of the competitive game altogether. Envy starts by comparison, and if we could only stop staring so intently at ourselves, we wouldn’t be so ready to compare ourselves to everyone else. We must find our self-worth not in what we judge to be our status in the world, but rather in what God says about us—in the reality that we are His precious children. Jesus commands us to love our neighbors as ourselves, but there is great irony in the envious: they love neither themselves nor their neighbor! If we struggle with envy we must first learn to love who we are, who God made us to be and what He has done for us. We should stop desiring to be someone we are not. We should know and understand that we have ultimate worth because we have been redeemed by the precious blood of Christ. This begins to break the cycle of envy.
Jesus tells us not to worry about where we think we might stand in relation to others in the world. The only important truth to know is this one, that Jesus says to us, “I have called you by name, I love you, and you are mine” (Isa 43:1). Resting in the grace of God, we can then begin to love others, appreciating them for who they are. Instead of desiring their gifts and abilities, we can celebrate who God made them to be and give thanks for the blessings that He has bestowed on others. In short, we can develop and cultivate the virtue of kindness. We can treat others with kindness when we recognize that others in this world need not be our rivals, but rather can serve as inspirations. Others who are successful are not enemies to be envied, but rather examples to be emulated! Instead of betraying our neighbors, or slandering them, or trying to hurt their reputation, we can instead, as Luther writes: “defend them, speak well of them, and explain everything in the kindest way.”
It was out of envy they betrayed our Lord Jesus Christ, but envy is not the end of the story. Our Lord Jesus Christ continued to embrace the purpose He had been given by His Father. After Pilate delivered Him over to be crucified, He was stripped, a crown of thorns was placed on His head, He was mocked, spit on, struck on the head, and then He carried His cross to Calvary. There He died, showing us how to be content in any situation, as Paul wrote to the Philippians. But far more than being content, our Lord died and rose again to forgive all our sins—even the cold sin of envy. And the secret to being content is always knowing we have something that no one can ever take away, something that gives us a status above all else—we know the forgiving love of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Now may the peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. Amen.
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