The Envy That Undermines Christian Unity, Second Thursday (II), January 18, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Thursday of the Second Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Beginning of the Octave of Christian Unity
January 18, 2024
1 Sam 18:6-9.19:1-7, Ps 56, Mk 3:7-12

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today as we begin the Octave of Prayer for Christian Unity, we encounter explicitly in today’s first reading, and between the lines of today’s Gospel, what is perhaps the greatest destroyer of unity. It’s the sin of envy, the deep sadness over someone else’s success, the anger over someone else’s goodness. As the Book of Wisdom reminds us, “By the envy of the devil, death entered the world, and they who are in his possession experience it” (Wis 2:24). Envy is a sign that the devil to some degree possesses us, because the devil is defined by envy.  It led Cain to kill Abel. It led to the devil’s fall and his desire to destroy us, because Christ took on our nature instead of the angelic nature. It has led to the destruction of friendships, of families, of societies, and done enormous harm to the Church. Envy, in short, kills. Today is a chance for us to focus on it and learn from it the virtues we need not only not to let the devil possess us through it but, on the contrary, to rebuild the unity that envy destroys.
• We see the destructive power of envy in today’s first reading. The Israelites, led by Saul, had triumphed in battle. Everyone was rejoicing. The women came out to meet the returning soldiers with an ancient ticker-tape parade, singing and dancing, with tambourines, sistrums and joyful songs. They began singing, “Saul has slain his thousands.” Think about that. Saul had triumphed over thousands of people. He was not just a king but a hero. And all the women were fawning over him. He should have been exultant, but his joy at his battlefield prowess was short-lived. In the second verse, they sang, “and David his ten thousands.” And that filled Saul with bitterness. Remember, David was slaying tens of thousands of people for the Israelites, for the nation Saul was leading. It would be like cheerleaders on a basketball team that has just won a championship, chanting “our point guard has scored 30 points, but our center has scored 40,” and having the point guard be more upset that he was upstaged by a teammate striving for the same team goal than he would be happy at winning a championship. It was ugly. It was petty. And it was destructive. Rather than rejoicing that God had obviously anointed David with special blessing — otherwise how could the harpist-shepherd have really taken down so many? — and had blessed Saul and his armies with that gift, he said to himself, “All that remains for him is the kingship.” The victory turned into a defeat in his heart and he sought revenge against the one who helped him triumph. Like King Herod out of envy would eventually try to strike down David’s 28th generation grandson, so Saul put David in his royal crosshairs. Rather than fighting alongside each other, rather than working together for the good, rather than rejoicing in their victory, Saul decided to go and destroy his greatest military asset. And even after he calmed down at the end of today’s passage, we would see that this cancer of envy would return over and again and Saul would seek to destroy David several times anew, despite David’s goodness to Saul.
• The future Pope Francis, in a book containing 48 spiritual conferences from his time as Archbishop of Buenos Aires, pondered what happened in Saul during this scene. “Saul’s envy of David,” he wrote, “betrayed a serious obtuseness on his part. Instead of joining with the people and benefitting from the unification of the whole nation around David, Saul preferred to go on his own way, stubbornly refusing to recognize this man anointed by God. Envy always errs in its object and frustrates the struggle. When people desire something good but do so with envy, they end up losing what is truly good, and, in the case of Saul, it was the common project, the corporate institution. When Saul’s isolated, disobedient conscience separated him from the Lord, he dragged the whole people down with him.” Cardinal Bergoglio makes a very profound point. When envy exists in a heart, it really can’t rejoice in a common victory because one can’t tolerate sharing the credit. Envy is a destructive selfishness that makes true solidarity disintegrate, because one is sad rather than joyful at the success or blessing of a teammate or a brother. Jealousy and envy are two different things. Jealously is basically, “I like your shirt and I hope to have one just like it one day.” Envy is, “I like your shirt, and because I don’t have one, I don’t want you to have yours either.” It ultimately desires the death of others and it leads to terrible atrocities.
• We see this truth about the homicidal hearts of the envious between the lines of today’s Gospel. The lines themselves show us the great attractiveness of the Lord Jesus on display. St. Mark tells us that such a large crowd of people was following Jesus that he needed to have a boat ready to push a little bit away from the shore so that the people wouldn’t crush him. They were coming from Galilee, Judea, Jerusalem, Idumea, the Transjordan, Tyre and Sidon. For those who don’t know the geography of the Holy Land very well, those locations might just be names. But Galilee was in the north and Judea in the South of the Holy Land. Idumea was even further to the South. The Transjordan were pagan inhabited regions on the eastern side of the Jordan and Sea of Galilee opposite where Jesus would carry out most of his public ministry. Tyre and Sidon were pagan cities way to the north along the Mediterranean. To get a sense of the message St. Mark was communicating it would be as if Jesus were here in Manhattan and that people were walking to see him from Maine, New Jersey and as far away as North Carolina, from Detroit and the outer reaches of Long Island, and it wasn’t just Catholics coming but also atheists, secularists, and those of other religions. They were all pressing upon Jesus, who was curing and teaching. Even the demons couldn’t help, in a sense, but praise him, blurting out against themselves that he was far more than the Jews’ long-awaited Messiah, but something far more significant, “You are the Son of God.”
• At the same time, however, we see in this scene that not everyone was attracted to Jesus. Amidst the joy of so many miraculous healings, so many exorcisms, so many blind people seeing for the first time, so many deaf and mute people communicating normally, so many lame people leaving their mats and with exultation ripping off their bandages, not everyone was happy. In fact there were some people who — as we saw at the end of yesterday’s Gospel — at this time were plotting to have him murdered, because he actually had the gall to love people with deeds on the Lord’s day. These were people who resented what he was doing, and resented other people’s happiness, because of their own miserable approach to God, others and themselves. They were a society of older brothers from the Parable of the Prodigal Son who practiced religion like slaves not sons, who, when their brothers received any blessing, couldn’t celebrate because their hearts were lived in resentment. They would rather have their brothers suffer, remain lost, remain crippled, and even die than to celebrate their healing, rediscovery and spiritual resurrection. That is the evil that envy wreaks. And that envy would lead ultimately to Jesus’ death.
• Because of how evil and destructive envy is, we need to battle against it perseveringly in our own hearts. How do we do so? What is the remedy for envy? I can propose a few ways:
  • The first is that we need constantly to be wishing each other well, in our thoughts, in our words and with our deeds. Becoming the president of their fan club. Really wanting the best for them. Listing their good qualities in our own mind and heart. Praying for them to get ahead. This is the first antidote to envy that can invade communities of believers.
  • The second is authentic humility. I’ve always loved Cardinal Merry del Val’s Litany of Humility. Praying the words sometimes takes heroism, because it goes so much against the way our fallen human nature can operate. We pray, “That others may be esteemed more than I …
That, in the opinion of the world, 
others may increase and I may decrease …
That others may be chosen and I set aside …
That others may be praised and I unnoticed …
That others may be preferred to me in everything…
That others may become holier than I, provided that I may become as holy as I should.” This is a prayer that makes us happier when a brother is chosen than when we’re chosen and is a real expression of genuine love for our brother. The more we cultivate that prayer, the less we’ll be eaten alive by envy.
  • The third is to cultivate authentic fraternity. We see in contrast to Saul’s envy Jonathan’s fraternal love. If anyone should have been jealous over David’s success it should have been he, because he was presumptively Saul’s heir, but instead of being filled with envy, he intervened to save David’s life. He was filled with fraternity, friendship and love. No wonder why he’s always been a model of a true friend.
  • Last is to be truly grateful for what God has given us. Envy and jealousy both flow from thinking we need something or someone else other than God in order to be happy. They ultimately flow from a deep insecurity about how loved we are by God in our own unique way, and when we can live in that love by God then we can more easily rejoice in the way God loves others, even if he loves them differently than the way he loves us. The Lord is our Shepherd and with him we lack for nothing (Ps 23:1).
• Today as we celebrate this Mass at the beginning of this Octave of Prayer for Christian Unity, we rejoice at the blessings that God has given our Christian brothers and sisters, those who pray better than we do, who love the Word of God better than we do, who serve better than we do, who are more merciful, who are more patient, who are more enthusiastic, who sing better than we do, who do just about everything better than we do. We rejoice that they are in our Christian family, on our team and are doing so much good for the Lord in helping him save the world. We thank him for loving us so much that he has drafted us by name onto that same championship team. And we ask the Lord with whom we are about to enter into holy communion to bring us into greater loving communion with each other.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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