Envy and the Christian Life

There is a line in CS Lewis’s book That Hideous Strength where Jane is waiting for the Director and thumbing through a book that she feels slightly guilty about reading, when suddenly Camilla Denniston comes through the door. Jane turns crimson and becomes aware of how she feels toward Camilla, and it is an uncomfortable realization. “It would be nice,” she thinks to herself, “to be like that — so straight, so forthright, so valiant, so fit to be mounted on a horse, and so divinely tall.”

There is nothing remotely sexual about her feelings, nor need we listen to any voices that might insist on it. Lewis’s response to any such suggestion would likely have been the same as GK Chesterton in his beloved Father Brown series, when the apostate suggests that the reason church steeples are built the way they are is because they are phallic symbols, and he is met with a mixture of disgust and righteous scorn by Father Brown. “Of course,” he snorts, “that is of course why they did not build the steeple upside down, resting on its tip with the broad base in the air!” It is not just patently absurd but also viciously (in the truest sense of the word) suggestive, and the person of faith need have no hesitation in dismissing it out-of-hand.

But Jane’s response is still problematic. For she is not content to rejoice in her new acquaintance’s beauty and how God has made her, but she feels the need to desire it for herself. Whether Camilla would lose these features once they had been imparted to Jane she does not dwell on, but it is not a problem she bothers herself with. It is that “passionate admiration” as Lewis says, that a woman often feels for another woman whose beauty is “not of her type.”

The problem is that in wishing we had something God has given to another, we commit several sins:

1. We experience grief at another’s good, as Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologiae.
2. By our desire, we level the charge that God has been mistaken in His assignment of gifts to us.
3. In envying we are doing the opposite of love, for instead of a willingness to do whatever we may for the good of our neighbor, we take his good away in our hearts.

There are more aspects to it, but these are sufficient for our purpose. Ever since the Sermon on the Mount, we have known that our thought life is critical to our walk of faith. We may not hate our brother without murdering him in our heart, Jesus said. We may not greet only our brothers and think that the Gospel will bear fruit in our lives – in the lives of our enemies. We may not do our good deeds to be seen by others and suppose that we will receive a reward from our Father in Heaven.

Someone will say, “But we are supposed to be under grace now, not Law!” True. But what is grace if it is not the benefits of Christ’s Law-keeping applied to our account, without any merit on our part, without any desert? And if we are now declared righteous by faith, is it not so that we may bear fruit in keeping with repentance?

“Ah,” the disputant insists, “but now you have a problem. Now you have to repent if you want to please God, and if you don’t repent you will be punished. Back to Law-keeping, aren’t you?”

But such clever sophistry only betrays that we do not yet understand the idea of the Covenant as we should. Every Covenant in the Bible has had terms. “Don’t eat this fruit or you will die,” God told Adam in the Garden. “Build an ark and you will be saved along with your family,” God told Noah before the Flood. “Lead My people in true worship and deliver Israel from their enemies, and you will never fail to have a man on the throne,” God told David when He set him up as king instead of Saul. Blessings and curses. Do this and you will live. Don’t do this or you will die.

The New Covenant of Grace has terms too, just as it has blessings and curses. Jesus Christ has kept the whole Law on our behalf, and His righteousness is imputed to us just as our sins were placed on Him for punishment. It is by grace we are saved, through faith, as St. Paul says in Ephesians 2, and that faith along with our repentance are the terms required of us. They are not meritorious, because even in our exercise of them we acknowledge that it was God who gave them, but there is no such thing as a true Christian without repentance and faith. And through our walking in them we receive all the blessings of that new Covenant, and we praise our Lord who took the curses on Himself on the Cross for us. Repentance, then, is simply our reasonable service, and the longer we walk with Christ the more we realize what a grace it is that we are able to repent.

It surprised me to learn, as I did some time ago, that many times the sin of homosexuality may be traced back to envy. There was a reason the Catholic Church counted it one of the seven deadly (or mortal) sins. By entering into such unlawful carnal knowledge people can attempt to gain for themselves the bodily experience they could not get from God, and in doing so they sin terribly against their own bodies and those of others. It is a sin that history shows us tends more rapidly to the complete destruction of society than other sins, and as such is a heinous offense. I heard Rosaria Butterfield speak on this topic this weekend as she correctly identified the concept of untethered empathy and how it wrecks well-meaning people in their unBiblical attempts to love.

Yet all this is not beyond salvation. Jesus was very harsh with churchmen who sat on Moses’ seat, who would not enter the Kingdom themselves and kept others out too. They knew exactly what they were doing and they used the Word of God to arrogate power to themselves at the expense of the souls of many. But Jesus was very tender with people who were guilty of committing sins of the flesh. They were blind followers, scattered on the hills like sheep without a shepherd, and He left the ninety and nine to go find them and bring them to His fold. “Go and sin no more,” He instructed the woman caught in adultery, because salvation is for the purpose of holiness. But He did not condemn her.

What then is our answer to this sin of envy that besets us? It is found in Philippians 2:1-11:

So if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy, complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

St. Paul lays out everything we need for life and godliness in this issue. Our motivation is always to be Christ Jesus, whose encouragement and comfort and Spirit complete us. We are to do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but instead of Jane desiring Camilla’s appearance, as a believer she is now able to delight in it for her new friend, counting Camilla more significant than herself and thanking God for His good gifts to both of them. This requires a new mind, the mind of Christ. If He could leave Heaven and take on flesh, lowering Himself and emptying Himself so far below His Godly station that we cannot even conceive of the difference, how much more can we live thankful lives that God has given us all He has! St. Paul provides the source of the power for such a life: The Cross of Christ. Here is where we find the forgiveness and renewal that fits us for a life of love, and no longer one of envying and striving with each other. And last but not least, he bursts into rapt doxology as he praises Jesus Christ at whose Name every knee shall bow, in Heaven and on earth and under the earth.

As we follow the apostle in the wisdom of his writings, we are also promised by Peter in 2 Peter 1:4 that along with the promises of God, we will one day also be made partakers of the divine nature. Eternal life; sinlessness; work without futility; love without hindrance. And still greater than all these, to live before the face of God Himself. For the heart of those of us who have longed for the gifts of the flesh that tend more toward divine glory than others (something so childishly simple and yet so God-evincing as being tall), this assurance draws our eyes up to our Savior’s: To the Son of Man in the midst of the seven golden lampstands, clothed with a long robe, with eyes like a flame of fire. And He is speaking our name with love.

Photo Credit: Ana Pana, 2025