Dr. John Young                                                                                                          9/21/08

Unitarian Universalist Church of Jacksonville

Envy or Justice

During this congregational year, we are considering a classic sin and virtue monthly. One of my quandaries is which sin to pair with which virtue. I paired envy with justice because it appears that envy is almost considered a virtue in contemporary society. Treating envy as a virtue is confusing people about how to understand and do justice.

The last of the 10 commandments in the Biblical book of Exodus states that: “thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s house, wife, manservant, maidservant, ox, ass, or any thing that is thy neighbor’s.” None of us has an ox or even a servant, but every human being knows to covet or envy is considered a moral/ethical lapse, a sin, and all of us commit that sin regularly. The term ‘envy’ comes from the Latin meaning to look askance, like an invidious comparison. Envy is “a painful or resentful awareness of an advantage enjoyed by another that is joined with a desire to possess that same advantage.” The envious want what others have, and they suffer from their disappointed desires.

Many people today, including some of the self-righteously religious, seem to be arguing that competition is the basic motivation for human action. They argue that envy is a foundation of hard work, achievement, success, and prosperity. Some people even suggest that a killer-instinct, bottom-line actions, cutting-to-the-chase and closing-the-deal are keys to goodness and happiness. In a culture where advertising for products, services, or ideas is the primary form of communication, this moral-ethical error may be understandable, but turning envy into a virtue could destroy our individual ability and collective will to do justice.

My wife, Kathleen, knew I was thinking about this sermon topic, and she shared her concern that over much of the last generation an increasing percentage of Americans were working harder and still doing less well than their parents. She feels that many people are giving up their own attempts to systematically better themselves and are compensating by watching others quickly succeed through American Idol, other TV contests and ‘reality’ shows, obsessing on the excesses of the suddenly famous, or making poor investments in gambling and lotteries. Much of America’s so-called entertainment and relaxation seem to be watching others easily succeed, a sort of vicarious spectators’ worship of envy.

Justice comes from Latin terms for law and welfare. Justice is defined as: “the impartial adjustment of competing claims or the assignment of merited rewards and punishments. Justice is done through the administration of the laws, the establishment or determination of rights, by impartially and fairly living according to the rules and conditions of equity, of fairness.” The problem with justice is that the self-consciously just person too often becomes righteous, oppressive or even fanatical, feeling free, for instance, to beat his/her children, abuse their intimates, or misuse their employees, neighbors or colleagues because they presume that whatever they choose to do is inevitably fair and automatically just. Envy makes them highly competitive, obsessed with getting their due, and they justify their injustices as ‘only fair,’ as defending their just claims to autocratic actions or even violence.

The reality is that it is difficult to do justice, to be fair. It takes patience, fortitude, care. It requires continuing humility, a commitment to respecting others and questioning ourselves. It may be impossible to be absolutely impartial, but it is difficult to even approximate fairness, when people fail to realize that there are conflicting reasonable claims in almost every situation. One party is hardly ever completely right and seldom deserves all or even most of the rewards. Resources are almost always finite; people need to share, and everyone needs to make sacrifices. Doing justice requires a degree of emotional separation and increasing amounts of altruism. Doing justice means refusing to taking on a God’s mantle to dispense righteousness, but rather firmly remaining an interested party, trying to negotiate a fair distribution among the available resources.

This gets us back to envy. Most people that accomplish much in their lives quickly move beyond envy or even competition with their peers as a primary motivation for their actions. Most of us even before adulthood found that our primary competition was with ourselves. We set goals and developed standards, and we did our best to reach those goals and live up to those standards. Most worthy goals and standards only momentarily have much to do with other people. Envious competition usually keeps the envious from achievement and fulfillment because they are caught in resentment and lost in the pain of their disillusion.

When I failed to accept the reality of my size as a young teen, I was quite unhappy until I stopped trying to be a football hero and became a wrestling and track star in my little world. When I started losing my hair, I became resentful of my genes until I realized that some women still found me attractive. I worried myself in early middle age because I was not the minister of the biggest church with the fanciest building, but I did more justice to myself and others once I savored the much that I had rather than obsessing about what I did not have and was unlikely to get. I was unduly proud of our new home in Sacramento until my young daughter looked at a mansion close to the church and said that was the kind of home she wanted to have when she grew up. Inevitably we notice what others have, but we do more justice to ourselves and to others when we stop obsessing about what others have and wanting what we are unlikely to get. One of the great ironies of life is that so often when the envious finally do accomplish their long sought obsessions they do not find them rewarding. The envious have gotten so caught in their selfish resentment and pain that they still feel resentful and full of pain even after they get what they envied.

If you want to do justice to life, it is better to want what you have. If you want to do justice to life, it is better to compete with yourself, to spend your energies meeting your goals, approximating your best standards, and savoring your accomplishments and experiences. Make each day count. See what kind of lasting ripples you can make in the world’s improvement, in nourishing the future, and in spreading and deepening love. As Marian Wright Edelman says: “We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a difference, ignore the small daily differences we can make, which, over time, add up to big differences we cannot foresee.”