Welcome to the new school year!

I get a hilarious image hearing this Gospel reading.  Picture it:  The scene opens in a rocky, barren place.   Jesus--played by, say, Peter Sellers--and the apostles—played by, oh, the Three Stooges, the Seven Dwarves, and Laurel and Hardy--are walking along, single file.  They are on tiptoe.  The apostle Peter (Laurel) stumbles and bumps into James (Hardy).  “Shhh!” hisses Jesus to the stooge behind him.  It echoes down the line:  “Shh!”  “Shh!”  “Shh!”  until it reaches the last guy, Sleepy—who asks, “Why do we have to be quiet?”  The question works its way back up to the front of the line to Jesus.  “Because I don’t want anyone to know we’re here!”  All the way back down the line.  “Why?” back up again.  “Because I want to talk to you.  You’re do dense I thought privacy would help.”  “Oh,” all the way back.

Jesus finally stops, and they all pile up behind him like dominoes.  They pick themselves up and huddle behind a rock.  “So,” their leader begins, “Here’s what I want to tell you:  The son of man will be betrayed by humans who will kill him, but he will rise again,” says Jesus, talking in the third person.  “Huh?” say the apostles, looking at each other cluelessly.  They have no idea what’s going on, but they figure it’s better not to let on just how dense they truly are, so for a while they are uncharacteristically silent.

Off they all go to Capernaum, which is where Jesus is always going.  Unable to stay quiet long, the apostles are now all aflutter, arguing, pushing and louding shushing each other.  “He likes me best!”  “The heck he does!”  “Me”  “No, me!”  “Shhhhhh!”   Of course, Jesus would have to be deaf and blind not to hear them bumbling along.  “So what was that all about?” he asks.  They all look at each other with phony innocence, shrugging and shaking their heads.  Sighing, Jesus calls them over and tries again.  “Listen,” he says.  “The last shall be first and the first will be last.”

Well, this really clears things up.  To muddy the waters even further, Jesus grabs a child and adds, “When you see a kid like this, you see me.  When you see me, you see God.”  The dwarves and stooges and so on furrow their brows and think very hard and of course come up totally empty.  

Let’s face it.  Jesus hardly ever states anything clearly.  And it doesn’t help that his reporters are such a lame crew.  It’s left to good old Paul and a few others to provide some context, some practical applications so we can make some sense of these odd pronouncements.  These guys take the raw, mystical, and mystifying things Jesus says and build on them, codify them, preach them, and turn them into theology.  This is very helpful to us stooges left here.

Fortunately, James really lays things out for us in his epistle.  All that first and last stuff Jesus scolded the apostles about boils down, in James, to some simple common sense:  Envy and ambition and squabbling are going to destroy your community.  Don’t do it.  Clear enough?

James also answers a question that bothered me even when I was little.  The Ten Commandments always seemed sort of unbalanced to me.  I mean, one commandment for murder, one for stealing—and two for different kinds of envy, plus another one for adultery, which is just envy in action.  A heavy lineup against envy! 

James puts that into perspective, and very sensibly, too.  Envy, he points out, is the root of a whole lot of the other, more obvious, evils.  Hey:  As he says, you want something and do not have it, so you commit murder; you covet something and you cannot get it, you fight.  Or you steal.  And while you’re stealing, you kill someone, or they kill you.  You get the idea.  The root of those other heinous sins—the ones we’re commanded not to do, since we don’t seem able to figure it out for ourselves--is that ol’ green-eyed monster, envy.  It deserves its airtime and the warning that goes with it.

The Buddhists understand this.  Buddha’s enlightenment consisted largely of grasping the idea that our biggest problem here on earth is wanting stuff all the time.  Desire, Buddha said, is the root of all human suffering and pain—partly because to want something badly is painful in itself, partly because we can never satisfy all our wants and therefore remain always unfulfilled.  We want things, we want love, we want to live forever, we want health, we want happiness—not to mention money and other people’s partners.  All this wanting takes a whole lot of energy and leaves us exhausted and gasping.  It takes away our pleasure in what we do have.  It drives us to work ourselves into sickness.  It interferes with our relationships.  It wraps us in unrelenting stress.  Buddha was onto something there.  No wonder that religion is doing so well.

The problem with Buddhism is that it doesn’t offer a whole lot of useful tools for dealing with all that desire.  Christianity does.  Defining envy as a sin recognizes it as a serious, dangerous problem of which we should be ashamed and afraid.  The guilt might spur us to work on the problem.   More importantly, though, our tradition offers the example of Jesus’ life and teachings.  Now, Jesus may not have been a perfect human; he certainly wasn’t immune to negative emotions—anger, for example, or even self-pity.  This is our evidence for his true humanity, after all.  But the New Testament reports not the slightest instance of  Jesus ever expressing anything like envy.  He is poor, but far from coveting money, he sees it as a direct impediment to salvation.  Others—like John the Baptist--have a more rabid following, but Jesus gives John the honor of being his baptizer.  The Romans and the Jewish high priests have all the power in society, but Jesus rejects all pleas to seek a share of that kind of power.  It is impossible to think of anything that Jesus seems envious of—not even anyone else’s relationship with God.  Here we have a guy seemingly completely free of envy.  Perhaps if he can do it, we can, too.

No one says it is easy to curb envy.  It is so human, so natural for us to be driven by desire.  Perhaps that is why Buddhism’s only real answer is meditation—deep, concentrated effort to retreat from the reality of an envy-filled world.  To follow Jesus’ example, maybe we Christians, especially in this stupifyingly affluent country, could begin by recognizing—more often than we usually do—just how fortunate and blessed we are, no matter how troublesome our current woes may seem.  A little gratitude goes a long way to restoring a sense of proportion.  So does a little humor, a gentle ability to laugh at ourselves and our priorities.

Most helpful, perhaps, is the benefit of participating in a community of believers, all of whom are struggling to overcome the same media-driven, culturally sanctioned, romantically encouraged urge to want more of everything--even joy.  If we can’t turn to one another and find contentment in each other, we are truly lost.  If we can’t find support and comfort in each other’s love when another love has died, then where can it be found?  If we can’t retire our ambition, our will to power, our aggression here, we don’t stand a chance out there in the rest of the world.  Of course, to find that satisfaction, that peace, we also must offer it.  It’s one of those things you can only get when you give it away.  But it can go a long way to beating the beast of envy.  Here, in this Christian community, we have been leveled by baptism, made equal in Christ, regardless of our incomes, our jobs, our achievements, or our stuff.  That’s a comforting thought.  This is a comforting place. 

Most of the time I go through life like one of those stumbling, stoogey apostles, getting squashed by pianos dropped from upper-story windows and destroying whole environments with my stumbling and fumbling.  The tragedies and crises of daily life consume my attention, and the faster I run to keep up with them, the more I trip over my own feet.  It’s so easy to yearn for the income of a surgeon, or the body of an athlete, or the free time of a retiree, or the wisdom of a perfect parent.  But being part of this cacophony, this gaggle of similarly encumbered but equally blessed folks here does clarify things enormously and put it all into perspective.  Now that’s something to be envied.