Tuesday • 3/8/2022
Tuesday of 1 Lent, Year Two 

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 45; Genesis 37:12–24; 1 Corinthians 1:20–31; Mark 1:14–28 

This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 13 (“A Song of Praise,” BCP, p. 90); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 18 (“A Song to the Lamb,” Revelation 4:11; 5:9–10, 13, BCP, p. 93)

Aggrieved people do grievous things. That’s the story of Joseph’s murderously envious brothers. It’s the story of mistreated children who become playground bullies. It’s the story of nations and people groups who launch wars and campaigns of genocide after generations of being looked down on. Lent is a season that invites every one of us to look within to ask if we are dying from envy’s venomous bite. 

Genesis 37 and envy’s poison. Familial dysfunction afflicts the human race as soon as the serpent begins to sow discontent in our original parents: “God knows that when you eat of [the fruit of the tree] your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God” (Genesis 3:5b). Displeased with our “less than” status with respect to God, we somehow take it out on one another: husband blames wife, and brother murders brother. Bookending the book of Genesis, Joseph’s brothers become Cain to Joseph’s Abel: rather than suffer their earthly father to favor their brother, they decide to eliminate their brother. Only the intervention of Reuben saves them from descending all the way into Cain’s hell-on-earth, and leaves the door open for redemptive forgiveness in the end. Praise be!

1 Corinthians 1 and envy’s poison. Paul encounters similar folk in the Corinthian congregation, people whom he loves but in whom he is profoundly disappointed. The Corinthians (or at least a substantial portion of them) seek their own value outside of Christ, even though He has graciously become all the value they could ever want. 

There’s deep irony in Paul’s words to them: “Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. … But God chose …what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are” (1 Corinthians 1:26,28). What the Corinthians (or at least a substantial number of them) prize is wisdom, power, and nobility. That fact is played out in the fact that: 1) believers gifted with more spectacular manifestations of the Spirit are touting their superiority over other believers with humbler gifts; 2) rich Christians are suing each other to secure their “rights;” and 3) in lordly fashion the “haves” are making the “have nots” eat separately at what is supposed to be the Lord’s Supper (see 1 Corinthians 6 and 11). 

Hidden deep within the heart of most proud people I’ve known (myself included) lies profound insecurity. Arrogance is often a cover for self-doubt. Blusterers hope no one will call their bluff. We’re afraid that others are smarter, more capable, better — than we are. We’re a mess, and we’re driven by envy and insecurity.  

1 Corinthians and envy’s antidote. Such were the Corinthians. Paul calls them out on their bluster: they are not as wise or powerful or noble as they think. Then, in a remarkably redemptive fashion he directs the envious posers among them to the source of more worth than they could possibly imagine: “[T]he source of your life i[s] Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, in order that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord” (1 Corinthians 1:30–31). 

Christ our wisdom. Christ has opened up to us the secret of life that is hidden to the philosophers: by the foolishness of the cross, God has killed death by death. T. S. Eliot begins his profoundly Christian poem, The Four Quartets, with a bit of wisdom he finds in ancient Greek poetry, “And the way up is the way down” (hodos anō katō mia kai hōutē), to which he adds, “…the way forward is the way back.” * Lent reminds us to go back to first principles; and the very first principle is that Grace came down to pull us up out of death into life, out of error into truth, and out of sin into righteousness. That is why Christ is our wisdom.

Christ our righteousness. No amount of performance could possibly silence the inner voice that says, “There’s always somebody who does better, works harder, deserves more, and makes you look lesser.” But because Christ has forgiven us, right-wised us, and made us to stand erect before the most exacting tribunal in the universe, there’s nobody of whom we—any of us who belong to Christ—need to be envious. We are the envy of angels: “Do you not know that we are to judge angels—to say nothing of ordinary matters?” (1 Corinthians 6:3). 

Christ our sanctification. Because of Christ, we are clean, not dirty! Easter begins on Saturday night, when at the Great Vigil, we baptize new believers and renew our baptismal covenant. There we are reminded that, with Israel of old, we have crossed through the Red Sea on dry ground. In our baptism, we rediscover that wickedness has been put to flight, sin has been washed away, innocence has been restored to the fallen, joy given back to mourners, pride and hatred have been cast out, and peace and concord have become the rule of life (“Exsultet,” BCP, p. 287). 

Or, as Paul puts it later in this epistle, reminding the Corinthians of the benefits of their baptism: “But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God” (1 Corinthians 6:11). 

Christ our redemption. To “redeem” means “to buy back.” The language of redemption takes central place in Christian discourse because of one crucial fact: God loved us too much to surrender us to the slave-market. To him the thought of our being in thrall to evil for eternity was unthinkable: that forever, we could be under the lash of an infernal version of Yul Brynner’s Egyptian slave drivers, or chained to an everlasting slave-galley like Ben Hur’s, or consigned to a Satan-captained “Middle Passage” like countless Africans sold to slavery in the America — unthinkable! Because he loved us so dearly, the God who so wonderfully created us, he simply could not not yet more wonderfully restore the dignity of our human nature. His love drove him — yes, drove him — to share with us the divine life through the one who humbled himself to share our humanity (adapting BCP, p. 288; and see 2 Peter 1:4).

There is no more perfect antidote to the venom of envy — of sullenly thinking ourselves “lesser than” — than reminding ourselves that Christ is to us wisdom and righteousness and sanctification and redemption.   

Be blessed, in him, this day, 

Reggie Kidd+

Image: Pixabay

* T. S. Eliot, “The Dry Salvages,” III, Four Quartets, pp. 175,196.