Love’s Near Enemy
Homily delivered for the Fourth Sunday after Epiphany (Year C)
Homily delivered for the Fourth Sunday after Epiphany (Year C)
The Very Rev. Fr.
Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
3 February 2019
3 February 2019
9:00 a.m. Sung
Eucharist (before annual parish meeting)
Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)
Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)
God, take away our
hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.
“Love is not jealous.”
This line at the beginning of the Hymn
to Love, today’s epistle, is part of a joke, a pun, by St. Paul. Paul introduces the hymn saying “Earnestly
desire the higher gifts” (1 Cor 12:31).
In Greek, the verb is the same: “be jealous for the higher gifts.” He repeats the verb in resuming his letter
after the hymn with the words, “Make love your aim, earnestly desire (or: be
jealous for) the spiritual gifts” (1 Cor 14:1).
So which is it Paul, should we be
jealous or not?
The problem of course, is that the
word zelo’o means both zealous and
jealous. Its root meaning is deep
attachment, connection, or engagement. It
means a sharp desire. If this is a
desire to take on something or someone that is not yet ours, it often is
translated as “strive for,” or “earnestly seek.” This can slide into “envy” if the thing
desired already belongs to someone else.
If this desire is to keep something or someone that is already ours, it
often is translated as “jealous.”
The Hebrew word we often translate
as “jealous” has a similar semantic range.
Thus “The Lord your God is a jealous God” does not mean so much “is
overly touchy about his privileges and status, and domineering in the extreme”
but rather, “is passionately engaged and committed.”
Paul with this little pun is saying
desire is a good thing, except when it isn’t.
His hymn to love tries to give us an idea of where the lines are drawn. I translate the core of this passage as
follows:
“What
is love? When you love someone, you are patient and kind with that
person. You are not jealous of those you love, and you don’t try to show
them up. You don’t talk down to them, or act rudely toward them.
You don’t try to have your own way at their expense, nor do you get annoyed or
resentful at them. … When you love someone, you put up with whatever they
do, you trust whatever they say, you hold every hope for them, and you are
willing to endure anything for them. When you love, you never stop loving.”
Buddhist teaching is very clear
about the issues raised here. It sees
each virtue as having a polar opposite, as well as a closely related opposite
that mimics but falsifies the virtue.
The polar opposite is called a “Far Enemy” of the virtue, while the
distortion that mimics the virtue is called its “Near Enemy.”
In standard Dharma teaching, the
divine emotions all have polar opposites as well as false imitations.
Loving-kindness is
selfless good will and love for others.
Its polar opposite, obviously, is hatred or ill-will. Its near enemy looks like love, but is
distorted and sick: it is selfish
attachment or the so-called “love” that seeks to control exclusively and
establish dependence.
Compassion is
empathy and sympathy for others. Its far
enemy is cruelty. Its near enemy is
pity. Where compassion looks on a suffering person as an equal, pity looks down on the sufferers, sees
them as inferiors.
Joy in others is
opposed by resentment or envy, while its near enemy is mere exuberance in
social settings.
Equanimity is
the ability to see and feel about yourself as you see and feel about others,
and is what I would call humility. Its
polar opposite is envy or jealousy while its near enemy is simple indifference,
not caring about yourself or others.
Paul argues here that true love is not
possessive and centered on one’s own desires, but rather the desires of the
beloved. For Paul, it is a grievous error to say that Othello killed Desdemona because he loved her too much. What drove Othello was not love, but a desire to possess, a desire further twisted into murderous jealousy by Iago. Iago himself is driven by envy and thwarted desire: at the opening of the play he swears revenge on Othello for promoting an Army colleague to a position for which he had hoped. He poisons Othello with his own venom of envy and jealousy.
Paul says we must keep a clear distinction in our minds between love and its near enemies: envy or jealousy, and conditional, demanding, and self-centered sexual and emotional attachment.
The boundary between love and its near enemies is implicit in today’s Gospel reading. Jesus preaches at Nazareth, his home town. One would expect him to be welcomed warmly, due to the affection, a minor type of love, we tend to have for one “of our own.”
The villagers start out with affection, “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?” But they expect Jesus to bring honor to the group, fame (and perhaps commerce) to the community. So when he is unwilling to perform in his own home, they turn against him. They know, perhaps, of his irregular conception and quickly turn the reference to Joseph into an accusation of illegitimacy.
Jesus’ teaching of mission—of going out to strange places and people do God’s acts of love—is coupled with his view that the great prophets worked some of their greatest miracles with strangers and foreigners. He notes that Elijah gave miraculous food not to good Israelites, but a woman in a pagan village. It was not good Jews that Elisha cured, but the Syrian leper Na’aman.
The Nazareth villagers’ familiarity with this native son does not grow into attachment and loyalty, but breeds contempt. Affection for a home-boy turns to rage. Like Othello for Desdemona or Frankie for Johnnie, their emotion is not love, but its near enemy: a will to possess and dominate based in desire-fulfilment.
Philosopher Rene Girard identified most of our socially generated evils with what he called mimetic desire: the urge to acquire what others have, or be what others are. Our tendency to scapegoat is one expression of this: we try to bond and become one with those we envy by defining others out, laying on them the fault of our not having what we envy, driving them outside of our “community” thus created, and then assaulting them with the very things we fear, the reasons for our wanting to imitate others.
In Aesop’s fables, there is the story of a wild donkey who envied the pasture and care given a tame donkey until, one day, she happened to come upon the tame donkey pulling a heavily loaded cart and being whipped. The wild donkey, on second thought, preferred freedom. There are two morals that usually go with the story. The first is wildly known: The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, that is, something that is not ours makes us want it, regardless of whether it is actually preferable. The second, less common is this: Between envy and ingratitude, we make ourselves doubly miserable: we think either that our neighbor has too much, or that we ourselves have too little. Note here the hallmark of mimetic desire tending toward evil: it’s a zero sum game where our gain is someone else’s loss. Its all about comparison for competition, not for growing together.
Even Girard admits that there is one kind of mimetic desire that is good
and healthy: when we emulate those whom
we admire. Such a desire does not seek
to deprive them of that good, but simply enjoy along with them. In “How it Works,” the introduction to the
Twelve Steps of Recovery taught by AA, NA, and Alanon, we read: “If you
have decided you want what we have and are willing to go to any length to get
it – then you are ready to take certain steps: (Alcoholics Anonymous, p. 58).
This is what is at heart of 12 step programs’ policy of “attraction, not
promotion.” Madeleine L’Engle described Christian
evangelism in similar terms: “We draw people to Christ not by loudly
discrediting what they believe, by telling them how wrong they are and how
right we are, but by showing them a light that is so lovely that they want with
all their hearts to know the source of it.” This is the basic reason for the Church, I
think: to provide us with community in
which we can see close up and personal not perfect people or unattainable good,
but rather real good lived out in real lives, the blessing of opening our
hearts and lives to Christ and his teaching.
In the name of God, Amen.
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