Jealousy's path

Today’s gospel (12:1-11) is a reminder to us of one of those uncomfortable truths we do not like to face: if you simply do what the Lord requires of you, and especially if you do something simply for the Lord, you will suffer hostility, even though you do not deserve it. This happens twice in the course of today’s gospel. When you enter the service of God, prepare yourself for tribulation (Sirach 2: 1). Yet the source of this hostility may be more complex than it at first appears.

Mary brings ointment to the feet of Jesus and the smell of it fills the whole house. Jesus instantly provides a commentary on the ultimate meaning of her act: “She had to keep this scent for the day of my burial.”

What surges through this passage, however, is Judas’s hostility to Mary. It was not his only vice. St John reveals here that Judas was light-fingered and his care for the poor was simulated: jealousy induces not only hostility but also deceit. What Judas sees in the ointment is lost revenues: he is the cynic who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. That his remarks are a hostile attack on Mary, however, can be seen in Jesus’ reply: “Leave her alone.”  Her actions have deprived Judas of a glorious opportunity. Who knows how this man who wandered the roads with Jesus was spending his ill-gotten gains?

Yet, jealousy is the root of a compound problem: jealousy is greed multiplied by a competitor’s success. And lest we feel a little smug that we would never be as base as Judas, let us recall that jealousy about wealth has a least a certain understandable tangibility about it. Lovely money!

The subtler (spiritual, perhaps?) forms of jealousy – jealousy of the praise of the powerful for a perceived competitor, for example, or of the apparent status the powerful might inexplicably give someone of our own rank – are much less vulgar and much more insidious. Such jealousy also blinds and deceives its sufferers; the slights it perceives multiply by the dozen before our objective selves have even noticed. And jealousy’s promise is always the same: ‘you will be as gods’ … if only you can have what your competitor has apparently attained. The happiness of the jealous person is always around the corner, always just out of reach ... and the competitor must be trampled (physically or psychologically) in its pursuit.

The second object of hostility is today's gospel is Lazarus, and in some ways the hostility directed towards him brings out the more spiritual side of jealousy: the chief priests wanted to kill Jesus because ‘many of the Jews were leaving them and believing in Jesus’. It was not the money they wanted; it was His power and influence over the people. The currency of their influence was on the wane. Jesus’ star was rising, and Lazarus was a symbol of it since his resurrection was so public and so dramatic. After all, he had been dead for four days and the decay of his body could already be smelt by those near the grave – hard to believe in our days of sanitised death, but a familiar enough odour in poorer cultures or in disaster areas.

What is so dramatic is that this sin of jealousy, with its lowlands of common greed and competition, continues to ascend to attain finally the uplands of a refined but demonic covetousness. The chief priests - the men charged with the holiest tasks of the Jewish religion and men no doubt perceived as models of piety and religion – were driven on by murderous intent. Their religion was not of the one true God they had sworn to serve, but of the one, true self they were committed not to abandon. If their hands reeked of the blood of their holy sacrifices, what did their souls reek of?

If anyone thinks they can stand, let them take heed lest they fall (1 Cor 10:12). By our hostilities and our deceits, our secret idols will be laid bare.