You have heard today, brethren, how, while he shut out others, the envious doorkeeper shut out himself. 'Woe to you, lawyers,' He says, 'for ye have taken away the key of knowledge; ye entered not in yourselves, and them that were entering in ye hindered' (Luke 11). You have heard, then, how, while he shut out others, the envious doorkeeper excluded himself. The Pharisee had received the keys, not that he might shut, but that he might open to those desiring to enter; but lest another should enter, he himself chose through spite to remain outside. All vices indeed ever tend and leap forth to the harm of their own possessor; but envy always consumes its own the more: envy has ever been the executioner of its own, it stretches the senses, tortures the souls, racks the minds, corrupts the hearts. And what more?
Whoever takes this in, endures his own torments without end, because in himself he ever loves to keep a household torturer. What end is there to evils, where another's good is another's punishment? where another's felicity is another's torment? A manifold evil: as many as are men's prosperities, so many are the torments of the envious. With other vices the Christian soul will be able to contend; but whoever does not flee envy before he feels it, does not escape it. This envy persuaded the lawyers not to open the Law but to close it; not to lend the teaching of the saving precept, but to deny it; to bar the fountain of knowledge and of the living stream, and by the secret of its own origin to obstruct its riches.
This disease must be swiftly fled, because those whom it touches it suffers not to be healed. Envy assailed heaven; for there it made a devil out of an angel; it scorched the earth, which indeed it shut off from us—the delights of paradise—by a flaming guardian. It urges on kings, for it so drove Herod to rage against the coevals of Christ that the blood was poured from tender limbs before the milk (Matt. 2). It violates charity, for it made Cain a fratricide, and drenched the yet-innocent earth with the gore of new blood (Gen. 4). It devastates peoples, for it made the Jews—if it be lawful to say it, if speech can grasp it—to be deicides: deicides we have called them, not by what they attained, but by what this crime aimed at.
For in Christ the Jews attempted to crush not man only, but God the Son of God, and to slay His powers, when they said: 'This is the heir; come, let us kill him, and the inheritance shall be ours' (Mark 12). But what avails the devil against God? What avails envy against the Lord's charity? The devil envied us the earth, but God gave us heaven; the lawyer took away the keys of the knowledge of the Law, but Christ through Peter bestowed the keys of the heavenly kingdom (Matt. 16). And thus envy was stripped of its own gains, and man was enriched by the very necessity of his losses. Well therefore did the Lord add in what follows, saying: 'Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees' (Luke 12). For in leaven there is no mass of greatness, but of swelling;
and the dough, puffed up with such an appearance, is not enriched: for the more fervently it heaves, the more the mass of meal swells and fills its whole form with lightness and swelling. Fittingly therefore was it said by the Lord: 'Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy.' What is hypocrisy but an appearance artfully composed, which does one thing in fact and promises another in countenance? This among the Pharisees swelled through knowledge, as the Apostle says: 'Knowledge puffeth up' (1 Cor. 8). For knowledge puffed them up unto pride, it did not instruct them unto life; and it corrupted them unto malice, it did not advance them unto prudence.
There was in their face hypocrisy, there was in their mind the dropsy of envy, there was in their breast a thirsty fountain, there was a burning wave, which was inflamed more and more by its own streams, so that it did not quench the thirst of the drinker, but increased the burning. Thus, thus, with hypocrisy serving it, envy ever gives its own draught to drink to its possessors. From this disease the Apostle draws us away when he compels us to celebrate the holy Passover of the Lord 'not in the old leaven, neither in the leaven of malice and wickedness, but in the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth' (1 Cor. 5). Truth knows no swelling; simplicity is utterly ignorant of hypocrisy. 'In the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.'
These are the unleavened breads of the heart, these seasoned with heavenly sweetness, these flavored with the richness of grace, these baked in the fire of the Holy Spirit; eating these, we solemnly sacrifice for our Passover the Lamb of God, the Lamb who takes away the sin of the world, by whom Christ was born wholly unto gladness, and was transformed wholly unto glory.