“Envy is one of the capital sins, a deadly sin that leads to other sins… It is the sadness we feel over the good fortune of another. Envy makes us so sad that we wish the other person didn’t have the good fortune they’re experiencing… It’s a self-centered, self-serving sadness that fuels the desire to take goodness and joy away from the other” (p. 71).
“The devil perceived that in fulfilling the role God had planned for him, according to heaven's logic of love, he would be called upon to serve human beings of far less power and excellence then himself. He envied the good that he saw coming to them, and he resented their destined place. The sight of these happy creatures filled the devil and his fallen angels with anger and envy, and so they took thought as to how they might mar the work of God and destroy the destiny of this newly-created race. They set about to enslave those whom they had been meant to serve, and to degrade those who had been assigned such an exalted place into the lowly slime beneath their feet” (pp. 71-72).So the enemy says: “I will not serve the humans, I will enslave and kill them.” But God says, in the humble love of Jesus: “I will serve them, I will liberate them and raise them to new life.” This is what Jesus does in today's Gospel when He heals the woman who was afflicted with hemorrhages for 12 years, and when He rescues the daughter of Jairus from the sleep of death (Mark 5: 21-43). He is the human expression of the God of love who does not “rejoice in the destruction of the living… [but] formed human beings to be imperishable” (Wisdom 1:13; 2: 23).