2026-09-24
1 Kings 3:26 Then the woman whose son was alive said to the king, because her heart yearned for her son, “Oh, my lord, giver her the living child, and by no means put him to death.” But the other said, “He shall be neither mine nor yours, divide him.”
I expect that most of you reading this are quite familiar with how the story goes. But perhaps a quick summary might be fitting still. Two prostitutes living together each give birth. At night, however, one of them sleeps on her baby and he dies, so she stealthily gets up and exchanges her dead child for the other woman’s living one. They appear before king Solomon to settle the dispute as none of them is willing to agree that the dead child, and not the living one, is hers. Solomon, in his first recorded act of wisdom, shrewdly figures out who the real mother is by asking his servant to cut the baby into two so that each woman gets half of him. The real mother would rather the other woman has the child, while the other woman is quite content if neither of them do, and so she says, “divide him.”
I have noticed how in the medical field particularly, it is so easy to get envious of colleagues who are clearly doing much better than you or who have distinguished themselves so much and happen to be winning in other areas of life besides medicine: there are the BSc Anatomy and Physiology folks, the student researchers getting themselves into PubMed indexed journals, those guys who seem to be exceptionally good in their clinical work, the ones winning various hackathons, those spear-heading successful start-ups, name it. It’s so hard not to be envious of them, and so easy to resent them for being and doing so better than us. I have, sometimes, personally tried to make sense of, and come to grips with the disparity by saying to myself, “Am I not just as capable? Oh I know I am gifted too. I too am just as important. The guy is just so full of pride.” And medicine being the ambitious field that it is at every cadre, I doubt that anyone is really ever out of the woods when it comes to these envious feelings. At every rung of the ladder there’s just always someone ahead of us, and it’s tempting enough to want to lean back as much as we can in order to fall the ladder, just so you all once again become level, or losers.
But while we might really want and long for the glory and success that someone else has, the thing is that whatever that glory or success is or involves, it might, in fact, on the whole, not be satisfying or fulfilling for us once we get it. It isn’t that we want these things as much as we can’t bear to see other people have them. We would be content if we both were failing, than that one of us should be doing so well. This must have been the reason why in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Baby Suggs fellow black neighbours suddenly hated her; “why should she be the one to give us such a treat? why must she have so much and be so generous?” And so, though they know what’s coming, they don’t warn Baby Sugg and Sethe, and would be pretty glad for them to be punished for their benevolence.
I John 3:12 says, “We should not be like Cain who was of the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own deeds were evil and his brother righteous.” Cain didn’t hate it that God had rejected his sacrifice as much as he hated it that God had accepted Abel’s. Had God been indifferent to them both, it’s very probable he would have had no qualms whatsoever or none of the rancour that made him lift his hand against his brother and kill him.
As in Shakespeare’s sonnet 29, “Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope/With what I most enjoy contented least” I think we ought to learn to take the cue from this reprehensible feeling that we just might be deriding what truly matters to us, what fulfils us, and what we most enjoy by envying someone else. One person winning doesn’t always have to mean that we have lost. We all are stars that though differing in glory, can yet shine as brightly as we are able to without caring whether or not we are being outshined. Envy, by making us vilify someone else and downplay their success, only ends up distracting us from what we ought to do to get ourselves better. It might be we who need to up our game, who need to be more disciplined and committed to our business. In more contemporary jargon, we should be the ones to go up to them, not for them to come down to us. Other people don’t have to play low just so that we feel safe.
Now, I know this essay won’t do much to rid us of this deadly sin, but I hope it will be a constant reminder that our dead child is no justification for wanting other people’s children dead too.
Prayer:
Dear Lord, thank you because it is you who richly gives us all things to enjoy. No man can have one thing unless it is granted him from heaven. Our hearts are no less evil than Cain’s was, and before we murder our brothers, or vilify them, or sabotage their work, just because we aren’t doing so well as they are, be kind and merciful to us, and rid us of this satanic inclination. In Jesus Name. Amen.