Ezekiel 18

A Flame, A Fox, And An Envious Person

Sour grapes. Ezekiel 18:2.

Did you ever notice the blackness of the ceiling above a gas bracket? There is usually a smoky circle on the white ceiling exactly above the spot where a gas jet burns. It is the same with a candle. If your candlestick stands always in the same place, ten to one there will be a grimy mark overhead. Then take a look at the back of the dining-room grate in the morning, when the cinders are out of it. You will notice that where the fire has been hot all the bricks are burnt clean, but higher up, where the flames have not reached, the back and sides of the grate, and the chimney too, are covered with a coating of smoke or soot. You see, what the flame cannot reach it blackens, and that brings us to our text, though you will say, “I don't see much connection between sour grapes, a flame, and a blackened ceiling.” Suppose we make it into a riddle, and suppose instead of “sour grapes” we use the word “envy,” let us see if that will make sense. Why is envy like a flame? Can you give me the answer? Because what it cannot reach it blackens. Ah, now you have it! “Sour grapes!” we say, when we hear anybody running down anything which we know they particularly wanted to get, but have not succeeded in getting. We are going back in our minds to the old fable of the hungry fox who found the grapes in the vineyard growing beyond his reach. You remember that in spite of all his leaping he could not leap as high as the grapes, so he turned away with a sneer, and said, “Anybody can have those for all I care. They are a lot of sour, nasty things”

The fox and the flame and envious people are all alike in this they blacken what they cannot reach. And, boys and girls, I don't want you to join them. I don't want you to be blackeners in this world. I don't want you to run down people or things simply because they are above or beyond your reach. Don't say a prize isn't worth having because another boy has won it. Don't say a girl is “stuck-up” because she happens to live in a slightly bigger house or wear slightly better clothes than you do.

Let me give you three reasons why you should not be blackeners.

1. It hurts others. You never know when a word spoken in sheer spite or envy, with no real truth behind it, may be understood by somebody else as a fact, and repeated by them as such. If you say, with a vicious snap of your mouth, “I don't believe So-and-so is a bit clever though she won the composition prize. It's pure grind with her, and I'm certain her home people help her with her essays,” the likelihood is that poor So-and-so will after that be labeled as “the girl whose father writes her essays.” And the worst of it is that there won't be a grain of truth in the story. It will all have arisen out of your own envious little heart which was sore because that essay prize did not come your way. Envy that means evil-speaking is dangerous; so don't let the flame of your jealousy blacken other people's lives.

2. It hurts yourself. You can't blacken others without blackening yourself. Envy will hurt you even more than it hurts other people. It will hurt you because it will make you unhappy in your own soul. And it will hurt you because it will make you shunned by your companions. We avoid the people who say sharp or biting things. We feel that if they say them about others they will say them about us as soon as our back is turned. So we avoid the blackeners and choose as friends those who will be true and generous and loyal, both before our face and behind our back. That is why blackeners are never favorites.

3. It is a great waste of energy. To go back to the smoke you know that smoke is just unburnt fuel. It is so much burning matter wasted, and if we could only make all our grates and chimneys consume their own smoke like those of some large factories, our fires would be hotter and they would burn far less coal.

Now it is the same with envy. If, instead of wasting its energy in saying bitter things, envy would stick in and work hard, it would soon win a better prize than the one it failed to get. If the fox in the fable, instead of sneering, had spent his time in hunting the vineyard for a bunch of grapes that grew nearer the ground, I've no doubt he would have had his reward in a fine juicy cluster; and what is more, he would have been able to say quite joyfully as he munched them up, “Ah, these are grand! I never tasted finer.” Hard work, you see, takes away the hard feeling.

Better still, boys and girls, join love to hard work. The two combined will burn away from your heart every trace of the black and bitter smoke of envy.