Thursday after Epiphany Sunday
1 John 4:19-5:4 | Psalm 71(72):1-2,14-15,17 | Luke 4:14-22
Anyone who says, ‘I love God’, and hates his brother, is a liar, since a man who does not love the brother that he can see cannot love God, whom he has never seen. (1 John 4:20)
I learned a new word yesterday: epicaricacy, synonymous with the slightly more familiar German word Schadenfreude. Both mean “taking joy in the misfortune of others”, something that all of us have done at one time or another, and which I briefly mentioned in yesterday’s entry.
It’s easy to feel secret pleasure at someone else’s comeuppance, particularly to someone we dislike. It’s a bitter pill to swallow when a better person points out this particularly un-Christian trait in us, and we usually take umbrage. “Who are you to criticize me? You’re a sinner too, OK?!?!”
Yet epicaricacy is an insidious evil, precisely because it seems so right. All those people zipping around at terrifying speeds on e-scooters are “accidents waiting to happen”, so when we see one being stopped by a couple of enforcement officers, it matters not why the stop occurred. All that goes through our minds is “very good, he deserves it, throw the bloody a**hole in jail!”
Not a very loving attitude towards a brother we can see, is it? Especially not towards the folks rushing to deliver orders to customers before their burgers cool into soggy messes, making minimum wage in the process.
Remember the phrase “hate the sin, love the sinner” from our younger days? We may detest the things that some folks do, but unless we know they’re intrinsically evil beings, why treat them like spawn of Satan?
So the next time we see someone being questioned by lawful authority, let’s pray that their encounter will cause them to adjust whatever unpleasant behaviour we believe they indulge in, and quietly throw a little love their way.
Rather than a mental “FU” bomb.
Lord, it’s so easy to sit in judgement of others, and so hard to remember that You alone are the true Judge. Help us judge less and love more. Amen.