ON EATING SOUR GRAPES

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (8\18\05)

I bought a bag a grapes the other day, and before I bought them, I tasted one of them. Sweet it was, ambrosial, but when I got the grapes home, Gretchen said, "You bought sour grapes." I was devastated. Sure enough, a few sour grapes were cached on the same stem with the ambrosial grapes.

With an ancestry of farmers on both sides of my family, I was trained to waste nothing. Farmers are the custodians of bits and pieces of nearly everything, busted machines, broken spades, and scraps of food, especially scraps of food. "Waste not, want not." "A penny saved is a penny earned." "You’ll never know. It might come in handy some day." My father, a dentist and a son of the soil himself, even insisted that everyone in the family eat the burned toast asserting that carbon was good for the teeth. Now, of course, we know that as with nearly everything else, carbon is a also carcinogen.

Being true to my heritage, it fell to my lot to eat the sour grapes in addition to the burned toast since Gretchen, her forbearers being merchants, railroad men, and politicians, would have none of my sour grapes eating project. I justified the project not only on the basis of familial loyalty, but also on the notion that eating sour grapes would clarify the mouth’s taste buds and make eating everything else that much clearer and enjoyable, something akin to munching on a kosher dill pickle before tying into a corned beef sandwich in a Jewish deli. Not so. The sour grapes didn’t clarify anything, much less whet the appetite. They left a sour taste in my mouth, just as one might reasonably expect from eating sour grapes.

One of my favorite Old Testament prophets, Jeremiah, set the whole "sour grapes" thing going with his radical idea that children should not be punished because of the sins of their parents. He said, "Each man who eats sour grapes, his teeth shall be set one edge (31:30)." Ultimately, if we take Jeremiah’s idea to its conclusion, we end up with a socially level playing field.
Apparently, the Christian right does not read Jeremiah. On hearing the Beatitudes in the Gospel of Luke without identifying the source an elder in a church I once served said that they sounded like communist propaganda. He also reported on leaving the committal service for his late wife, "Well, Sarai, she was a good woman. Never crossed me."

For a long time "sour grapes" have been symbols for envy, one of the seven deadly sins. They well might be symbols, being as they are enticing of appearance, but sour of taste. Sin is almost always attractive, witness the story of Adam and Eve. First, the serpent induced Eve to question the authority of God’s Word. Then the serpent promised that she and Adam would be like God, knowing everything, if they ate the fruit of the tree. Eve doubted God in a fit of envy, saying to herself, "Oh, yeah, who says?" Seeing that the fruit of the tree (probably a date, not an apple) was enticing of appearance, being good for food, a delight to the eye, and making one wise, she and Adam ate, thinking they would hoodwink God. Then they knew they were naked which was a vivid way of saying they vulnerable and way beyond their depth.

So temptation is almost always attractive, but what is the sin of "sour grapes?" Out of the seven deadly sins, pride, greed, lust, anger, gluttony, envy, and sloth which one fits "sour grapes?" Without much wit, easy it is to see that envy is the culprit, being the only sin without a serpentine promise.

Pride promises the illusion of importance. Greed promises wealth. Lust promises the pleasures of the flesh. Anger promises the avoidance of pain by spewing our pain on others. Gluttony, an American favorite, offers the promise of satisfaction. Sloth promises relaxation and ease.

And then there is envy which promises nothing at all. Envy is akin to jealousy, only envy is about place, power, position, and possessions, commonly called things, while jealousy is about people. As sins, they offer no rewards. They do not entice with false promises, that is, unless one likes yellow bile and dyspepsia.

Medieval psychology offered four diagnoses, sanguine, melancholic, phlegmatic, and choleric. Built upon the theory that four humours, blood, black bile, phlegm, and yellow bile, flow through our bodies, affecting our personalities. Envy and jealousy are choleric, yellow bile personalities.

Although envy and jealousy offer no rewards, they are the most widely practiced of the seven because of their hidden agendas. While sins can promise rewards, they can’t promise virtues; however, they can imply them. Envy and jealousy imply dignity through indignation. In a sense they try to baptize sin and turn it into a virtue. The question, "Just who does he think he is?," implies that the questioner is better than the offender. "Where does she get off doing that?" implies that the questioner is more virtuous than the accused. In short, envy and jealousy pretend virtue without actually having to be virtuous. They are morally slothful.

Envy and jealous let a person pretend to be good from the sidelines without the ardor of virtue. Envy and jealousy require no effort, only indignation. They allow the illusion of moral accomplishment without accomplishment.

They are part and parcel of Plato’s distinction between appearance and reality. They have the appearance of virtue without its reality. The reality is yellow bile. All sins have a consequence, and envy and jealousy’s consequences are choler.

All of the deadly sins exemplify the New Testament word for sin, hamartia, which literally means missing the mark. A term of archery, it is a word fit for the experience. All the seven deadly sins miss the mark, but jealousy and envy miss it with a vengeance. They not only have no promises, they have consequences a plenty. In addition to their vanity, they leave bitterness, a sour personality.

Faith is a form of finding the mark.

Copyright © 2005 Dana Prom Smith