Today is our one Sunday in the whole liturgical year with a lesson from the Book of Ecclesiastes, so I thought it would be worth it to give it a little bit of our attention. If you don’t know the Book of Ecclesiastes, also called Qoheleth, well you have nothing to feel bad about since we obviously study it so little in our churches! You may be familiar with the first line though: “Vanity of Vanities! All Is vanity“ but again it’s very possible that you have never heard much more after that. It’s a quick read though. You’ll find the Book of Ecclesiastes in your Bible among the other books of Wisdom, it’s twelve short chapters, you can easily go through the whole thing in half an hour, so I would say it’s perfect for a rainy Sunday afternoon! Now this said, it’s certainly not an easy read, it may even be one of the most, if not the most, difficult book of the Bible, and not because it’s hard to understand (like, say, Revelation) but because it is hard to take in emotionally.
Peter Enns, a specialist of the Old Testament, summarizes the book in those words:
This what Qoheleth is saying: At the end of the day, life is frustratingly absurd. The cycles of nature are screaming that message to you. You live. You exert a lot of energy, but nothing new happens. Just like the sun, wind and rivers. Then you die.
And one other thing: after you die, you will be quickly forgotten.
You have guessed it, it is quite bleak, many even say depressing, and actually so depressing that some have wondered why it’s even in the Bible, where we should be taught about faith, hope, resilience, blessing and all the good things. But let’s start with the beginning, since the beginning is at least something that we’re a bit familiar with!
“Vanity of vanities, says the teacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity”, thisis the familiar opening line of our book. The word vanity as an English translation for the Hebrew word Hevel as been discussed, but we understand what is vanity. It’s the same root than vain, which means “empty”, or at least “very superficial”, which is why we also call a washbasin with a mirror a vanity, because that’s where women would comb their hair and do their make up! (And we know women are vain, right!) But hevel has also been translated as meaningless or absurd. The closest to the original sense yet would be something like smoke or mist, something that you can vaguely perceive but never catch because it dissipates very quickly. This wordHevel is important because, over the 12 chapters of Ecclesiastes, it is used 40 times and it really summarizes the whole meditation of the author: The transitory aspect of human life, on an individual level, but also as families and civilizations. Everything is vanity because of the march of time: Generations come and go and people are forgotten, our life represents a blink in times compared to planets and stars. And then, since we know we’re all going to die, good and bad alike, one cannot be saved by their piety or wisdom. Finally, the teacher observes that life is random: We try our best and we are not rewarded because we all lose everything in the end, and even if we pass it on, who knows what people after us will do with what we have left behind!
Now it is difficult to render in a few words the whole emotion you can get when you read the book, the poetry of the teacher is really poignant and you can really feel, even experience, his pain. It is not an intellectual exercise in skepticism, the man is not toying with some ideas, rather he struggles intensely with this perceived lack of meaning of “everything under the sun” and he expresses a whole range of feelings from sadness to despair (He says in our passage: I turned and gave my heart up to despair), and then he shift to anger, including anger at God, but also bitterness and resignation. We have a glimpse of that in our passage today. He says: It is an unhappy business that God has given to human beings to be busy with. But again, I invite you to read the whole text itself.
Then the Second thing we need to notice in this first line of our passage today is that the man is called “Teacher”, one of the many translation of the word “Ecclesiastes” which means literally “The Gatherer”, the one who gathers people to teach them or to preach to them. What is so interesting, and also somehow troubling, is that the whole speech of the Teacher, being reported to us by a narrator, is never criticized, downplayed or judged as false, depressing or ungodly. The narrator says at the end of the book that the teacher “wrote words of truth plainly” (12:9) He praises him, he is indeed a Teacher, he says something important we all need to hear. The Teacher teaches wisdom and even more than wisdom, because he has understood that if wisdom has its benefit in its time to guide our lives, wise men are not superior to fools because they will perish as well. It is a greater form of wisdom if you will, the Teacher has even outgrown wisdom to attain the great humility of the one who knows that his own knowledge, education and science won’t do anything for him in the end. That’s why the narrator concludes at the end of the book: The end of the matters; all has been heard.
So why does it matter to us, and why should we keep reading Ecclesiastes, and more than just “read”, meditate its message?
1 – The book of Ecclesiastes has often been described as “brutally honest” which is a quality we always need to bring back in our conversations, in our studies and in our churches if we want to be genuine in our faith. I am quite amazed to realize that the Teacher has a very clinical, almost scientific way of describing the world: The vasteness of the cosmos, the cycle of life. But rather than bringing awe at the work of God, it creates for him a sense of absurdity: Things repeat themselves but the individuals do not really count. I think this is the way a lot of people see the world, especially through the lens of evolution who see competition and cruelty in nature rather than order and beauty. We are surrounded by those voices of atheists, but we can also hear this voice of doubt inside of us even when we believe in God. The world can appear random, or at least purposeless, especially when we go through difficulties or even tragedies. We all go through times where we can feel like the universe is silent, that nobody cares, that our individual lives or efforts don’t matter or don’t accomplish much in the end. Our many losses are weighting on us and nothing new happens, we are stuck. Like the Teacher we may be discouraged, bitter or angry at God. We have learned very early not to share our negative emotions as if they were a lack of faith, but it makes a huge difference to see the Bible make room for all these feelings and experiences because they are real.
2 – Actually, as often as I have heard that the Book of Ecclesiastes is depressing, I have also heard those who have taken it seriously finding it strangely comforting.The first reason may be indeed because it gives room and voice to those feelings and thoughts we don’t think are legitimate and are difficult to share. Finding them in writing in the Bible shows us that not only they are part of the human experience through times and cultures, but they are also part of the experience of faith.There is no direct answer to despair, anger and doubt but since Ecclesiastes is part of Scriptures it’s like God tells us he knows this is how we see the world, random or even cruel and this thousands of years before Darwin. God knows this is how we feel, lost or forgotten, and God sees us and hears us in our questioning, fatigue and even rebellion. I wonder if in order to really find faith, we don’t have to deeply experience the absence of God first, what it means to live in a fallen world. The way I understand Ecclesiastes is a description of what the world is without God and…without our day to day illusions.An author I like say that conversion is not so much going from being bad to becoming good, it’s about turning from illusion to face reality. We may keep ourselves busy with work or entertained with distractions, but if we open our eyes indeed we will see that these things we hold on to don’t have ultimate meaning or won’t last for ever. It can be very depressing, but it can be also comforting to realize that “This too shall pass” if we shift our focus, and we can find something even better, a deeper and lasting meaning.
3 – So how do we find meaning? The vision Ecclesiastes offers is pushing us in our faith. The Teacher is angry at a God who should provide blessing on his work, wealth and family, and we all want that, and yet we all know it does not happen the way we want to. It is believed by most scholars that this Book was written when the Israelites came back from Exile, after they had lost everything. So the Teacher may be our inner voice, it may also be the voice of a nation that has lost its purpose after being destroyed by the Babylonians. The Israelites had to rediscover what God expected of them after all this tragedy happened. For us as well, we have to keep looking for a bigger God who would not just bless us and bless what we care for, but a God who redeems us and redeem the world, make things new and offer us new life. For Christians, the Book of Ecclesiastes has meaning because we believe the nation of Israel had to keep going to be ready to receive the Messiah who would come in Jesus to save the people. God had a bigger purpose for them than what they thought it was (Their king, their Temple). Reading Ecclesiastes from our perspective, it is obvious that there was still meaning to be found, and yet we know that we also can be discouraged in the same way.
That’s why the last words of the narrator of Ecclesiastes summarizes it well telling us that we have to keep going and to keep being faithful even if we don‘t understand what is going on. Yes the Teacher has said it all, and yet we have to: Fear God and keep his commandments; for that is the whole duty of everyone. For God will bring every deed into judgment, including every secret thing, whether good or evil (12: 13-14). Fearing God and keep his commandment could translate “Love God and love your neighbor”. As Christians, we believe this is what gives value to our faith: not that we perceive God and God’s intentions, but that despite not knowing, we choose God and others anyway. In the end, only God can bring meaning and salvation, through God’s judgment. In the meantime, faith is to keep seeking, keep trying, keep believing in spite of all the way we may feel God is absent. Faith is not so much how we feel or what we think, rather it’s how we decide to behave regardless. This is also what Jesus went through in his passion.