It's all meaningless!
Time marches on. We are already in autumn, and, incredibly, we are starting to think about Christmas, already. Over in our charity shop, Clare has already unpacked the Christmas gifts she’s been saving up for people to buy. And it’s still September, for goodness sake. As the Teacher of Ecclesiastes grimly reminds us, nothing actually changes in reality. There is a time for everything under the sun, and just as the earth orbits the Sun for another year, so the time for all things will come again. Time to sow, time to reap, time to live and time to die.
The Book of Ecclesiastes is a puzzling inclusion in
the canon of Scripture. But it is well
worth considering as the year marches forward to its inevitable conclusion. It starts with those strident lines, ‘Vanity,
vanity, all is vanity!’ and the startling statement, by a biblical text, that
‘there is nothing new under the Sun’.
The translation of the Hebrew word hevel
as vanity is somewhat disputed. It
literally translates as “breath” or "vapour". Figuratively, it can be translated to mean
“vain”, but also "insubstantial", "futile", or
"meaningless".
So much of Scripture has a trajectory through
time. Its grand narrative is of a
Universe created from nothing, then the coming of life, the arrival of sin,
then its redemption and ultimately the completion of all things in a new heaven
and a new earth. There is a direction of
travel, through the pages of Scripture.
We are encouraged to hold on to the coat-tails of history as we traverse
a part of that great road to the future.
But the writer of Ecclesiastes, who may have been King Solomon, has an
entirely different view of history. For
him, history repeats itself. It goes
round and round. And none of it really
matters. It’s all meaningless, futile;
vanity. He underlines his view with some
really dark comments. Like these, (from
chapter 1):
“What has been is what will be, and what has been
done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun” (verse 9).
“Is there a thing of which it is said ‘See, this is
new’? It has already been, in the ages
before us” (verse 10)
And then, even more bleakly, “The people of long ago
are not remembered, nor will there be any remembrance of people yet to come by
those who come after them” (verse 11).
Even more bleakly, the writer of Ecclesiastes
notices the reality of oppression in our world.
In chapter 4, he says this:
“I saw all the oppressions that are practiced under
the sun. Look, the tears of the
oppressed – with no-one to comfort them!
On the side of their oppressors there was power – with no-one to comfort
them. And I thought of the dead, who
have already died, more fortunate than the living, who are still alive; but
better than both is the one who has not yet been, and has not seen the evil
deeds that are done under the sun”!
As we look back over the awful events of the last
year, especially in Ukraine, in Israel and Palestine, in the Yemen, in Sudan and
in many other places – we can see exactly what The Teacher means, can’t
we? He is right that power often leads
to oppression. He is right that the most
fortunate person is perhaps the one not yet born – the one who has not had to
witness the evil deeds that are done under the sun. He is also right about the circularity of
these things – the present wars and conflicts are but the latest examples of
such battles in, quite often, the self-same lands. The quest for power – to have it, to exercise
it, to use it for one’s own benefit is at the heart of all such conflict. It is all futile. All vanity.
For every tyrant will die. Every
state will crumble. Every political
movement will founder on the rocks of time and reality.
So what is there for us to cling to, amid such a bleak
assessment of the passing of time. Only
God. At the very end of his book, the
Teacher offers us this thought:
“[This is] the end of the matter, all has been
heard. Fear God, and keep his
commandments; for that is the whole duty of everyone. For God will bring every deed into judgement,
including every secret thing, whether good or ill”.
In the end, God. God is the author of all, the
perfector of all, the judge of all. God
is the yardstick against which every human action is measured – however often
that action is repeated in the cycle of history. God may be a real, living entity, the source
of all things, the ground of all being.
Or God may be an idea, an insistence upon the human condition, a
constant story against which all human action can be weighed, measured and
judged. But what history demands of you
and I, what the ceaseless round of orbits round the Sun teaches us, is that
only that there is only one constant presence, one constant idea, one constant
Word worth our attention, our commitment, our effort and our life. It is God.
In the end, it is God. Amen