5. The variety which is life

Pathways in the Old Testament

1 August 2010

Ecclesiastes 1:2, 2:21-23

Our final excursion into the Old Testament during this winter series takes us to the Book of Ecclesiastes, which could be said to be one of the least straightforward in the whole Bible. Let me say a number of things that might assist us in understanding its message. William P Brown reminds us of an important rule of thumb, namely that we should apply our understanding of any biblical passage by ‘letting the whole interpret the part’.

This is particularly appropriate with Ecclesiastes. The opening verse attributes a wide assortment of poetry, proverbs and autobiographical material to an enigmatic figure whose character is just as complex as his writings. We are simply told ‘the words of the teacher’ (1:1).

Who is such a person? Erskine White suggests, ‘We ought to find him quite interesting; he is one of the most modern personalities in all the Bible. In fact here is someone very much like you or me.’

He is successful by any measure of achievement.
He knows how to enjoy the pleasures of life.
He is a person who is very restless.
He is looking for deeper meaning and fulfilment.

Such an introduction places him at home in our modern world and encourages us all to want to know something more about the questions he asks. He is honest about himself and considers what he has done with his life. He explores the variety which is life!

Our text is an outstanding verse in this book of wisdom:
“Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the teacher.
“Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.”
(Ecclesiastes 1:2)

What a text for the preacher to choose! My challenge is to seek to get into the mind of a man who makes these statements and see how they apply to the specific circumstances of life and how they can help those of us who are seeking to live our lives in Jesus Christ.

The writer’s underlying questions are: ‘What am I working for?’ ‘What am I living for?’ ‘What do I gain for all my life under the sun?’ If we are really honest, these are the kind of questions people ask in any age and, not surprisingly, in ours.

Everyone might ask such questions: a person in an office or factory may ask the questions; a person at home may ask the questions; the young up-and-coming businessman or woman may ask the questions; the retired teacher may ask the questions. All manner of people!

The writer, teacher or preacher makes a sweeping assessment of the human condition which provides the keynote for the message of Ecclesiastes. We would be in error to see this as a wholly pessimistic outlook on life, but it leads us to explore something of the deeper meaning which will open up for us enormous possibilities that are positive and wholesome.

The Authorised Version preferred to translate ‘vanity of vanities’, which John J Collins suggests has ‘such a time-honoured ring to it that other translations are weak by comparison’. However, Collins adds: ‘Unfortunately the familiarity of the phrase can often cause it to slip past us without making any real impression.’

It might be helpful to know that the Hebrew words are more accurately translated ‘vapour of vapours’. The characteristic nature of vapour is for it to disappear. William Shakespeare coined a phrase with which we will all be familiar: ‘into thin air’. This is the transitory and passing nature of life.

Let me ask three questions which take the general questions a step further:-

What am I working for? - The ultimate question

This is not a question about employment, but rather relates to our priorities in life. Both the Book of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes are shaped by the typical and recurring aspects of life, rather than specific and exceptional circumstances.

Work does not really make the ultimate difference in life, even though as Protestants we have been driven by it. We never fully subdue the earth, achieve all our goals and look back feeling we have done everything we set out to do. Our working is much more to be seen in the application of the whole of our lives… rather than in paid employment, however important that is.

This book is quite different from the prophets who address specific crises, historical contexts and so on. We don’t really need to know who has written the book – or even why – but we are invited to explore the nature of the questions.

‘What am I working for?’ reminds us that we must be sure of our real reason for living. Throughout the twelve chapters, the writer argues one main point – to quote David Hubbard, ‘It is incredibly difficult for us as human beings to gain a grasp of life that will take us beyond futility.’

The strong language of the text is reinforced by repetition and strengthened by the word ‘everything’. For the Christian who is seeking to live the life of Christ, this question is foundational and helps to raise us above the cyclical nature of life, saving us from being cynical.

The unsatisfying pursuit of enjoyment

Of course, our Christian faith is not given to us to prevent us from enjoying life. However, it is when enjoyment becomes a domineering pursuit and the very end and goal of our lives that we lose our way.

It was G K Chesterton who described joy as ‘the gigantic secret of the Christian’. He was not suggesting that it should be the goal of our lives, but the glorious by-product of living close to God and having a great compassion for those in need.

What is equally true is that work must not become all-consuming … and the teaching of Jesus is so applicable here: ‘What good will it be for you to gain the whole world, yet forfeit your soul?’ (Matthew 16:26)

When we set our hearts and minds upon the real purpose of life, which is centred both in God and on his concern for the world, we discover what William George Jordan, one of the great American essayists, espoused, ‘Love, is the divine alchemy of life, transmutes all duties into privileges, all responsibilities into joys.’

The futile outcome of vanity

The text uses strong language and the sweeping generalisation might mean we miss the truth being communicated. Life is not what it seems.

Perhaps the writer has come to the sobering realisation that so much of what he has worked hard to build up will eventually be enjoyed by someone else, who may or may not use it wisely. The futility of life is summed up in the fact that what we build does not necessarily last. It is only when we live our lives in the arena of God’s grace that we recognise everything he has to say to us – and how he brings meaning and purpose into life.

Let me tell you about a young, gifted minister whose preaching was considered a cut above the ordinary. As the ranks of the congregation began to swell, his head followed suit. After he had delivered his latest eloquent sermon, one of his loyal members earnestly shook his hand and said, ‘You’re becoming one of the greatest expositors of this generation, Pastor.’

As he squeezed his head into the car and slid behind the steering wheel, his weary wife sat beside him and all the kids crammed into the back seat. He could not wait to share what the lady had said.

‘Mrs Franklin told me she thought I was one of the greatest expositors of this generation,’ he said proudly, caught up in the heady swirl of the exaggerated compliment.

No response… just the sound of frenetic activity behind.

Fishing for affirmation, he glanced at his silent wife with a weak smile and prodded, ‘I wonder just how many “great expositors” there are in this generation?’

Unable to resist the opportunity to set the record straight, she said quietly, ‘One less than you think, my dear.’

When life is all about ourselves, then the outcome is futile.

Is that all there is? - The all-consuming search

The writer of Ecclesiastes is not fired by anger, cynicism or skepticism; he is trying to bring into our lives a real God-centred perspective. He invites us to test the theory in our own lives. If we have all the wealth in the world, if we have all the power in the world, we will still find ourselves lacking the deep things.

Corrie Ten Boon put life in proper perspective when she proclaimed, ‘I have learned to hold everything loosely. That way it doesn’t hurt when God takes them from me.’

The search for meaning is grounded in experience and weighs up all the possibilities and obscurities of human existence. William Brown tells us that the sage who wrote Ecclesiastes ‘… is ever on the move, taking account of the polarities … as he attempts to make sense of his world “under the sun”’.

Dreams become delusions!

There is nothing wrong with having dreams – in fact we would be concerned about the young person who failed to look to the future with some degree of confidence in their hopes.
However, the story of an old minister who was invited to speak to a group of young people about to leave college speaks strongly about visions that fall short. He met a brilliant young student named Robert.
‘What do you plan to do after college, Robert?’ he asked.
‘Well, I’ve been given a place at law school,’ Robert answered.
‘What will you do after law school?’
‘Well, I thought I would get married, have children and establish my own law practice.’
‘And then what will you do?
Robert said, ‘I’d like to get rich and retire early, so I can see the world. This has always been one of my dreams.’
The old minister persisted, ‘What will you do after that?’
By this time, young Robert had run out of plans, as he heard the words, ‘Young friend, your plans are much too small. You’ve planned only for the next sixty or seventy years. You must make your plans big enough to include God and large enough to include eternity.’

Delusions fill too many lives. Henrik Ibsen, the Norwegian dramatist, suggested, ‘Take the life-lie away from the average man and straight away you take away his happiness.’ This may be true, but only in the sense that no matter how hard we try we cannot, of ourselves, discover ultimate satisfaction anymore than, as one writer put it, ‘drink water from a mirage’.

Haste becomes destructive!

During our recent trip to see our family, we chose to travel to London by train. The 250 kilometre journey took less than two hours and something that occurred to me about the swift journey was the fact that we passed through numerous stations which we could not identify because of the speed. So it is with life!

It is far too easy to pass through our lives and be more concerned about the speed of the journey than our engagement with others and the desire for meaningful and quality relationships. This is probably the most worrying aspect of the meaninglessness that afflicts many people.

Our sense of meaninglessness is unavoidable if we have false objectives. Life then becomes meaningless and:-

becomes the brick wall that blocks the way.
exists between the apparent boundaries we set.
is the greatest challenge to Christian mission today.

Haste is a feature of our modern life. In Emerson’s essay Prudence, he could well have been speaking of our present world when he wrote, ‘In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed.’

To whom am I accountable? - The defining moment

This is the ultimate question with which we all must do business if we are serious about life. In this opening chapter, the writer uses the term ‘under the sun’ (v.3) and he will use it close to thirty times in the twelve chapters. This term is an ancient Semitic description of life. It makes sense to us at Wesley Mission when we suggest that ‘word and prayer’ need to be earthed in ‘deed and action’.

We are reminded that the big issues of uncertainty, injustice and the apparent futility of people’s lives need to become the context in which we explore meaning… for in these issues we must find our way forward. However, at the same time, we remain accountable to the Creator God, Loving Saviour and Ever-present Spirit.

Those of us who believe the Great Commission of Jesus is the starting point of our mission in the world must remind ourselves that we are accountable to the One who gave that commission.

For many, life is meaningless – and we are charged with the task of bringing meaning to life and giving hope to the world of suffering and disorder. But this is not of our own design – for it comes from and can only be fulfilled in God’s grace through Jesus Christ.

The constancy of meaningful values

The debate about values is the debate about life. Every community or organisation has values, whether it consciously realises it or not! Understanding those values helps to create the destiny we seek to carve out within those organisations or communities.

The people of God recognise that this is an important part of identifying how we can address the question of accountability. Søren Kierkegaard, in his search for meaning, reflected, ‘What I really lack is to be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I am to know… the thing is to understand myself, to see what God really wishes me to do… to find the idea for which I can live and die.’

We need to clearly separate the two concepts of success and significance, because they are not necessarily linked together. George Bernard Shaw memorably said, ‘There are two sources of unhappiness in life. One is not getting what you want; the other is getting it.’

For the Christian, the debate about values will always take place in the context of the presence of God – and also in the light of words we find in the Book of the Law, Deuteronomy, as God spoke to a Covenant People, ‘Now choose life, so that you and your children may live and that you may love the Lord your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the Lord is your life …’ (Deut. 30:19-20)

The enduring nature of God

In 2002, a film called About Schmidt was released… an interesting movie starring Jack Nicholson. He plays Warren Schmidt, an actuary for the Woodman of the World Insurance Company. The film begins on the momentous day of his retirement. He sits at his empty desk with his boxes neatly piled against the wall and he watches the clock as it tick-tocks to closing time on his final working day.

His colleagues give him a party at the mall steakhouse, including a cake shaped like the insurance company building. His wife of forty-two years had scrimped and saved enough money to buy a 35 ft Winnibago so they could travel around the country in retirement. Unfortunately, she drops dead while cleaning the house. Now, Schmidt is really lost… no job, no wife and no family, except a daughter in Denver from whom he had been somewhat estranged for years.

Warren is desperate to find something meaningful in his thoroughly impressive life. He has nothing to do, so he sets out for Colorado in the Winnibago in the hope of bridging the gulf between himself and his daughter, prior to her wedding.

Unfortunately, as you can imagine with a Nicholson role, he hates the groom-to-be, a profoundly mediocre, under-achieving waterbed salesman. As this strange journey of discovery unfolds, Warren details his adventures and shares his observations in long, rambling letters to an unexpected new friend and confessor, a six-year-old Tanzanian orphan who cannot possibly read, who he sponsors from an advert on the television. He is in that place to which the Book of Ecclesiastes draws us. He would be able to concur with the thought that life is meaningless!

Our plans can go dreadfully wrong. The experience of failure and despair fills far too many lives, even in our seemingly ‘successful’ society. A simple four-liner reminds us that we are continually brought face to face with the aspirations and meaning of our lives:–
Across the fields of yesterday he sometimes comes to me,
A little lad just back from play, the boy I used to be.
He smiles at me so wistfully when once he’s crept within,
It is as though he’d hoped to see the man I might have been.

In this one-off excursion into Ecclesiastes, it seems to me that the writer could have lived today… gloomy pessimism and life without reference to God abound – and have become the norm for far too many.

We will never fully understand the writer’s message without fast-forwarding to the ministry of Jesus Christ. Paul stood before the Areopagus, a public debating venue in Athens and, at the close of his address, reminded his audience of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The response was that ‘some of them sneered, but others said, “We want to hear you again on this subject.”… Some of the people became followers...’ (Acts 17:32-34)

Christian Life