Thursday in the 25 Week of Ordinary Time, September 22, 2022

Ecclesiastes 1, 2-11

Vanity of vanities, says Qoheleth, vanity of vanities! All things are vanity! What profit has man from all the labor which he toils at under the sun? One generation passes and another comes, but the world forever stays. The sun rises and the sun goes down; then it presses on to the place where it rises. Blowing now toward the south, then toward the north, the wind turns again and again, resuming its rounds. All rivers go to the sea, yet never does the sea become full. To the place where they go, the rivers keep on going. All speech is labored; there is nothing one can say. The eye is not satisfied with seeing nor is the ear satisfied with hearing.  What has been, that will be; what has been done, that will be done. Nothing is new under the sun. Even the thing of which we say, “See, this is new!” has already existed in the ages that preceded us. There is no remembrance of the men of old; nor of those to come will there be any remembrance among those who come after them.

The Book of Ecclesiastes lays out for us the grim situation of the human race before the coming of the Son of God into the world.  It also paints for us the picture of the modern human living without Christ and the hope of heaven.  It is a short book, but just long enough to remind us of our great good fortune in what we have and what will be our fate should we lapse into a life of sin.  It also ought to motivate us to help others who do not know the Lord to get to know him, most of all by praying for them, for without grace, nothing changes.

“Qoheleth” is not a name but a position in which a person acts as a teacher or the speaker to an assembly.  Verse one identifies him with Solomon, but nearly all Hebrew wisdom was attributed to Solomon in the same way that we might say a king conquered a territory — his generals and soldiers in fact accomplished this.  The word translated here as vanity means “breath” or “vapor” in the Hebrew.  The ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew word means “emptiness”, “purposelessness”, “nonsense”, and “emptiness”.  With this in mind, we can translate verse two as “It is all nonsense”, or “It is all without purpose”.  While perhaps striking some of us as a negative way to start a book, particularly a biblical book, this teaching reassures us of what Jesus teaches.  For instance, in the Parable of the Rich Farmer, the farmer has an abundant crop one season and decides to take it easy from now on and live on his enormous surplus.  But the Lord speaks to him in his bed: “You fool, this night do your soul will be demanded of you. And whose shall those things be which you have gathered?” (Luke 12, 20).

“One generation passes and another comes, but the world forever stays.”  This verse sounds like the inspiration for “Ol’ Man River”, which points to the universality of this wisdom.  A given human person will make scant impact on the world — unless he becomes a saint.  We might think that an inventor could make a big difference in how the people of the world live, but ultimately nothing substantial improves.  There is no progress in the world of men and women, only change.  We find cures to one disease only for another to appear.  We create one technology only to find that the convenience it gives us does not make up for the dangers it unleashes.  Progress only occurs in the spiritual realm, where the most wretched sinner can repent and grow in grace and become a John of God, or a Mary of Egypt.

“The eye is not satisfied with seeing nor is the ear satisfied with hearing.”  Fallen human nature makes us ever restless to find peace.  The godless self-medicate on things far worse than narcotics in order to forget the pointlessness of their existence: pornography, violence, our jobs.  They do not ease their suffering and find no answers, and at the same time the spouses and children they have accumulated suffer from their absence.

“Nothing is new under the sun.”  This held true until the Son of God became incarnate of the Virgin Mary.  And he came precisely in order to renew us.  This is why we Christians use words like “resurrection”, which literally means “to rise again”.  We do not just rise on the last day, we rise again.  That is, this is an entirely new kind of rising: not only the soul, but the soul and the body rejoined and glorified.  Jesus changes everything that matters.

“There is no remembrance of the men of old; nor of those to come will there be any remembrance among those who come after them.”  Even three or four hundred years before the Birth of Christ, when this book was written, ancient ruins abounded.  Babylon and Nineveh, once so mighty, lay crushed to the ground.  The great pharaohs of Egypt were no more and hardly anyone knew their names anymore as the land was controlled  by the Greeks, who would later give way to the Romans.  

We give God thanks for making himself known to us, and for the grace which enables us to do his will so that he have purpose in our lives and heaven to look forward to.