The 18th Sunday in Ordinary Time, August 3, 2025

Ecclesiastes 1, 2; 2, 21–23

Vanity of vanities, says Qoheleth, vanity of vanities! All things are vanity!  Here is one who has labored with wisdom and knowledge and skill, and yet to another who has not labored over it, he must leave property. This also is vanity and a great misfortune. For what profit comes to man from all the toil and anxiety of heart with which he has labored under the sun? All his days sorrow and grief are his occupation; even at night his mind is not at rest. This also is vanity.

The Hebrew word hevel (הֲבֵ֤ל) means “vapor”, “breath”, and “vanity”.  It has the sense of something that passes quickly, that is disposable.  Its doubling, as in “vanity of vanities” strengthens the original meaning.  We might translate the first two words of today’s First Reading as, O most vaporous vapor!  In such a case, the line “All things are vanity” becomes, All is vapor that dissipates!  The author lists several examples drawn from life of what he considers “vapor”, one being a man who works hard and diligently who dies and leaves his property to someone who has done nothing to earn it.  All our hard work goes for nothing, the author seems to say.

A hasty reading of the Book of Ecclesiastes might cause the reader to think of it as a depressing book, one that reflects despair.  In the end, though, the author reveals that true happiness is to enjoy what we do have even if it is all passing.  And indeed, everything we can seem hear, and touch is passing away in front of us, and every moment you and I age.  Everything physical is impermanent by design.  Only the spirit lasts.  This is why Jesus tells us: “9 Lay not up to yourselves treasures on earth: where the rust, and moth consume, and where thieves break through, and steal. But lay up to yourselves treasures in heaven: where neither the rust nor moth doth consume, and where thieves do not break through, nor steal” (Matthew 6, 19-20). 

Keeping in mind that the world is passing away even now and that our life in it is temporary is the perspective that the Lord wants us to have and maintain.  We see the world as a place where we learn to love and where we practice our faith so that we may leave it for the world for which we were created, heaven.  St. Paul puts it very well: “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child. But, when I became a man, I put away the things of a child.”  We leave our earthly things behind in order to enter the celestial realms of the angels and the saints.  But if we try to cling to earthly things, as a child clinging to toys it has outgrown, we refuse to grow, to become capable of entering heaven.

In the Gospel Reading today a man comes to Jesus and tries to get him to judge a property matter, and the Lord essentially tells him, through the parable in the reading, that the more he has to do with this world, the less prepared he will be for the world to come.  We cannot get ourselves for the future, we have to be ready now.  If we derive our sense of worth or our identity from the things we possess, from our jobs, from our worldly success, then all we are doing is collecting the vapor that dissipates as we grasp it so that we will be left with nothing.