Today we find ourselves in the middle of the summer holidays; summer time- when the living is easy, fish are jumpin’ and the cotton is high. But the season of summer seems a world away from the despair and scepticism of today’s reading from Ecclesiastes, which strikes the chord not of mid-summer but rather of mid-life crisis. The questions that are asked are put in the mouth of King Solomon, a man of power and influence who had an important place in the history of the Israelites. An ‘alpha male’ whose endeavours have met with success. But here he asks, in seeming despair, what is the point of human endeavour? What value is there in toil and labour when all our work comes to nothing when we die? Isn’t it all chasing after the wind, sheer vanity?
What the author of Ecclesiastes seems to be objecting to is the fact that the work which gives our lives purpose, has no purpose at all in the light of our inevitable death. Everything is transitory and everything we do may be undone by those who follow us, those who did not toil for it. There is no reward for hard work and all our endeavours are merely a way of, if you like, flattering ourselves- it is all ultimately shallow and meaningless. Although Ecclesiastes is one of the books that make up the wisdom tradition in the Old Testament it challenges some of the assumptions of this wisdom tradition:
The ancient Israelites believed that the search for wisdom would be met with reward in this earthly life. Those who worked hard and pursued wisdom could expect to be prosperous. But the author of Ecclesiastes challenges this view. Throughout the book there is a desire to avoid theological clichés – theology has to meet the reality of human experience and human experience shows us that we all meet misfortune, failure and different sorts of poverty. If nothing else the author challenges the reader to question the conventional wisdom of their time.
The parable from Luke’s gospel forms an interesting interplay with this passage from Ecclesiastes.
The parable of the rich man who had good land, a fine harvest and whose greatest problem is where he should store his crops, perhaps illustrates what is expressed in Ecclesiastes; working to accumulate wealth and possession is ultimately a pointless exercise in the sight of our inevitable death. But the rich man does not seem to work hard for what he has- he is rather one of those fortunate people who has benefited from a particularly fine harvest (or perhaps a particularly good education, or photogenic appearance- if we imagine this parable being retold today). The danger of greed and accumulating possessions is not only that it is futile but rather that we are in danger of operating under false assumptions about ourselves and about God.
The rich man is ultimately criticised not for being sinful or evil but for being foolish. In the wisdom tradition of the OT foolish meant more than being silly or making ill-considered judgments, rather it meant disregarding the ways of God and God himself.
The rich man’s disregard for God is shown in his conversation with himself when he says
“I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry” (v.19)
The word ‘Soul’ here can mean ‘self’ or ‘life’. It seems the rich man believes that his core self can be sustained and given value through the accumulation of possessions. He does not refer to God or anyone else as he decides the shape of his future because he is under the illusion that he is in sole control of his own life. It is easy to believe this when we are wealthy- that somehow we are wealthy because of who we are. We forget the fact that all life comes from God and very often it is largely an accident of time and culture that means we are all in the West, possessors of relative wealth.
In the parable God – the true author of life- disrupts the narrative of the rich man’s existence. This is the only parable in which God appears as a speaking character and the story requires this explicit divine intervention to show the man that he is not God but that God is! God shows him- and us- that life is a gift from God and not simply another taken-for-granted possession. The rich man has equated his true self- his soul- with that which he has accumulated to enjoy. In this way he has shielded himself from asking the questions that the author of Ecclesiastes asks.
It is in this way that wealth can be harmful for us. This parable is not a simple moralistic tale about the need to share what we have, rather it is showing us how wealth can mean we live under the illusion that we are in control, that we are the authors of the plot. By doing so we end up marginalising God in our lives [The very opposite of being rich towards God].
It is when we are faced with arbitrary illness or the injustice of an early death that we might be forced to re-evaluate the course of our lives and indeed the assumptions of our culture. Because of course our culture today embodies the attitude of the rich man in this parable. Consumerism rests on the assumption that our very selves can be sustained in the acts of accumulation and of eating, drinking and being merry. Like the rich man it omits the end of the phrase ‘for tomorrow we die’. In a culture where the endless drive to consume fuels so much of our economy and culture, death marks not simply the end of our earthly life but the end of our capacity to consume. So in a consumerist culture, death and poverty are the ultimate taboos. The things we like to pretend aren’t there.
The upside of consumerism- or at least what makes it attractive- is that it provides a sort of answer to an anxiety that lies within the hearts of so many of us; our anxieties about being worthwhile or the purpose of our existence. An anxiety that is in part articulated by Ecclesiastes.
The never-ending stream of products that come onto the market are designed to allay that fear- or to prevent us from even formulating the question. In this way wealth acts as a sedative which means we can believe that, through having the right clothes, the right furniture, the newest car, or the latest antioxidant face cream, we are in control and the authors of our destiny.
Christianity provides us with a means to ask the difficult questions about life rather than escape them by riding the tidal wave of consumerism. In asking the difficult questions we come to realise that only in life which participates in God’s life is there peace. This is not a peace which protects us from loneliness, from anguish, from doubt- sometimes we may wrestle with the same sense of futility that the author of Ecclesiastes does, but ultimately, as Paul writes in his letter to the Colossians, we know our life is ‘hidden with Christ in God’ and that ‘Christ is all and in all.’ Paul is here exhorting the community to focus on God , to let God be God, or to put it another way, to be rich towards God. Wherever we find ourselves in the seasons of our own lives, let us pray that we might hear God’s call to re-evaluate our habits and place our riches in his hands.
Amen.