Text: Vanity, vanity, all is vanity, saith the Preacher – or in modern language, utter futility, says the Speaker, everything is futile (Eccl 1.2, 12.8)
The book of Ecclesiastes opens and closes with this familiar, gloomy refrain. As we grow older not many of us would turn these pages expecting to find words of comfort, hope and consolation. And I doubt whether the Preacher’s appeal to those of you who are much younger is any more enticing either, given the all-pervading context of futility. So I was intrigued when I came across a journal article some years ago, entitled: Mortality and its joys, Reading Ecclesiastes in the light of the gospel resurrection narratives. What I have to say this evening owes much to that article, itself originally a sermon delivered by Jessica Martin at Great St Mary’s, the University Church in Cambridge.
In our second reading, from 2 Timothy, the apostle facing the prospect of death has the same concern as the author of Ecclesiastes to pass on his wisdom to the next generation, but there is no sense of endlessly futile repetition. On the contrary his letter is infused with hope both for himself, as he enters the final straight, and for the growing churches he is leaving behind. He is living of course in a context of resurrection hope unknown to the Preacher in Ecclesiastes. But is there no sign at all, in Ecclesiastes, of the seeds of such a hope that will eventually break into bud when the spring-time of Christ gives them life?
There is a nice literary parallel between the concluding words of Ecclesiastes and those of St John’s gospel. The Preacher, you will remember, warns his son that there is no end to the writing of books, and much study is wearisome (Eccl 12.12). He must have allowed himself a wry smile as he wrote those words, for he was just putting the finishing touches to a book which may be gloomy and sceptical, but is also elegantly expressed. Despite its gloomy refrain, his little book is far from wearisome. The knowing and the making in which he delights may be ephemeral in this world, yet they link us with the spirit of the Creator God who shares the same pleasure. St John by contrast closes his narrative where he does, not because to write more would be wearisome, but because, as he says, the whole world could not contain the books which might be written if he were to write down everything that Jesus said and did. The perspective is at first sight radically different, and yet the very last words of Ecclesiastes also refer to the endless tale of everything we do, which will be brought to judgment. So in both cases there is vastly more to be said, just different reasons for not writing any more of it down.
There is a hint here of the importance to both writers of how we remember things and more particularly how we remember people. One might say that the whole book of Ecclesiastes is about memory, what we can learn from experience, and indeed this is recognised by the inclusion of Ecclesiastes in the Jewish reading cycle for the observance of Succoth – the harvest festival – when experience is celebrated by the formal hallowing of memory. If the cycle of forgettable lives is a cycle of death, then lives remembered become a potent image for resurrection. Moreover it is this resurrection memory, sometimes called anamnesis, which has become the technical term for the bodily re-membering of Christ in the Eucharist. Thanksgiving at harvest time, anamnesis, remembering and resurrection are all the fruits of bitter-sweet experience. In the Jewish Tanakh translation of Ecclesisastes 1.18 we read that to increase learning is to increase heartache. Paradoxically we approach the resurrection by walking open-eyed through our own particular valley of tears, and finding we are not alone
And when human hearts are breaking
Under sorrow’s iron rod,
Then we see the self-same aching
Deep within the heart of God
It’s as we come to terms with the magnitude of our loss that we realise how precious as well as how painful is the gift of memory, in which we sense the gift of resurrection life. ‘The resurrection’, writes Rowan Williams, ‘is not properly preached without an awareness of the world as a place of loss and a place where men and women strive not to be trapped in that loss.’
The question we have to ask of Ecclesiastes is whether the Preacher is trapped within the circles of futility which he describes, or whether he too is striving, through a scepticism that we might admire as realistic, to escape such a trap. The evidence is mixed. On the one hand the things we have done, the books we write, the achievements we might point to in our careers, are soon forgotten. Some of the people we love, die as we suppose before their time. Worse still they may become unrecognisable, walking about the world broken and corrupted, their youth and promise turned to ruin. ‘I see all the deeds that are done under the sun, and see, all is vanity, and a chasing after wind’ (Eccl 1.14). We expend our care, and the thing or person we care for melts away from us as if they had never been; in embracing them, we seem to embrace the wind. Yet wind or breath is not altogether ephemeral. We do not cease to rejoice in the first breath drawn by a baby, because we have also marked the last breath of others we have loved. The breath of God is the Spirit which brings everything and everyone into being, and sustains their existence.
It is Thomas, the sceptical realist, the disciple closest in spirit to the Preacher of Ecclesiastes, who is invited to experience the truth of the resurrection by touching Christ’s pierced hands. But the Jesus whom the disciples encounter after the resurrection is not simply the Jesus they knew before. Meeting him again in Galilee, It may look as if they have come full circle, but they have not. As they recognise him, they have to come to terms with their betrayal of him. Getting him back, they cannot behave as if nothing had happened. His love, his physical presence forces them to take to heart their own fearful cruelty, forces them to replace the futility of mere repetition with the searing but healing pain of forgiveness. As we see most clearly in the challenging conversation with Peter – Peter, do you love me, three times repeated – they can only escape the circle of futile repetition by facing up to the truth of what they have done. The gift of his love makes them able to bear to see it, to deal with it, and so begin to move on.
The Preacher of Ecclesiastes is wearied by the futility of repetition. Yet he longs to find something new under the sun (Eccl 1.10). He longs for the eye to be at last satisfied with seeing, the ear with hearing. It is Jesus who promises that he has come to make all things new (Revelation 21.5). He is present in those rare moments when we encounter in our experience of his love, perhaps mediated to us by others, that infinite goodness, that sense of being touched by his infinite love, which can illuminate our finite lives. The Preacher of Ecclesiastes, lacking the framework of new life in Christ, never quite gets there, though his poetry sometimes takes wing. But he does offer us the advice of experience as to how we might create the conditions for such moments of revelation. Learn to live gracefully with your history, he says; and don’t allow your own mortality to overshadow the delights of living and the beauties of the world. There is a time for everything, as he observes in one of his most memorable passages, and ‘God has made everything beautiful in his time (Eccl 3.11). Moreover he adds: ‘I know that whatever God does lasts for ever; there is no adding to it, no taking away. And he has done it all in such a way that everyone must feel awe in his presence’ (Eccl 3.14).
I’d like to think that when the author of this little book passed through death and found himself in God’s presence he will at last have discovered just how much of the goodness and beauty he celebrated was not futility after all, not just wind, but breath, breath alive with the breath of God.