“They desire a better country, that is, an heavenly.”
The Sunday Next Before Advent brings us to the end of the ecclesiastical year and so to the beginning of yet another. It brings us to the end of the Trinity season in a kind of summing up of the whole pageant of grace and it brings us to the beginning of the Advent season when we begin again with the grace of God’s turning and coming to us.
There is something profound and wonderful in these moments of transition, something which suggests the true nature of the dynamic of faith. And yet there is a kind of ambiguity as well. Do we end the year on a note of weariness and exhaustion? Too many books, so little time? “Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh,” after all, whether it be books in print or e-books. Are we frustrated and perplexed with the relentless sameness of yet another year, a year in which, once again, there seems to be no progress, no change from the endless and dismal stories of hardship and struggle? If anything, it might seem that there is more grief and trouble, more sadness and dismay. “Everybody knows, that’s the way it goes”, as Leonard Cohen’s song puts it rather cynically. It may seem that we have been “fed with the bread of tears” and have had “plenteousness of tears to drink” as the psalmist puts it (Ps. 80).
Do we end, as Ecclesiastes seems to suggest, simply with the sombre awareness of death and mortality, the feebleness of old age and the barrenness of winter? “That time of year,” as Shakespeare puts it, “when yellow leaves or none or few/ do hang upon those boughs which shake against the cold/ bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang,” an image which evokes at once old age and ecclesiastical ruins; a pile of holy stones, a Tintern Abbey centuries before Wordsworth.
Do we end, then, weary and worn with the attempts to take the world by storm only to find that the mysteries of life continue to elude us? If so, then we end well, it seems to me. Because to confront the vanities of our pursuits and ambitions is to stand on the brink of a great wisdom, the wisdom of God which alone can redeem and heal our weary souls.
In a way, the strong wisdom of this day is to realise our need to be open to the wisdom of God, aware that we can do nothing of ourselves but only through God. It signals the profound awareness of the limitations of the finite and the failings and shortcomings of human hearts. That kind of ending marks a new beginning, a beginning not with our selves and our petty projects and devisings, but a beginning again with God.
That is why Ecclesiastes’ explicit direction here is so wonderful and profound. “This is the end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God, and keep his commandments; for this is the whole duty of man.” His point is that there is nothing of ultimate worth and worthiness to be found in the pursuits of human lives considered simply in themselves. “There is nothing new under the sun.” Indeed. “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity”, meaning empty and futile. Indeed. “What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?” Indeed. “I have seen all the works that are done under the sun”, he says and, “behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit.” Indeed. It is almost as if he has anticipated the malaise of modernity in the interplay of narcissism and nihilism; the culture of the self-absorbed, after all, can only discover its own spiritual and moral emptiness. Or so we might hope.
It belongs to the courage of the philosophical outlook of Ecclesiastes to examine all aspects of human enterprise and to find them all utterly wanting, yet without collapsing into cynicism and despair. To be sure, “all things are full of labour; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.” But that is about the phenomenal world, the world that is, quite literally, “under the sun”.
In a way, he is pointing out an ancient truth, a truth which, perhaps, we have forgotten, namely, that the world of nature and human action cannot account for itself. And that is why “the eye is not satisfied with seening, nor the ear filled with hearing.” Can’t get no satisfaction! We desire something more. And while Ecclesiastes does not provide us with an answer to our quest for meaning and purpose, neither does it dogmatically and categorically deny the possibilities of such a quest. That “there is nothing new under the sun” does not mean that we cannot be open to the transforming grace which comes from the God who is precisely not “under the sun”, but the author and creator of all that is. With God, everything else is, by definition, after. Hence, the profound advice to “fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.” There is the orientation towards the possibilities of something more. Ecclesiastes stands on the brink of the Advent of Christ.
Complementing this first lesson from the last two chapters of Ecclesiastes is the reading from the Letter to the Hebrews. In contrast to the contemplative and reflective vision of Ecclesiastes, we are reminded of the pageant of faith; in short, we are reminded of those who are defined precisely by their yearning and openness to something more. “They desire a better country, that is, an heavenly.”
The eleventh chapter begins with the famous statement that “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” and proceeds to chronicle a great cloud of witnesses of those who have journeyed “by faith”. It is at once exciting and exhilarating but it is also quite sobering. Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, and Sarah are explicitly mentioned before going on later in the chapter to speak of Isaac, Jacob and Esau, Joseph, Moses, Rahab the harlot, Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel and the prophets and many, many more, unknown and unnamed, about whom, and this is key, “the world was not worthy.” And yet they constitute a great cloud of witnesses. The pageant of the faithful recalls us to the realities of faith, “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen” precisely because of the barren emptiness of the finite world and the empty futility of human life without the transforming power of God’s redemptive Word.
In other words, Ecclesiastes and Hebrews turn us to the coming of God’s Word. Such is Advent. To fear God is to be in awe and wonder at his majesty and truth, at that which cannot be taken captive by the agendas and projects of our world and day. “They [we] desire a better country, that is, an heavenly.” That is to be open to something more than the dreary weariness of a world about which one might rightly ask, “Is that all?” Ecclesiastes and Hebrews challenge and encourage us to begin again.
“They desire a better country, that is, an heavenly.”
Fr. David Curry
Sunday Next Before Advent, ‘09