An Advent Meditation
“The end of the matter; all has been heard”
“The end of the matter” is this, it seems, “all has been heard.” There is, after all, “nothing new under the sun.” Everything comes to nothing. “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” says the Preacher. “What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?”
What kind of an ending is this? A strange and fearful ending, an ending that is despair? Why do anything if everything is nothing? Our lives are nothing. All our struggles, our labours, our desires and ambitions, our hopes and dreams, are they all an empty nothingness? Yes. That is the hard message of this challenging and remarkable book, The Book of Ecclesiastes. Everything that we are, everything that we do, everything that we seek, all comes to nothing, to the nothing that is vanity. “All is vanity.” This recurring refrain frames the entire book.
This is actually the great wisdom of ancient Israel at the height of its philosophical understanding. But it challenges us as well. In fact, it speaks to our modernity like no other book of the Bible, for it raises the question without which the Bible and religion make little if any sense. What are we here for?
In the barren greyness of late November when nature herself seems most desolate what does the Church give us to read? The Book of the Preacher, Ecclesiastes, a church book, as it were, which proclaims the barren emptiness of all human endeavour, the vanity of every enterprise of men and women upon the earth; in short, the barren emptiness of everything. “Vanity of vanities”…”All is vanity and a striving after wind.”
This is the preacher’s constant refrain as he explores all the avenues of human existence. What is the vanity of humanity’s social, political, material and philosophical aspirations? That everything under the sun has limits and cannot explain its purpose or ours. There is a boring sameness to all things finite. Everything under the sun is nothing in and of itself and cannot explain what anything is for. Everything is nothing, it seems.