“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.
To know this is wisdom and the beginnings of the possibilities of grace. “God has put eternity into the mind of man,” as Ecclesiastes reminds us, and though human wisdom is unable to find out the reason for anything in the things that are “under the sun,” at least it stands open to the one who is the answer. “Ecclesiastes is the question to which Christ is the answer” (Peter Kreeft). He is the eternal one who has entered time. In him, time has its meaning. What seems to be nothing is found to be something. He alone makes something out of the nothingness of our lives. At this time of endings we are being returned to our new and renewing beginnings; in short, to Christ, “the Lord our righteousness,” as Jeremiah prophesies, to “the Lamb of God,” as John the Baptist proclaims. Somehow everything is gathered to him who comes and enters into the barren emptiness of human life. The times of endings signal new beginnings. Something is made out of the nothing, not by us, but by the grace of God who engages our nothingness.
It means that even the sense of the barrenness, the nothingness, and the vanity of all things has to be gathered to Christ. Our hearing and reading of Ecclesiastes belongs to such a task. It is given to be read because it belongs, as all Scripture does, to the fullness of the meaning of our life in Christ. Our hearing and reading is an act of intellection, an act of understanding; in short, an act of gathering, even the gathering of our sense of the utter futility and empty meaninglessness of everything. Ultimately, it has to be gathered to Christ, even as it is gathered by him through us.
To know the barren nothingness of human existence is the beginning of the awakening of our desire for God. Such is the purpose of our reading Ecclesiastes. We are brought more fully and more clearly into what Christ knows and into what he wants us to know. Only so do we begin to enter more completely into his making something out of it. The great lessons are about sin and love. They are the lessons of the Gospel, par excellence. They are the lessons, too, about which the poets sing.
Philosophers have measur’d mountains,/ Fathom’d the depths of seas, of states, and kings,/ Walk’d with a staffe to heav’n, and traced fountains:/ But there are two vast, spacious things,/ The which to measure it doth more behove:/ Yet few there are that sound them; Sinne and Love. (George Herbert, The Agonie)
The understanding of sin and love meet in Jesus Christ. They belong to the things which he most wants us to know. This is the meaning of the pageant of sanctifying grace in the Trinity season. It brings us yet again to the pageant of justifying grace which begins with Advent. Our lives are embraced in these movements, even as the hope of our ultimate ending, our life with God in the glory of heaven, is signaled at the beginning of this grey month of our remembering in the celebration of All Saints’, itself a festival of spiritual gathering, a feast of glorifying righteousness in the harvest of our lives in grace.
Endings and beginnings. Such is the wonder of Advent. We are returned to him without whom all our lives are nothing worth. There is nothing new “under the sun,” but with the Son of God, who comes to us “with healing in his wings,” we find the grace that renews and redeems, the grace that bestows salvation, the grace that is hope and glory, the grace that is not only something but everything. “Grace is everywhere,” as Bernanos puts it in The Diary of a Country Priest.
We begin again, not with ourselves in the empty nothingness of human presumption and pretension, but with Christ, our Alpha and Omega. “Fear God and keep his commandments,” says Ecclesiastes, precisely in the face of the awareness of our own emptiness. “For this is the whole duty of man.” The wonder that stirs us to something more and something greater is the grace that has entered into the dark and empty nothingness of our human aloneness in our self-willed alienation from God. In Christ, we find hope and grace and a renewed sense of duty that is pleasure and delight, the duty that is love. In him we find our new beginning, in him who is all our ending. “The end of the matter” is that we have our beginning with Christ and that is everything.
“The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments; for this is the whole duty of man.”
Fr. David Curry