The Readings: Ecclesiastes 5:8-20; Galatians 3:23––4:11; Matthew 15:1-20

Many things we might wonder about in the first reading; here are three.

“If you see in a province the oppression of the poor and the violation of justice and right, do not be amazed at the matter; for the high official is watched by a higher, and there are yet higher ones over them.”

In the teacher’s world, oppression is not a bug, but a feature. How ought the wise/righteous respond? At first glance the teacher is the outlier in the wisdom tradition. Recall:

“I put on righteousness, and it clothed me;
my justice was like a robe and a turban.
I was eyes to the blind,
and feet to the lame.
I was a father to the needy,
and I championed the cause of the stranger.
I broke the fangs of the unrighteous,
and made them drop their prey from their teeth.” (Job 29:14-17)

“If you faint in the day of adversity,
your strength being small;
if you hold back from rescuing those taken away to death,
those who go staggering to the slaughter;
if you say, ‘Look, we did not know this’–
does not he who weighs the heart perceive it?
Does not he who keeps watch over your soul know it?
And will he not repay all according to their deeds? (Prov. 24:10-12)

But Proverbs also observes:

“When the righteous triumph, there is great glory,
but when the wicked prevail, people go into hiding.” (28:12)

The teacher sees no point in fighting apparently unwinnable battles. This collection of the teacher’s words challenges us readers: do we agree?

A second thing to wonder about: “This also is a grievous ill: just as they came, so shall they go; and what gain do they have from toiling for the wind?” There’s that word ‘gain’ (yitrôn) again. We might wonder: is the teacher (or the editor) pulling our leg a little? Is it all for nothing if you can’t take it with you?

A third thing to wonder about: how to translate the ending of v.20. The problem is that there are a number of homonyms for the Hebrew verb ˁānâ, so translators have to decide which is in play. Here are two representative translations:

“For they will scarcely brood over the days of their lives, because God keeps them occupied with the joy of their hearts.” (NRSV)

“Indeed, people shouldn’t brood too much over the days of their lives because God gives an answer in their hearts’ joy.” (Common English Bible)

If the NRSV is correct, joy is an exercise in bread and circuses, a distraction from our grim reality. If CEB is correct, joy is a privileged clue to God’s benevolent intentions in the midst of our grim reality. And which we lean towards depends on how we read the book as a whole.

The Readings: Ecclesiastes 3:1-15; Galatians 2:11-21; Matthew 14:1-12

“He brings everything to pass precisely at its time; He also puts eternity in their mind, but without man ever guessing, from first to last, all the things that God brings to pass” (NJPS).

Translations of the verse vary. “He hath made everything beautiful in his time” (KJV) is equally possible for the beginning of the verse. NRSV paraphrases ‘eternity’ as “a sense of past and future”; others, “the world”; others, assuming a textual error, “toil.” Nevertheless, the general sense is clear. It’s not that God is absent or inactive, but that the speaker can’t make out what God is doing.

This inability is clearly a source of pain, and the speaker is all over the map in the implicit evaluations of God’s conduct.

Is the situation different if we pull the camera back to include the rest of the Bible? On the one hand there is the Great Story running from Genesis to Revelation whose highlights we Christians celebrate in the course of the Church Year. On the other hand, there’s the experience of Abraham, recipient of splendid promises of posterity and land, who remains childless for decades after receiving the promises and has to negotiate for a place to bury his wife. Or Jacob, in his self-description on meeting Pharaoh: “The days of the years of my pilgrimage are an hundred and thirty years: few and evil have the days of the years of my life been, and have not attained unto the days of the years of the life of my fathers in the days of their pilgrimage” (KJV).

It’s not that the speaker doesn’t know the Great Story; it’s that where the speaker is living it doesn’t help. So with us, and in these places the speaker isn’t a bad traveling companion. “Two are better than one…  For if they fall, one will lift up the other” (4:9-10).

The Readings: Ecclesiastes 2:1-15; Galatians 1:1-17; Matthew 13:44-52

In the first two chapters—and only there—the speaker adopts a royal persona (“the son of David, king in Jerusalem”), thus the traditional identification of Solomon as the author. “Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had spent in doing it, and again, all was vanity and a chasing after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun.” Why, wondered early readers, would Solomon say that?

Early Jewish interpretation, preserved in an Aramaic paraphrase (the Targum), provides one answer: ”When Solomon the King of Israel foresaw, by the spirit of prophecy that the kingdom of Rehoboam his son would be divided with Jeroboam the son of Nebat, that Jerusalem and the holy temple would be destroyed, and that the people of Israel would be exiled, he said by the divine word, ‘Vanity of vanities is this world! Vanity of vanities is all which I and my father David strived for. All of it is vanity.’”

Well, even if we don’t follow the Targum in making Solomon a prophet, the Targum’s picked up on one of the book’s central themes: our works don’t last. They turn out to be no more substantial than hebel (‘breath’, ‘vanity’, etc.). Recall Shelley’s Ozymandias with its line “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.”

So what? Perhaps (1) O Hearer, if this is Solomon’s verdict, what does this say about the toil you’re investing in your more modest projects? And (2) O Hearer, perhaps Solomon will help you properly evaluate the conspicuous consumption practiced by the movers and shakers in your time?

What do you see?