Re the Daily Office Readings June 11 Anno Domini 2020

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The Readings: Ecclesiastes 11:1-8; Galatians 5:16-24; Matthew 16:13-20

“…you do not know the work of God, who makes everything.” Our not-knowing: that’s been one of the teacher’s main themes. It would not be hard for that not-knowing to be paralyzing, precisely the danger today’s text addresses.

Verses 1-2 are sometimes taken as investment strategies, but since that involves a fair amount of interpretive squinting, perhaps the older Egyptian proverb is a better clue: “Do a good deed and throw it in the water; when it dries you will find it.” Why not some senseless random acts of kindness: who knows what effects they might have?

“Whoever observes the wind will not sow; and whoever regards the clouds will not reap.” That’s the pragmatic angle: when do we have the information we’d like before making an important decision?

“Just as you do not know how the breath comes to the bones in the mother’s womb, so you do not know the work of God, who makes everything.” The teacher could have chosen any example; why this one? Perhaps G. K. Chesterton’s observation re Job provides a clue: “Lastly, the poet has achieved in this speech…another and much more delicate thing. Without once relaxing the rigid impenetrability of Jehovah in His deliberate declaration, he has contrived to let fall here and there in the metaphors, in the parenthetical imagery, sudden and splendid suggestions that the secret of God is a bright and not a sad one–semi-accidental suggestions, like light seen for an instant through the cracks of a closed door.”

Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations?
Speak if you have understanding.
Do you know who fixed its dimensions
Or who measured it with a line?
Onto what were its bases sunk?
Who set its cornerstone
When the morning stars sang together
And all the divine beings shouted for joy? (Job 38:4-7)

Re the Daily Office Readings June 10 Anno Domini 2020

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Photo by Camilo Jimenez

The Readings: Ecclesiastes 9:11-10:20; Galatians 5:1-15; Matthew 16:1-12

“Like fish taken in a cruel net, and like birds caught in a snare, so mortals are snared at a time of calamity, when it suddenly falls upon them.”

Perhaps this is the place to say more about the early form of globalization that shapes the teacher’s context, in which local control and predictability become, well, like breath. William Brown in Wisdom’s Wonder: “In contrast to the largely subsistence, small-scale, agrarian-based economy of preexilic times, the economy of the Persian period became increasingly commercialized. A standardized monetary currency was established under Darius the Great (550-486 bce) to facilitate commerce between Egypt and Persia. Some two centuries later, under Ptolemy II (283-246 bce), coinage became firmly established in Yehud (as Israel was called in Persian times), yielding dramatic economic development. In addition, an aggressive system of taxation was introduced by the Persians and continued to be enforced and developed throughout Hellenistic times.”

The lectionary ends the first reading at 9:18; the above link expands it. The brief complaint about the social order upended is a familiar topos (meme) in wisdom literature, and we might wonder what the teacher would have made of the Magnificat! The teacher knows the stories of poor wise people (4:13-16; 9:13-16), but defaults to rich=wise, poor=fool, testimony to the trouble all of us have in escaping from our mental ruts. “Dead flies make the perfumer’s ointment give off a foul odor; so a little folly outweighs wisdom and honor” applies also to the teacher, and is perhaps a reminder to us not to be too indulgent with what we regard as our minor follies.

Re the Daily Office Readings June 9 Anno Domini 2020

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Martin Luther King, Jr., Feast Day April 4

The Readings: Ecclesiastes 8:1––9:10; Galatians 4:21-31; Matthew 15:29-39

The lectionary begins the first reading at v.14; let’s pick up a little before that.

“Though sinners do evil a hundred times and prolong their lives, yet I know that it will be well with those who fear God, because they stand in fear before him, but it will not be well with the wicked, neither will they prolong their days like a shadow, because they do not stand in fear before God.  There is a vanity that takes place on earth, that there are righteous people who are treated according to the conduct of the wicked, and there are wicked people who are treated according to the conduct of the righteous. I said that this also is vanity” (8:12-14).

We’ve seen this tension/contradiction before: it will be well with those who fear God, but not the wicked; the God fearers and wicked often get what they don’t deserve. Why doesn’t the teacher abandon divine justice/retribution? Perhaps because the teacher is even more convinced of his incapacity to discern what God is up to (e.g., 8:16-17).

We might wonder if the teacher is encouraging us to embrace a particular sort of freedom: if you’re going to act justly, don’t do it because that way you’ll succeed, or because God will reward you, or because you’ll get the desired results, or because it will matter in the end, or because it will be remembered. Just do it. The Book of Job opens with the accuser asking whether Job serves God for nothing; the teacher, in his own way, has aligned himself with Job.

And, when God gives the opportunity: “Go, eat your bread with enjoyment, and drink your wine with a merry heart; for God has long ago approved what you do. Let your garments always be white; do not let oil be lacking on your head. Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life that are given you under the sun, because that is your portion in life and in your toil at which you toil under the sun. Whatever your hand finds to do, do with your might; for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going” (9:7-10).

Ecclesiastes can be read as encouraging conformity. In his context the teacher judged that the wise course. But to assume conformity in all contexts would be to ignore the teacher’s exploratory approach. “…the wise mind will know the time and way,” and if “for everything there is a season” (3:1), if there’s a time for conformity… “Whatever your hand finds to do, do with your might.” It’s only stupid if it doesn’t work.

Re the Daily Office Readings June 8 Anno Domini 2020

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Pride by Jacob Matham

The Readings: Ecclesiastes 7:1-29; Galatians 4:12-20; Matthew 15:21-28

In the first reading vv.16-18 understandably give interpreters fits. (The Lectionary ends the reading at v.14, one way of dealing with the problem!) We might wonder about these verses in the context of other nearby verses:

“Surely oppression makes the wise foolish,
and a bribe corrupts the heart.” (7:7)

“Do not be too righteous, and do not act too wise; why should you destroy yourself? Do not be too wicked, and do not be a fool; why should you die before your time? It is good that you should take hold of the one, without letting go of the other; for the one who fears God shall succeed with both.” (7:16-18)

“Surely there is no one on earth so righteous as to do good without ever sinning. Do not give heed to everything that people say, or you may hear your servant cursing you; your heart knows that many times you have yourself cursed others.” (7:20-22)

In light of vv. 7, 20-22, I think William Brown’s on the right track re vv.16-18: “Qoheleth exposes all efforts to fulfill the absolute ideals of righteousness as self-serving attempts to reap glory. A life obsessed with righteousness, in fact, blinds a person from his or her own sinfulness.” So Thomas Keating, author of numerous books on centering prayer, tells of the young man who proudly drank everyone else under the table, and, on becoming a monk, when Lent came around, equally proudly fasted everyone else under the table. (The next year his abbot prescribed a penance of a full glass of whole milk and a large Hershey’s bar daily!)

So I might wonder: in what spheres or regarding what issues am I tempted to present myself as better/more woke/[insert preferred adjective here] than I in fact am?

In passing, v.7 may be important for our reading of the book as a whole. The teacher is immersed in an oppressive context; readers may properly wonder what effects this is having on his wisdom.

Re the Daily Office Readings June 7 Anno Domini 2020

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Photo by Andres Siimon

The Readings: Job 38:1-11; 42:1-5; Revelation 19:4-16; John 1:29-34

The OT Reading bumped by Pentecost: Ecclesiastes 6:1-12

Robert Gordis in his Koheleth—the Man and his World writes “Koheleth sets up the attainment of happiness as the goal of human striving, not merely because he loves life, but because he cannot have justice and wisdom. Joy is the only purpose that he can find in a monotonous and meaningless world, in which all human values, such as wealth, piety, and ability, are vanity, where all men encounter the same fate and no progress is possible.”

Part of this “cannot” is clearly the economic globalization that arrived with the Persian Empire. The relatively predictable links between actions and their consequences—our baseline way of knowing what is to come—eroded with the monarchy, further eroded under the earlier empires, went on life support with the Persians. Progress.

We’re somewhat past the Persians. So we might wonder: is the teacher saying explicitly what we’ve concluded implicitly, that justice and wisdom are impossible?

It happens that this year this reading falls on Trinity Sunday. Perhaps It’s an opportunity to recall that with this God the impossible is as good a starting-point as any.

“When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astounded and said, ‘Then who can be saved?’ But Jesus looked at them and said, ‘For mortals it is impossible, but for God all things are possible’” (Matt. 19:25-26).

So cue up (again) Billie Holiday’s rendition of Sigman & Russell’s “Crazy,” not a bad image of the love of the Holy Trinity for the human race, a love that empowers the final couplet “The difficult I’ll do right now / The impossible will take a little while.” Enjoy.

Re the Daily Office Readings June 6 Anno Domini 2020

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Photo by Marco Bianchetti

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.

Re the Daily Office Readings June 5 Anno Domini 2020

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Potters at work – Imado, by Katsushika Hokusai

The Readings: Ecclesiastes 4:4—5:7; Galatians 3:15-22; Matthew 14:22-36

The Lectionary, oddly, omits 4:4-16. I’ve included these verses with today’s reading (5:1-7) in the link above, because they’re helpful in thinking about how we read the book.

“Then I saw that all toil and all skill in work come from one person’s envy of another. This also is vanity and a chasing after wind” (4:4). All toil and all skill? Hardly. Counterexamples come to mind quickly, whether from our own experience or from Scripture (Bezalel, Oholiab, and others whose skill is a divine gift and whose toil is inspired by the work of constructing the tabernacle; Jacob’s seven years of toil for Rachel, which “seemed to him but a few days because of the love he had for her” (Gen. 29:20). What apparently is true: “Then I saw that…” As Anaïs Nin observed, “We don’t see the world as it is, we see it as we are.” Is the author here tipping his/her hand, inviting us to wonder not simply about the teacher’s words, but about the teacher’s character?

“Fools fold their hands
and consume their own flesh.
Better is a handful with quiet
than two handfuls with toil,
and a chasing after wind” (4:5-6).

Two sayings, back to back, pointing in opposite directions. We have similar sayings: “A stitch in time saves nine”; “Haste makes waste.” The teacher likes putting such competing sayings back to back, and probably for different reasons. Here, perhaps, a traditional reminder that wisdom consists in recognizing which saying is relevant, whether we’re in the time for this or that (recall 3:1-8). The teacher does not seem to have given up on the hope of being able to recognize these times (see 8:5-6).

“Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil” (4:9). Equally interesting are the claims the teacher does not pair with a counter-claim (no claim that one is better than two). The teacher could have included a long exhortation on selecting friends, building and maintaining friendships, but opted to let the hearers draw their own conclusions. Strikingly, we know the threefold cord proverb (v.12) from the Gilgamesh Epic, a reminder that wisdom is an international enterprise, and that the teacher is quite happy to pass on selected traditional wisdom.

Re the Daily Office Readings June 4 Anno Domini 2020

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The Readings: Ecclesiastes 3:16––4:3; Galatians 3:1-14; Matthew 14:13-21

“Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe” (Jn. 20:25). There’s theological integrity here, securing Thomas’ place as the spiritual, if not biological, descendant of the teacher in our first reading, an integrity particularly on display in this reading.

“I said in my heart, God will judge the righteous and the wicked, for he has appointed a time for every matter, and for every work.” If “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven” (v.1); surely that must include judgment. But as the teacher repeatedly observes (e.g., 7:15; 8:14) judgment is not visible in this life. Judgment is part of the tradition the teacher’s received, and the teacher’s too aware of the limitations of his knowledge to toss it prematurely. What about the life to come as the setting for judgment?

A bit of background: until well into the time under Persian and later Greek domination, most Jews believed that at death everyone descended to Sheol, where there was neither reward nor punishment, simply disconnection from the living and from God. In part to answer the question of where God’s justice happens, some Jews variously reconceptualize the afterlife. It’s one of the issues that splits the Pharisees, who affirm the resurrection and Sadducees, who deny it. In today’s text the teacher responds to this emerging argument: “All go to one place; all are from the dust, and all turn to dust again. Who knows whether the human spirit goes upward and the spirit of animals goes downward to the earth?”

Integrity. Opting for the human spirit going upward would have answered many of the teacher’s questions. But, lacking evidence, “who knows?” Nor does the teacher discard “God will judge the righteous and the wicked.” The teacher preserves the tension. Complains about it. Repeatedly. And that’s perhaps as close as the teacher comes to praying in the book.

Postscript: Pulling back the camera to include today’s other readings, while the New Testament retains divine judgment (e.g., Matt. 25:31-45), it stresses more the need we all have for divine mercy.

Re the Daily Office Readings June 3 Anno Domini 2020

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NASA Image

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).

Re the Daily Office Readings June 2 Anno Domini 2020

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Death chasing a flock of mortals by James Ensor

The Readings: Ecclesiastes 2:16-26; Galatians 1:18––2:10; Matthew 13:53-58

Death is a deal-breaker in Ecclesiastes, but not in Proverbs. Why? Part of the answer may lie in the difference between the worlds implied in the two books. Here are a couple characteristic contrasts:

“The memory of the righteous is a blessing, but the name of the wicked will rot.” (Prov. 10:7)

“For there is no enduring remembrance of the wise or of fools.” (Eccl. 2:16a)

“Train children in the right way, and when old, they will not stray.” (Prov. 22:6)

“I hated all my toil in which I had toiled under the sun, seeing that I must leave it to those who come after me — and who knows whether they will be wise or foolish?”  (Eccl. 2:18-19a)

And with the social world becoming less stable, the sense of self links less to the multi-generational community, more to the individual—which can also shift perceptions of what counts as justice. Jeremiah: “In those days they shall no longer say: ‘The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.’ But all shall die for their own sins; the teeth of everyone who eats sour grapes shall be set on edge” (31:29-30).

The world of Proverbs may feel like a more comfortable world— “Nice work if you can get it”—but it’s Ecclesiastes that sets death up as the enemy, with its conqueror not yet on the horizon.