“What, should one man go on toiling, his the craft, his the skill, his the anxious care, leaving all to another, and an idler? That were frustration surely, and great mischief done. Tell me, how is a man the richer for all that toil of his, all that lost labour of his, here under the sun? His days all painfulness and care, his very nights restless; what is here but frustration? Were it not better to eat and drink, and toil only at his own pleasures? These, too, come from God’s hand; and who has better right to food tasted and pleasure enjoyed than I? Who wins God’s favour, has wisdom and skill for his reward, and pleasure too; it is the sinner that is doomed to hardship and to thankless care, hoarding and scraping, and all to enrich some heir God loves better! For him frustration, for him the labour lost.”
Book of Ecclesiastes, 2: 21-26 [link]
I remember when at seminary in Rome attending an entire lecture series on the book of Ecclesiastes, which Scripture scholars seem to think was a secular book that was later given religious significance by the Hebrew priests, who attributed it finally to the wise king Solomon. The reason given for this supposition is that very little reference is made to the God of the Hebrews and to the Temple-centred Hebrew religion. Ecclesiastes does seem (when taken on its own) then to be a personal philosophy, and can have the effect of hopelessness: the gist of it seems to be that no matter what you do, whether you are good or bad, virtuous or not, life with its ups and downs still happens. This seems to be dislocated then from the rest of the Bible, which often suggests that God gives good things to those who are religiously observant, and punishes the evil.
But, there is a tension between both these ideas in the Bible. And, of course, none of us who have experienced this world really believes that the good are always rewarded and the evil always suffer. There is a profound realism in Ecclesiastes, which is echoed in the book of psalms, which asks in many places why God allows the wicked to thrive and the innocent to be humbled into the ground. The Hebrew priests, the rabbis and the bishops of the Church have successively entered these observations of life in this world of the book of Ecclesiastes into Holy Scripture, setting them against the background of religious observance, and encouraging faith and perseverance, even when virtue seemingly bears no fruit, and prayer seemingly receives no answer. Here’s a psalm with the theme of this Sunday…
“What need have I to be afraid in troubled times,
Psalm 48 (49): 6-18 [link]
when malice dogs my heels and overtakes me,
malice of foes who trust in their own strength,
and boast of their great possessions?
No man can deliver himself from his human lot,
paying a ransom-price to God;
too great is the cost of a man’s soul;
never will the means be his
to prolong his days eternally and escape death.
True it is, wise men die;
but reckless fools perish no less;
their riches will go to others,
and the grave will be their everlasting home.
Age after age, they will live on there,
under the fields they once called their own.
Short is man’s enjoyment of earthly goods;
match him with the brute beasts,
and he is no better than they.
Fatal path, that ensnares the reckless!
Pitiful end of the men that love life!
There they lie in the world beneath,
huddled like sheep, with death for their shepherd,
the just for their masters;
soon, soon their image fades, the grave for its tenement.
But my life God will rescue
from the power of that lower darkness,
a life that finds acceptance with him.
Do not be disturbed, then, when a man grows rich,
and there is no end to his household’s magnificence;
he cannot take all that with him when he dies,
magnificence will not follow him to the grave.”
All of this also provides the substance of the so-called problem of evil which is still put forth today. People will ask us who are religious and devoted to the Almighty God, and say to us, If your God is so powerful and loves so much, why does He permit evil things? Why are there babies dying in the Palestine wars, and church-going Christians being massacred in Nigeria, and so on…? We’ve been hearing about human dignity in the last few weeks. Why do we have to fight so hard for human rights and human dignity, when the powerful God Who gave these to men and women should be able to exert his power and come to their defence? Aren’t all our efforts hopeless, isn’t all we do just vanity?
But these questions and this commentary are merely another statement of the human condition. The Church, with her long history and her long memory, more than any other community today speaks to this human condition, calling her sons and daughters out of the misery of this world and towards hope in a glorious future. We are born into and live within a world of sin, where people use the freedoms given them by the Holy One both well (with charity and altruism) and badly (oppression, totalitarianism, exploitation). God permits this situation for a time, because He wants us to demonstrate virtue, He wants us to embrace Charity ourselves and become like Him. This union with Him He will effect only with our participation and cooperation – His gift of communion with Himself crowns our own desire for it.
How shall we demonstrate our desire? We are to learn to use our freedoms well, with guidance from Him – this guidance comes both from Scripture and from the tradition of the Church and from her active teaching authority. We are to discover that a life of Love, lived for Love’s sake, has its own value, whether or not it receives material reward. As the pre-Christian Greek sages would say, Virtue is its own reward. We may then answer the sage of the first reading (or Psalm 48 above) by saying that, Yes, the life of virtue may seem futile because the concrete, material result of a life well-lived may fall to a successor who is profligate or a villain, or because there have been no results at all. But the heart of the virtuous person if forgotten by this world yet lives in eternity. As the psalm this weekend says, our life in this world is a short night -a dream- but there will be a dawn, a morning beyond it.
“Teach us to count every passing day,
Psalm 89 (90): 12-16 [link]
till our hearts find wisdom.
Relent, Lord; must it be for ever?
Be gracious to Thy servants.
For us Thy timely mercies,
for us abiding happiness and content;
happiness that shall atone
for the time when Thou didst afflict us,
for the long years of ill fortune.
Let these eyes see Thy purpose accomplished,
to our own sons reveal Thy glory;
the favour of the Lord our God smile on us!
Prosper our doings, Lord,
prosper our doings yet.”
The Christian therefore approaches these questions of evil in this world and the seeming futility of human effort by pointing beyond death to a world beyond. We Christians live in a world of ruin, we live as a light in the darkness, preserving a vision of life and eternity in the midst of change and decay. S. Paul says in our second reading that we are to look for eternal things, heavenly things, and not to treasure the material things of this world.
“Risen, then, with Christ, you must lift your thoughts above, where Christ now sits at the right hand of God. You must be heavenly-minded, not earthly-minded; you have undergone death, and your life is hidden away now with Christ in God. Christ is your life, and when He is made manifest, you too will be made manifest in glory with Him. You must deaden, then, those passions in you which belong to earth, fornication and impurity, lust and evil desire, and that love of money which is an idolatry. These are what bring down God’s vengeance on the unbelievers, and such was your own behaviour, too, while you lived among them. Now it is your turn to have done with it all, resentment, anger, spite, insults, foul-mouthed utterance; and do not tell lies at one another’s expense. You must be quit of the old self, and the habits that went with it; you must be clothed in the new self, that is being refitted all the time for closer knowledge, so that the image of the God who created it is its pattern. Here is no more Gentile and Jew, no more circumcised and uncircumcised; no one is barbarian, or Scythian, no one is slave or free man; there is nothing but Christ in any of us.”
Letter of S. Paul to the Colossians, 3: 1-11 [link]
This doesn’t mean that material possessions are essentially bad or evil – rather, we are to treat them not as ends in themselves, but as a means to arrive at eternal things. We must chase after Charity and generosity, benevolence and integrity – and fill our barns and our greater barns with these, not with reward and possession. We see this theme once more in our gospel story today. Two brothers are quarrelling about an inheritance, and the one approaches Christ to ask for some magisterial help with his own case. The Holy One is very clear in His response – He has come to teach the abandonment of such things as material possession, so they who seek earthly things for the sake of these things cannot expect His assistance. The parable He then tells also speaks of the futility of material possession, and he echoes the psalms and the book of Ecclesiastes when He says, You cannot take any of it beyond this life. He has said the same thing in others ways, such as when He recommended that we store up treasures for ourselves in heaven, beyond the reach of the rust and corruption of this world. Or when He recommended that we seek first the Kingdom of God and its righteousness.
So, we may the enjoy the good things of this world, yes, but while keeping our eyes fixed on the destiny with God at the end of all things. In effect, we shall have chosen only God after all.
“Then He said to them, ‘Look well and keep yourselves clear of all covetousness. A man’s life does not consist in having more possessions than he needs.’ And He told them a parable, ‘There was a rich man whose lands yielded a heavy crop: and he debated in his mind, What am I to do, with no room to store my crops in? Then he said, This is what I will do; I will pull down my barns, and build greater ones, and there I shall be able to store all my harvest and all the goods that are mine; and then I will say to my soul, Come, soul, thou hast goods in plenty laid up for many years to come; take thy rest now, eat, drink, and make merry. And God said, Thou fool, this night thou must render up thy soul; and who will be master now of all thou hast laid by?‘”
Gospel of S. Luke, 12: 15-20 [link]
Catholic Louth and Mablethorpe 