Aren’t you glad, after today’s depressing reading, that Lent will end in the glory of Easter Day? Don’t you wish that you could share yesterday’s reading, and John Stott's reflections, with the writer of Ecclesiastes, just to cheer him up? Nevertheless, even if the resurrection is the ultimate answer (which he could not yet know), we must still let him challenge us with the ruthless honesty of his questions. Our culture tends to avoid thinking or talking about death. Ecclesiastes won’t let us get away with that, so neither will I!
The big question
The whole book of Ecclesiastes is a journey, a quest, by someone called Qoheleth (‘the Teacher’, NIV), to see if he can find an answer to ‘the meaning of life, the universe and everything’. Basically, here is the controlling question he asks, ‘What do we gain from all the work we have to do in life?’ (1.3 & 3.9). And, since work is an essential part of the way God created us to live, his question boils down to, ‘What’s the point of life itself?’ Does it have any ultimate meaning? Well, how would you answer him?
The big gift
Now the Teacher knows that life itself is good. In fact, he says so empathetically no fewer than seven times in this book. (2.24-25, 3.12-13, 3.22, 5.18-20, 8.15, 9.7-10, 11.7-9) When he says ‘there is nothing better’ for people than to enjoy the blessings of everyday life (work, sex, marriage, food and drink), he is not being cynical or hedonistic. He means it. These are good gifts from the God of Genesis 1-2, who declared his whole creation good, very good indeed. (3.12-13) And the Teacher has himself explored all of those good things of life, in abundance. But even when you add all these things together, do such things, good as they are, hold the key to the meaning of life itself? No. An awful lot of life and work seems futile, fickle and transient, actually pretty meaningless (his favourite word) when you stop to think about it (and he has done, very hard, just skim through 2.12-23).
The big joke?
And the most meaningless thing about life is, death. Maybe you’ve heard the grim saying, or seen the graffiti, ‘Life sucks. Then you die.’ That gets (most of) Ecclesiastes down to five words. I can see the Teacher sadly nodding his head. Or, as Marilyn Duckworth put it (beloved, I've read, of medical professionals), ‘Life is a sexually transmitted terminal disease’ (Disorderly Conduct, p160).
The Teacher keeps coming back to the baffling, inexplicable mockery that death seems to make of life. Of course, it’s better to be wise than foolish. But when you’re dead, will it matter (2.13-14)? Of course, it’s better to be a human than an animal, but we’ll all end up just as dead (3.19-20). Of course, we ought to be good and religious, but can we be sure our destiny will be any different from those who aren’t (9.1-3)? Of course, you may protest, it is better at least to be alive than dead. Sure, but only because while you’re alive you know you’re going to die, whereas the dead know nothing at all (9.4-5). Death makes a macabre joke out of everything we have lived for. We’re leaving the table. We’re out of the game (9.6).
The big tension
It’s relentless. It’s poignant. It’s disturbing. But above all, it’s honest. Honest, that is as far as the Teacher could see. For what he is describing is the reality of our Genesis 3 world, the world where God told us that death would be the effect of our sin, life would become toil and sweat, and dust would be our destiny. The Teacher forces us to look that world full in the face, even while he holds on, with great effort, to the truth he knows from Genesis 1-2. That is the unresolved tension of the whole book. Life is good. Death is ghastly.
But it is this very tension that drives us to the cross and resurrection of Christ. If only the Teacher could have known what we know! It would not change the miserable facts about death itself. But it assures us that death is not the end. Death is no joke. But death will not have the last laugh.
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