Judgment and Joy

 October 3 2021

Ecclesiastes 3:16-22, 4:1-16, 5:1-9

         With the changing of the seasons, the arrival of fall with its clear cool mornings, I find myself, for some reason, reminiscing about going to church when I was a kid. I guess it was in the fall, more than any other time, with the entering into a new Sunday School level with, of course, a new Sunday School teacher that is the source of these memories that I have. Another thing I remember is that as my family all walked into church through the main entrance doors that on the one side of it was a framed plaque that held pictures of all the new families that had just recently joined the church. There they were, all these happy smiling families staring at us from the Polaroid pictures that were taken on that day when they had gathered up at the front of the church and they promised to be faithful and loyal members of the church. Now, I have no idea why I even paid attention to those pictures and those families, maybe it was that anytime people would get up in front of the church and make promises, I just assumed that was a pretty big deal.Yet what I noticed is that after awhile those people in those pictures which hung in the entryways became harder and harder to spot on any given Sunday morning. I remember thinking that it seemed rather odd that they would go through all the bother to do what needed to be done so that they could proudly call themselves a member of the church but in a few short months the only sign that they had done so was their picture hanging in the church entrance. Somehow, I just knew that something as serious as professing ones faith in Jesus Christ and pledging to be a faithful member of his body, the church had to be more than just saying a few scripted words in front of the congregation.

         I guess what made me bring up those memories of my church life as a kid was that as I studied the book of Ecclesiastes I came across the writers advice that we should watch our words that we speak before God. There was the seriousness I sensed was missing from those who made promises of faithfulness only to forget them as time went by. Yet what can’t be also forgotten is that this passage from Ecclesiastes gives us the reason for this seriousness which is that we are to be people of integrity, people who, if they make a vow to pay that they will indeed pay up when the time comes. This integrity is also echoed in the teachings of Jesus who in the Sermon on the Mount taught his disciples that they were not to take an oath at all, “either by heaven, for heaven is the throne of God, nor by earth because earth is the footstool of God nor by Jerusalem for Jerusalem is the city of the great king. Do not take an oath by your head because you cannot make one hair black or white. Let what you say be simply, ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything more comes from evil.” What Jesus is getting at is that, just like the writer of Ecclesiastes pointed out, is that we are to be a person who will do what they said they are going to do or else just come right out and say that you have no intention of doing something, this is far better than saying one thing and doing another. 

         Now, this teaching from Ecclesiastes is obviously an important teaching but we have to wonder just why is it found here, in this section of Ecclesiastes. To figure out the reason as to what does the writer of Ecclesiastes want us to take away from our scripture reading for today, we have to remember just what his writing is focused on. The writer as we might recall is trying to figure out the answer to the question, “What does a person gain from all the work that they do all of the years that they are busy with that work here on earth?” This word gain is one that speaks about the real value that we have when we take our experience and we subtract the costs involved with that experience, and then figure out just what do we have left over. The writer of Ecclesiastes found that the pursuit of happiness came about at a the cost of great effort that in the end, after all that effort was subtracted all that was left was nothing, there was nothing of any real value to be had from a life that had as its goal the pursuit of happiness. Even the life lived by wisdom was also found by the writer of Ecclesiastes to be an empty venture because in the end in didn’t matter if one lived by wisdom or if one lived by sheer foolishness, in the end all would die. All that a wise person had accomplished could, in the end, end up being used by a person who was foolish so what was the point of trying to spend ones life in the pursuit of wisdom. 

         After the writers endless searching for an answer what he concluded is that there was nothing better that a person to do than to eat, and drink and find enjoyment in the work they had been given by God. Now, this was not a novel discovery on the writers part because this eating, drinking and enjoying oneself was the very purpose for the feasts that God had demanded be a part of the life of his people. At the end of their harvests, at the culmination of their hard work, God commanded his people to take the week off and eat and drink and enjoy themselves. The reasoning was that in this time of rest they were to come to the understanding that God had blessed them. It was not their effort but rather it was the very love of God that they had experienced through the work that they had done. God in his love had made the sun to shine upon them and it was God who had caused the rain to fall, this is the reason that they now could rest and rejoice. This period of rest was time for God’s people to reflect upon this love of God and with grateful hearts, rejoice. This, I believe, is what the writer of Ecclesiastes is pointing to when he concludes that there is nothing better for us to do than to eat, drink and find enjoyment in our work. This is an attitude of contentment, one where we find our hearts are at peace no longer restless but at last, finding their rest in God and the certainty of his love.

         This conclusion that the writer of Ecclesiastes has come to, that we are to eat, drink and enjoy ourselves is as we find out is, as we go through his writing, the very heartbeat of what he desires us to know. This phrase is repeated at least five different times throughout the book of Ecclesiastes which means that its importance cannot be underestimated. Where the writer of Ecclesiastes finds that the rest of the worlds activities are nothing but futility and absurdity, eating, drinking and enjoying the work that God has given a person, this is what makes sense. Here in the third, fourth and fifth chapters of Ecclesiastes then, the writer begins to explain just what difference it makes to live with this sense of contentment in our hearts. The third chapter begins with one of the best known sections of Ecclesiastes, which states that for everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven. Now, we get so overwhelmed by the writers profound words that we forget just why exactly the writer wrote these words in the first place. The purpose of pointing out that the world is marked by seasons and times is that as we heard in our scripture, God will judge the righteous and the wicked, for there is a time for every matter. So, the writer is saying just as there is a time to be born and a time to die, in the same way there will be a time when we act and there will be a time when those same actions will be judged by God. The writer is stating this fact to get the attention of those whose actions reflect that they have no concerns about God’s judgment because they look around and see that in this world it sure appears that anything goes. But, the writer of Ecclesiastes points out, there are seasons and times for everything and just because it appears as if that there is no judgment now does not mean that there will not be a judgement, later. In this time, the writer tells us, God is testing the children of man to see if they are beasts, mere animals or are they indeed those in whom God has placed eternity in their hearts. This means are they  people willing to hear and obey the eternal word of God or will they instead listen only to the voice of their desires wanting only to have what is needed for survival, what looks pleasing to their eyes or what is needed to provide some sense of security. Yet as important as the writer knew that it was that we were more than beasts, more than just animals who follow our base desires, the problem, once again, was that, in the end, both beasts and people die. With this being our lot, the writer once again must conclude that the best one can hope for is to simply rejoice in the work that they have been given to do. Even so, the writer wonders, what is to be done for all those who are oppressed. The connection to what the writer has previously written can be heard in the hundred and third Psalm, the sixth verse which states that the Lord works righteousness and justice for all who are oppressed. So, yes, God is going to bring about righteousness and justice for all those oppressed however it is hard to see the evil done to the weak and the poor until that season comes. As the writer of Ecclesiastes ponders this state of things he suddenly has this insight that what motivates all the toil and skill in work comes from a person’s envy of their neighbor. So how do we define envy? Well, envy is a feeling of discontentment or resentment based on someone else’s possessions, abilities, or status. Now, when we understand the full meaning of what it means to be envious of someone else it isn’t hard to see just how polar opposite this is from what the writer of Ecclesiastes believes that we should be, that we are to eat and be joyful in the work that God has given us to do. This is what the writer is getting at when he states that better is one handful with quietness than two handfuls that has come through a striving to have what someone else has. The writer goes on to tell of the sad state of affairs of a person so caught up in his envy that he works frantically so that he never ceases to work, striving to always have more, never stopping to ask just who it was that he was working so hard for and just why he was depriving himself of enjoyment. What a person gains, what they have in real value when they are driven by their discontent, their envy, is absolutely nothing because in the end they find themselves all alone with no one to even be there when they fall down. One cannot but help to hear the warning of Jesus found in the twelfth chapter of Luke who told his disciples to be on guard against all covetousness, this desire to always want more and more because life does not consist of the abundance of ones possessions. Then Jesus told them a parable saying, “The land of a rich man produced plentiful and he thought to himself, “What shall I do for I have nowhere to store my crops? And he said, “I will do this: I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods.” I will say to my soul, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years, relax, eat , drink and be merry. But God said to him, “Fool! This night your soul is required of you, these things you have prepared, whose will they be?  This is exactly the point of the writer of Ecclesiastes, that when your life is driven by envy, by this discontent that comes when one compares themselves with what others have the result is a frenzied life of accumulation which in the end is no life at all.

         The answer to the madness that is caused by the envy of what another one has, according to the writer, is to see that the real treasure is not what the other person has but it is rather the other person themselves. As the writer puts it, two are better than one because together they have a good profit for their work. So, where discontent only leads one to always want more until one is caught up in the never ending task of working to acquire more, contentment , this eating, drinking and enjoying what one has been blessed with by God, this leads one to value the importance of the more we have when we have life  together. This is the ground of the righteousness of God and what must be understood is that only as we rest in the provision of God, only as we receive all we have from the hand of God with gratitude, only then can we see others not as those who we are to compare ourselves with but instead we will see others as those with whom life is given a greater value with them than apart from them. You see, our envy which comes from our discontentment and resentment over what another person has will lead us to eventually covet what another person has and it is this craving for what another person has which leads us to stop seeing people as those whom God loves and instead to see them as objects, as something which stands in the way of what we desire. When we turn people into objects then this is when we begin to believe that we are superior to them. Righteousness is lost when we in some way believe ourselves to be above another person because the basis of all righteousness is that we are all equal in the eyes of God. This equality is what is found in our work when we experience the blessing of God, the love of God who makes the sun shine on the evil and the good and who makes the rain fall on the just and unjust alike. As God so loves us equally then we are to see others as those loved by God just as we are, not objects who stand in the way of what we crave but people whose life is sustained by God just as our life is. This then is how we differ from the animals, that we know the God who gives us life and calls us through the word he speaks to love just as he loves us. The difference it makes in our life then is not how we die but rather how we live, not in some frenzied state where our discontent fuels us to always want more to the exclusion of everything else but rather in our contentment with what God has blessed us with where we realize that what is of real value in this life is a life lived with others in mutual love.

         All of this then brings us to the writers thoughts of what we are to do when we enter into the house of the Lord. The writer tells us that it is better to draw near to listen than it is to offer the sacrifice of fools. This is a really obscure saying but this whole section concerns speaking and doing. The reason why we are to watch what we say is that we must make sure that what we say we are going to do and what we do are the same thing. Yet with a little thought this too can be seen to be an outgrowth of our resting, our eating and drinking and rejoicing because all of this we realize is the result not only of the love of God but also the faithfulness of God. As the writer states, whatever God does endures forever. So, as God has been faithful to us we in like manner are to be faithful to God. As we rest contented in what God has always provided for us, we can make promises and keep those promises because God in his faithfulness creates faithfulness in us.

         So, what these festivals that God commanded his people to observe were to do is to create an environment whereby God’s people would enter into a life of contentment, understanding that in their work they had experienced the love and faithfulness of God. In this awareness then, they were to understand that as God’s love extended to all so should their love reach out to the love of all. As God had been faithful they too were to return his faithfulness to them with faith in him. When we begin to see how this works we can get at what the writer is saying when he writes about a province where there is oppression of the poor and violations of justice and righteousness. It is in this place where the high official is watched over by an official higher than him and that official also has an official who is yet higher than them. Everyone it seems is answering to someone but no one is answering to God. The writer then goes on to say that there is much gain, something of great value in this that a king is committed to cultivated fields. Why is this so important for a king to be concerned about farmland? A king remembering the fields where his food comes from will remember that it is God who sends the sun and the rain to create the harvest, a harvest he was to receive and be contented with joy. In remembering this love of God he will also become aware that as God has blessed him, the king, God has also blessed the very least person, God’s love extends equally to all. In this way, the king would remember that all the people under his care were to be loved equally just as God had loved them equally. He was to know that these people were not objects that stood in the way of his desires but rather they were those he was to watch over and care for as they may also watch over and care for him. You see, all of this grows out of the environment that God places us in, a place where we rest in his love and in our unity together, we rejoice! Amen!