LOOKING ON THE DARK SIDE OF LIFE
The Book of Ecclesiastes has a wit and charm which wins you over to its subversive take on life. 
 
Occasionally a TV series taps right into the zeitgeist - the spirit of the age – in a way which sends its ratings stellar.  BBC TV’s ‘Grumpy Old Men’ and - let’s not be sexist about this - ‘Grumpy Old Women’ too, laid bare the formidable capacity of British people to complain about the world.  Julian Baggini has said: ‘a man who is tired of complaining is tired of life’.  If this is true, then British people may be the liveliest people on earth.

Sometimes the moaning is symptomatic of personal issues.  Most of the so-called grumpy old men and women featuring in the series weren’t old at all – barely middle-aged in fact – suggesting a struggle to reconcile themselves to a world they thought they could change in their youth but now realise they cannot.
Sometimes complaining is the verbal frustration of a person who can predict the ending of their career years before it arrives (e.g. I’m an accountant at 40, I’ll be an accountant at 65).  A dawning awareness of personal mortality – that death is nearer than birth – niggles away at people until they become habitually grumpy.
Reginald Perrin
Reginald Perrin remembers his mother-in-law again
 


How fascinating it is to find that the Bible sails close to the wind on just such issues.  The Book of Ecclesiastes is morbidly off-message when you think about it.  The apostle Paul calls us to rejoice in the Lord because our salvation is nearer than when we first believed while the writer of Ecclesiastes famously says: ‘Meaningless!  Meaningless!  Everything is meaningless!...What does man gain from all his labour at which he toils under the sun?...There is no remembrance of men of old, and even those who are yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow.’   

The book comes dangerously close to saying there is no point in trying at all but veers away at the last second.

Its best known passage, beginning ‘there is a time to be born and a time to die’, was used by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on the White House lawn before he shook hands with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, giving birth to a peace treaty and signing his own death warrant.  The book also accurately describes the post-modern world where it says: ‘what has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun’.  Most tellingly it encourages younger people to make the most of their energy and optimism before world-weariness sets in: ‘Remember your Creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come and the years approach when you will say, “I find no pleasure in them”’.

You may be tempted to think the book is too depressing to read, but you would be wrong.  Rather like watching the ‘Grumpy Old Men’ series, it raises a wry smile of recognition and has a wit and charm which wins you over to its subversive take on life.  Some have complained it isn’t very Christian, which is rather misplaced, given it was written so long before Christ.  Ecclesiastes is very human, perceptively describing what goes on in the mind of people stuck in a stifling and meaningless routine – a Reginald Perrin before its time.

One of the outcomes of living in a world that is not right with God is a strange and persistent sense of maladjustment.  Many people wake up in the morning wondering why they should get up; whether they make any difference in the world; whether they would be missed if they simply slipped away.  They struggle with dissatisfaction at work, threadbare relationships at home and a relentless weariness which spoils their leisure.  Even people who are fulfilled in their work often suffer from a nagging despondency about life.  These are symptoms of life in a broken world, which Ecclesiastes identifies.  If you think I am being alarmist, look at the number of people in this country who live for Friday night alone and yet when they get there obliterate themselves with drink and drugs.  Life without God is edgy and precarious; even those with God in their lives can struggle at times to find lasting purpose in its detail.

Perhaps we are not entirely honest in the Church about this predicament.  We know what Christ has done for us and how we should rejoice in this and so when we feel out of sorts we don’t own up, as if doing so would diminish the resurrection of Christ for us.  It only takes one person to say ‘how can you be so miserable when Christ died and rose again for you’ to make sure your mouth stays shut when the blues strike again.  And I have heard that kind of thing said, even if you haven’t.  And so the beauty of Ecclesiastes is that in holding up a mirror to the human soul, it pokes fun at the absurdity of life and gives permission for all to do likewise even as they profess a serious and lasting faith in God’s goodness.

The author’s conclusion, after all his soul searching, is to ‘fear God and keep his commandments’.  Some theologians have assumed the author is so off-message throughout that it is unlikely these are his original words, representing instead the editorial insertion of some panicky believer desperate to preserve orthodoxy.  There is no way of telling this, but neither is this a good reason not to take it as his final word.  The book is dark in perspective, but not entirely bleak, and there is a lot of wisdom which finds its fulfilment in the summary of the law which Jesus provided: ‘to love God and love your neighbour as yourself’.  This remains the single best description of the purpose of life.  If we love one another God will be with us; and by loving one another we bestow the kind of dignity and affirmation which makes life worth living.  Ecclesiastes poses the question and Jesus here provides the answer, but to make sense of the mission of Jesus, we should first identify the dark clouds of Ecclesiastes, with all it says about the drift and despair of life in a fractured world.

   
 
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