Ecclesiastes 1:2,2:21-23; Colossians 3:1-5,9-11; Luke 12:13-21
Vanity of vanities… This translation of Ecclesiastes 1:2 might be the one that is best known, but it is also confusing. What is the context between vanity, a hardworking person and the injustice that is referred to?
The meaning of the word vanity has changed over the centuries. Here it is not about today’s meaning of inflated pride. The expression in vain gives an indication of what vanity used to stand for. Some Bible translations therefore use the word meaningless. However, what is meaningless for one person can be meaningful for the other.
Another translation connects to the expression in vain and uses the word emptiness. What does it mean? The text refers to a hard-working person who seemed to try to make everything right, but then ‘must leave what is his own to someone who has not toiled for it at all’.
There is a point of justice – justice for a person who has worked hard and then has to leave everything behind for someone who might not deserve it.
Emptiness, meaningless or vanity. The translation that might fit best is breath of wind. Everything is futile, as much as our ancestors might have tried to provide a deceased loved one with material gifts from this earthly life for their journey or life after death, it is all futile. Looking at the bigger picture, hard work and sleepless nights are just like a breath of wind. Life and death are not in our hands but in the hands of God.
Our beauty and our achievements are futile. Like a rose that slowly grows and is then crowned when it is blooming. The rose can’t ask for more time to display the bloom. At any moment a wind might shorten its life-time.
The second Reading reiterates this call for focussing on heavenly things rather than on material belongings on earth. Through Christ, we are experiencing ‘true life’. We need to strip ourselves of bad behaviour and of prejudices, and this new emptiness as described in Colossians will be filled with a new self, centred in Christ. Instead of possessions or emptiness, Christ is our new meaning in life ‘he is everything and he is in everything’.
The relationship between people of wealth and God have long been discussed. There is even a concept of the ‘Prosperity Gospel’, indicating that wealthy people have been blessed by God.
In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus tells a quite different story. Jesus was asked to be a judge between two men and a property, and he answers with a parable. Just like the two Readings before, the parable disappoints all those who are seeking for security through possessions. Only God knows how much time we have on earth.
In none of the Readings there is any judgement about working hard and having possessions. The warning refers more to the desire to acquire and enhance possession of riches as if they would provide ultimate security – and hence forgetting that all possessions on earth are futile and can be taken away by a breath of wind. The only security that will be lasting is the trust in God.
‘So it is when a man stores up treasure for himself in place of making himself rich in the sight of God.’
BM
