Ecclesiastes is a book for harrowing. It can drive us, with Qohelet’s roiling questions and assertions about God, death, life, wisdom, and meaning, towards a fundamental undoing. Having our assumptions, questions, fears, and hopes broken apart is profoundly disquieting; will anything be left of us in the end?
Ecclesiastes is also a book for those already harrowed by experiences of grief, trauma, and lament. Indeed, there seems to be a core of lament at the heart of Qohelet’s rage. When else but when we are disillusioned and in pain do we ask our most terrible, vulnerable questions about the meaning of life, as Qohelet does in this book? When else do we refuse so vehemently to accept anything less than the truth, even if it kills us? When do we need hope more?
I propose that we, the readers, preachers, and teachers of Ecclesiastes, are invited to remain with Qohelet in the relentless complexity and lament inherent to the text. In the act of remaining, we offer ourselves to the Spirit, who uses Ecclesiastes to harrow us, breaking apart our hearts and minds to sow compassion, honesty, and a thirst for real life in us. In the harrowing, we find that Ecclesiastes is not only essential reading, but also very good news for people struggling to understand how the already/not yet kingdom of God will ever come to bear. It is the antidote to saccharine, indifferent Christianity; it demands that life as it actually is be taken seriously and engaged, and offers dignity and solidarity to us in those moments when we cannot see how God will make, as Qohelet says, “everything beautiful in its time.”
The full paper is attached to this post as a PDF.
