19th Sunday in Ordinary Time
ECCLESIASTES 1:2 and 2:21-23
Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher,
vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
There is one who works with skill,
with wisdom and success,
and must leave his portion
to one who has not labored.
This also is vanity and a great evil.
What does a man gain by all the toil
at which he toils under the sun?
For all his days are full of pain, and his work is a vexation;
even in the night his heart does not rest.
This also is vanity.
Nowadays it is preferred to call this book “Qohelet,” which is the Hebrew name of its author. A generic name, by the way, which comes to mean “the man of the assembly” (ecclesia in Greek and Latin is “the assembly,” “the church”), the Teacher or the Preacher.
It is a “book of Wisdom” with scarcely any religious sense. Its basic idea is a profound disillusionment with life. The summary of the book in its classical translation is: “vanity of vanities and all is vanity.”
There are quite a few texts of Qohelet that abound in this sense:
For the fate of the sons of men and the fate of beasts is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and man has no advantage over the beasts; for all is vanity. All go to one place; all are from the dust, and all turn to dust again. ECCLESIASTES 3:19-20
This is an evil in all that is done under the sun, that there is one fate for all men, and the hearts of the sons of men are full of evil, and madness is in their hearts while they live, and after that they go to the dead. ECCLESIASTES 9:1-3
And another “book of Wisdom,” in a way similar to Qohelet, the one that was formerly called “Ecclesiasticus” and now “Sirach,” maintains equally surprising assertions:
For the Most High also hates sinners, and will take vengeance on the ungodly. SIRACH 12:4-6
Do not look on any one’s beauty,
and do not sit in the midst of women;
for from garments comes the moth,
and from a woman comes woman’s wickedness.
It is better to have the wickedness of a man than the goodness of a woman.
SIRACH 42:12-14
Of course, this raises the question of in what sense and to what extent we can admit that these statements are the “Word of God,” but the subject exceeds the possibilities of this commentary.
COLOSSIANS 3:1-5 and 9-11
If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.
Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. On account of these the wrath of God is coming.
Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have stripped off the old nature with its practices
and have put on the new nature, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator.
Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free man, but Christ is all, and in all.
We continue reading splendid texts full of content; in all of them the same ideas are developed: incorporated into Christ, we belong to “what is above.”
There is a play on the meaning of death (dying to the old condition, crucifying it…), with a profound sense of hope: today the glory, the true life, is not visible. But finally the glory of Christ and ours with Him will appear.
One must be careful with the meaning of some expressions, for example:
Strip off the old nature
Paul does not mean that the human is bad, opposed to the divine, but rather he calls “human” here what is not of God, what deforms and impoverishes the human, as he has developed in the previous lines. That is why he continues saying:
and put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator.
We do not like the expression “put on,” because it seems like putting on a dress without changing the interior. Similarly, the expression is used to speak of Jesus “putting on humanity”: it seems to us as if it were a disguise. That is not Paul’s intention, although it is true that in our way of understanding, it is an unfortunate expression.
José Enrique Galarreta, S.J