The Book of Ecclesiastes is a somewhat cynical take on human existence. Everything is “vanity.” What profit has man from all the labor which he toils at under the sun? Qoheleth, the name give as the author, is kind of a Donny Downer, that life is an endless repetition of same old, same old. He claims, “Nothing is new under the sun.” (I would suggest that our time has, in fact, seen something new. We can now destroy civilization with nuclear weapons, we are quickly degrading creation through global warming, and AI threatens the role of humanity in the order of creation.) What Qoheleth doesn’t know is that God had a plan to bring about a new way of being in the world with the coming of Jesus. We are not trapped in an endless loop of drudgery but can be part of the coming of the kingdom of God by the way we treat one another. Our compassion, forgiveness, and generosity makes us part of the new heaven and the new earth.
