The book of Ecclesiastes shows up in the current Sunday lectionary only this once every three years, so we ought to consider that briefly before looking at its connection with today’s Gospel.
I’ve always loved Ecclesiastes. I think this love began when I was a teenager and wrestling with matters of faith as a Protestant. I grew up in something of an anti-intellectual tradition (not that we would have ever used the word “tradition”), so my questions about the Bible and theology weren’t always very welcome by many of my Sunday school teachers or youth group leaders. I was barely aware of the existence of Catholicism at that point in my life, but looking back, I can see how easy it was to call the bluff, so to speak, on much of the Protestant teaching I received. You can’t go around criticizing Catholics for their authoritarian tradition while at the same time insisting that the Bible has to be read a certain way just because. There’s an intellectual and cognitive incoherence there that I and many others found hard to bear.
Ecclesiastes comes into my story as an example of . . . well, a somewhat annoying series of questions without obvious answers. Right there in the heart of the Old Testament is a thought experiment where the writer, known as the Teacher, for the sake of argument, just puts aside everything he knows about divine revelation and tries to figure out whether life makes any sense. It can come across as dark, or as whimsical, but it struck me all those years ago just as it does now, as real. For something written thousands of years ago it feels very postmodern.
What Ecclesiastes shows us is, among other things, a world without hope. There are all sorts of things we can know with reason alone: things about the natural world, even the existence of a creator. But we cannot know anything about meaning, or hope, or love, except in the most superficial and ephemeral ways. Ecclesiastes boldly asks the question almost taken for granted by many people in our age of idle wealth: What if this is really all there is? What if the only meaning in life is what I make of it, what I do with my time and my money, how I pursue pleasure and happiness before I inevitably die?
Ecclesiastes isn’t the final canonical answer to these questions, of course, even within the Old Testament. It needs to be read along with the other books of Solomon, especially Proverbs and the Song of Songs. There we can see, in rough outline, a sort of three-act drama. In Proverbs, Solomon asserts the conventional practical wisdom of the natural law. In Ecclesiastes, he explores the absurdity of following merely natural law in a world of death and chance. In the Song, he finds that the ultimate human vocation is not merely in the virtues of this world, in wealth and pleasure, but in the ecstatic embrace of divine love, which is mirrored in human marital love.
But the more cynical moments of Ecclesiastes continue to resonate, and it seems that our theoretical rich man in the Gospel takes a this-worldly approach to life’s meaning. His strategy, of building up his business may strike a modern businessperson as basic prudence. Yet the prophets would have reminded him that, although doing good work is indeed virtuous, and making wealth is also good, he has to remember that this material success brings certain obligations to the common good as well as certain temptations to his own soul’s health. To treat his success as something to simply capitalize on for his own benefit, or even for that of his heirs, is to neglect a basic principle rather bluntly stated by St. Ambrose in his commentary on this passage: “The things we cannot take away with us are not even ours. Only virtue is the companion of the dead. Compassion alone follows us.”
If this seems to cut into the heart of the “American Dream,” then perhaps we begin to understand aright what the Lord wants us to hear. Those of us more comfortable in a classic economic “conservatism” may then fret that the Lord wants us to become socialists or something, but this isn’t the point, either. The Catholic ideal is not some sort of flattening economic equality, where everybody must forcefully get the same thing all the time. It is rather the insistent awareness of what material things are for, and what they are meant to do: they form us either in virtue or in vice. They can aid us in seeking communion with God or stand as obstacles in our way.
In his reading of this passage, David Lyle Jeffrey points out that Jesus is warning here against the hypocrisy and covetousness of not just the rich, but also his poor disciples, who might resent and covet that same wealth. In other words, sitting around being envious of the rich is just as dangerous as sitting around hoarding your wealth
Whatever our present status, the Lord calls us to invest in what matters. This doesn’t mean we can’t also invest in the things of this life. It is not a bad thing to make provisions for our children or our friends, because this can be an aid to their spiritual growth insofar as it provides for their material health. But there are very real dangers to the soul if we do not take seriously the Lord’s call to be generous with what we have, and to prioritize the things of God. If we treat our possessions as merely ours, we will form our souls not for heaven, but for the dust of the ground. And this is a matter of not just money, but every aspect of life.
Do we regard having more than two children as “too expensive” because we take as normative the expectations of American consumer culture? Do we shrink from the idea of our children pursuing celibacy in religious or clerical life? Do we think we are being generous when we throw a small bill into the offering plate every so often? Do we resent it when the Church asks us to show up on a weekday, or fast, or abstain from meat?
Hard questions for reflection, maybe, but worth asking if we want to be prepared for the life to come, where the size or our granaries or our investments accounts mean exactly nothing, except insofar as they were used to cultivate the divine life in us and those around us.