Advent. It's a season of waiting. It's not – no matter what the stores might tell you – the same as the season of Christmas. Christmas begins on December 25. We aren't there yet. We're waiting. This is Advent. Classically, Advent represents two things: a memory of the past wait for the Messiah's birth during the days of the former covenant, and an experience of the present wait for the Messiah's return as Judge during these days of the new covenant. So, on the one hand, Advent connects us with Israel's experience of hearing the prophets and looking ahead to what we see as accomplished, and thus a time of celebration; but on the other hand, Advent is a time for Christians to contemplate the Four Last Things: death, judgment, heaven, hell – hence why Advent was originally a time of fasting before the feast, just like Lent before Easter. That's why the colors of the paraments on the altar, and the colors of the Advent candles themselves, match the same colors we use during Lent.
So you'll forgive me if, at least to start out, this message doesn't have the cheer you might have expected when you thought it might be Christmas. Today I'd like to take us back, back to a world before the dawn. Last Sunday, in the reading the Hesses did as they lit the first of our Advent candles, we heard a message from the Prophet Isaiah. That message was premised on there being a world of “people who walked in darkness,” a world that “dwelt in a land of deep darkness” (Isaiah 9:2). In the verses before those words, verses we seldom read, the prophet depicts a people living in fear and hunger and rage, “and they will look to the earth, but behold, distress and darkness, the gloom of anguish; and they will be thrust into thick darkness” (Isaiah 8:22).
What would it really mean to walk in darkness, to dwell in a land of deep darkness? What would it be like to live in a world and a universe “that have no dawn” (Isaiah 8:20)? What would it have meant to be closed in, as though locked into the world as a confinement – to feel all air as stale, to be claustrophobic in the cosmos, to see nothing but walls closing in and be quarantined from any mysteries beyond?
In effect, that's a quintessentially modern condition. One of the hallmarks of our secular age is that people instinctively think of the universe as a closed system, not an open one. We strive to find meaning within the world we can see, hear, smell, touch, taste, analyze, subjugate, in isolation from every concern which we can't, those things which modernity has screened out of consideration, if not out of existence. There can be no “meaning from outside,” because, as some scholars would put it, “modernity is locked into itself and utterly dependent on its own resources for finding a way amidst the challenges of our day.”1 We and the world alike are 'buffered selves,' no longer permeable to spiritual presences that might transcend our particular meaning. By ruling out consideration of anything beyond the observable, tangible world-system, our experience and outlook become merely secular, that is, worldly, pertaining to the age and world we're capable of knowing under such stringent limitations, which demand that “we assume the view from the inside.”2 And what does that world-system look like from the inside when it's a closed system, isolated from anything more above or beyond it? Shakespeare's melancholy character Jaques, in his comedy As You Like It, quite famously remarked that “all the world's a stage.” But for those who treat the earth as a closed system, we might quip that all the world's a cage.
Long before the modern era, during the days we remember in Advent, there lived a man who took a good, hard look at life in the cage and drove himself mad. That, at least, is something like what we see in a book of our Bibles we probably don't spend much time in: Ecclesiastes. Ecclesiastes is a hard book to read, because there are so many layers we don't recognize, and so its contents shock and concern – as they're meant to.
Think of the book of Ecclesiastes as a story about a dad taking his son to the theater. Some families might go out to see a stand-up comic on stage, but this dad is bringing his son to a different kind of one-man show: a stand up tragedy performance. The dad is the narrator at the start and end of the book, and he wants his son to meet and confront this stand-up tragedian, this actor working out his intense existential struggles on stage while playing the role of King Solomon – although, in the play, the character is just called 'the Assemblyman' or, more conventionally, 'the Preacher.' The meat of the book is the text of the monologue the actor performs, though it isn't necessarily the same as the message the dad wants the kid to get, which may be still more different from what the story's author wants us to get. Like I said: lots of layers make things complicated – and rich.3
But the actor, 'the Preacher,' is a wise man, a sage, who wants to understand the world from his own point of view. He looks at the world as a somewhat closed system – and, unlike most people who do, he understands the world as a kind of cage. He's assessing the world by what he can see, he's studying life as limited 'under the sun,' and he's torn. He's torn between things he knows, pieces of wisdom handed down, the view of life he was taught and that somewhere deep in his heart still affirms, and the world he sees when he stubbornly looks no further than the bars of his cage. In the dark and damp prison of life, he's torn by a conflict between what he claims his heart knows and what his eyes and ears can tell him. That conflict is leading to a place of crisis.
So what kind of secular world does the Preacher find in the cage? What is this darkness he's seeing? He's got quite a problem on his hands, as he analyzes his world. The world he experiences is a closed system in the dark, and – just as those without rhythms of night and day are driven mad, and just as solitary confinement is ruinous to the human psyche – so the cage of the world feels claustrophobic, insubstantial, futile, maddening to him. It's extremely boring to live in a cage, because with the world as a closed system, there's nothing for its processes to do but repeat themselves. Like he says, “all streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow, there they flow again. All things are full of weariness – a man cannot utter it! The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:7-9). Within this closed system 'under the sun,' things repeat. There's nothing new worth discovering; it turns out somebody's already found it. Just as the streams flow and flow without filling up the sea, so experiences flow and flow into our eyes and ears without filling us, without satisfying us. To this Preacher, such a cage of a world is unspeakably exhausting.
And when he applies human wisdom to it, where the beginning of such wisdom is observing the world, he has to ask: “Who knows what is good for man while he lives the few days of his futile life, which passes like a shadow?” (Ecclesiastes 6:12). What's our human good, what has meaning? Life passes like a shadow, darkness overspreading the world. Life's days are few, not many. Life is as insubstantial as vapor, an exhaled breath you can just barely see in the cold – the thing easiest of all to disturb, with no significance as it goes. That obsesses the Preacher, as he wrestles for meaning in a closed world and comes up empty-handed: “I have seen everything that is done under the sun – and look, it's all futility, shepherding the wind!” (Ecclesiastes 1:14). As Paul would later say, “the creation was subjected to futility” (Romans 8:20). Everything done in the world is a bundle of frustration that comes up empty-handed, like desperately trying to chase the wind into a sheepfold.
The Preacher considered whether the virtues of hard work might escape futility, might mean anything. But as his eyes see it, the root of whatever skill we apply to our labor derives from worldly ambition and from envy of others, a mimetic desire to have what they have and be what they are (Ecclesiastes 4:4). That's not exactly good – and where does it get us, in a closed world? “What has a man from all the toil and striving of heart with which he toils under the sun? For all his days are full of sorrow, and his work is a vexation; even in the night, his heart doesn't rest. This also is futility” (Ecclesiastes 2:22-23). “All his days, he eats in darkness in much vexation and sickness and anger” (Ecclesiastes 5:17). Life in the cage is toiling and eating in darkness, a life that forces stress and anxiety on us so that everything we taste is tainted by our sickly sorrows.
Can't we enjoy the fruits of that toil, though? The Preacher claims to speak from Solomon's experiences with wealth and worldly success – of many houses and vineyards and gardens, of servants and herds and flocks, of silver and gold stockpiled, of singers to entertain him daily, of concubines aplenty for the pleasures of the night (Ecclesiastes 2:4-8). “Whatever my eyes desired, I did not keep from them; I kept my heart from no pleasure..., and this was my reward for all my toil” (Ecclesiastes 2:10). But “he who loves money will not be satisfied with money, nor he who loves wealth with his income – this also is futility! When goods increase, they increase who eat them” (Ecclesiastes 5:10-11). Hence, after everything this character says he's tasted in life, “all was futility, a shepherding of the wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 2:11).
Well, Preacher, what about the achievements of the intellectual life? What about knowledge? What about the path of wisdom? On the one hand, he says, “there is more gain in wisdom than in foolishness” (Ecclesiastes 2:14). But, on the other hand, that gain is impermanent, because life is impermanent as breath; hence, the impact of wisdom in this life is ultimately trivial, since the wise and foolish get dumped in the same grave when the shadow passes (Ecclesiastes 2:14-16). Plus, a lifetime of wisdom is as easily outweighed by one foolish choice as a sweet perfume is tainted by a dead fly in it (Ecclesiastes 10:1). It's so much easier to ruin than to build that failure is, for all intents and purposes, inevitable – that's what he's saying. “So I hated life, because what is done under the sun was grievous to me: everything is futility, shepherding the wind” (Ecclesiastes 2:17).
What about leaving a legacy, at least? Does that have benefit? Is that meaningful? Is that worth it? Here the Preacher isn't really any rosier. Whatever he's built, whatever he's taught, “I must leave it to the man who will come after me, and who knows whether he'll be wise or a fool? Yet he'll be master of all for which I toiled and used my wisdom under the sun. This also is futility” (Ecclesiastes 2:18-19). Even if the Preacher claims, “I became great and surpassed all who were before me” (Ecclesiastes 2:11), yet even the greatest who achieved the most in life have no assurance that their name will endure – or, if it does, that it'll be a good one in how it's received. Of even the mightiest and wisest of kings, the Preacher says that “those who come later will not rejoice in him. Surely this also is futility and a shepherding of the wind!” (Ecclesiastes 4:16).
Ultimately, the Preacher says, all the efforts we invest in life are a gamble. No matter how smart somebody is, no matter how well someone plans, no matter how strong or diligent or careful people are, “time and chance happen to them all” (Ecclesiastes 9:11). The world, seen by this view from the inside, is capricious, based more on luck than on skill or quality. Them's the breaks. That's life. There are these forces of the world that keep you trapped, that keep you in the cage, that keep you in the dark.
We moderns like to think that a closed-system world, a limited world, is more understandable, able to be subjected to our scientific gaze. But actually, by dimming the lights and screening out all context beyond the tangible world, we discover the world-in-itself as inscrutable. Certainly the Preacher finds it that way. He can't figure out the world. There are appointed times and seasons in which different ways of living fit. After all, “for everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). So “there is a time and a way for everything” (Ecclesiastes 8:6), “a time for every matter and every work” (Ecclesiastes 3:17). If so, then matching the matter or work to the time is all it should take to thrive. And this woe-torn Preacher was always taught to believe that “the wise heart will know the proper time” to apply this or that insight out of his bag of proverbs to the world (Ecclesiastes 8:5).
But what's driving him crazy is that the times and seasons aren't obvious. Which is the time to keep silence, and which is the time to speak? Which is the time to gather things together, and which is the time to throw them away? When it is time to embrace, and when is it time to put some distance between people? When has the time for peace given way to the time for war – and when will it be time to go back to peace? A human being “cannot find out” the times' and seasons' order and arrangement “from the beginning to the end” (Ecclesiastes 3:11) – the view from the inside of the cage doesn't allow for that. Therefore, “man's evil lies heavy on him, for he does not know what is to be, for who can tell him how it will be?” (Ecclesiastes 8:6-7). “However much a man may toil in seeking, he will not find it out; even though a wise man claims to know, he cannot find it out” (Ecclesiastes 8:17). All this wisdom turns out to be pretense: he's as in the dark about it as anybody.
As if a confusing world in the dark weren't bad enough, this cage is an unpleasant prison, one of violence and of woe, where oppression and injustice have always run wild and unchecked “when man had power over man to his hurt” (Ecclesiastes 8:9). There in the dark, without a sense that there are prying eyes looking on to judge, the world is a place where those who gain an upper hand exploit those they find beneath them. “Behold the tears of the oppressed,” cries the Preacher, “and they had no one to comfort them!” (Ecclesiastes 4:1). There's no one coming to the rescue, if the world is a closed system. We can imagine all we like that we become other than who we are by the power of our own collective choice, but the cage is the cage, and the Preacher sees no source of comfort or salvation under the sun. “Surely oppression drives the wise into madness” (Ecclesiastes 7:7). The fact of injustice in the world is so debilitating that it breaks the human mind and spirit.
The story of the cage, as the Preacher tells it, is that “the hearts of the children of man are full of evil, and madness is in their hearts while they live, and after that they go to the dead” (Ecclesiastes 9:3). When? There's the rub: “man does not know his time,” any more than the deer sees the bullet the second before the trigger's pulled (Ecclesiastes 10:12). It can't be stopped or avoided: “No man has power to retain the spirit or power over the day of death” (Ecclesiastes 8:8). “It is the same for all, since the same event happens to the righteous and the wicked, to the good and the evil, to the clean and the unclean.... This is an evil in all that is done under the sun, that the same event happens to all” (Ecclesiastes 9:2-3).
Worse yet, owing to the veil of darkness drawn over our eyes by the cage, we can't observe what awaits us upon that common event. “Even though he should live two thousand years, yet see no good, do not all go to the one place?” (Ecclesiastes 6:6). “As he came from his mother's womb, he shall go again, naked as he came, and shall take nothing for his toil that he may carry away in his hand” (Ecclesiastes 5:15). And “who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes down into the earth” (Ecclesiastes 3:21)? So far as can be seen under the sun, “there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in the underworld where you're going” (Ecclesiastes 9:10), where “the dead know nothing and have no more reward..., and forever they have no more share in all that is done under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 9:5-6). If the injustices of life make the Preacher announce that “better is the day of death than the day of birth” (Ecclesiastes 7:1), the obscurities of death make him lament that “a living dog is better than a dead lion” (Ecclesiastes 9:4).
So long as the cage is a cage, darkness must reign, and our pretended satisfactions within the cage are but delusions we've invented as coping mechanisms. These all flounder in the face of cosmic indecipherability, regnant injustice, and mysterious death4 – which is why we try to hide behind myths of scientific pursuit, moral progress, and the joys and pleasures of life. No wonder, early on in his considerations, the Preacher “turned about and gave my heart up to despair” (Ecclesiastes 2:20). The cage has broken him. All each can hold out hope for, it seems, is “a little cheer before I go” (Job 10:20-21), “a handful of quietness” (Ecclesiastes 4:6), “to eat and drink and see good in all the toil with which one toils under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 5:18).
All the Preacher is capable of saying, as he closes out his time on stage, is the advice to not think of the world as he has. “Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come” (Ecclesiastes 12:1). The Preacher knows more than his eyes and ears would tell him. He knows that, whatever may be true of this world, “God is in heaven,” deserving of reverence and awe from within the world (Ecclesiastes 5:2). “Walk in the ways of your heart and the sight of your eyes, but know that for all these things God will bring you into judgment” (Ecclesiastes 11:9) – a mysterious “work of God who makes everything” (Ecclesiastes 11:5). The Preacher, and each of us, are living “the few days of his life that God has given him” (Ecclesiastes 5:18). “To accept his lot and rejoice in his toil – this is the gift of God” (Ecclesiastes 5:19). “He has put eternity into man's heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). The cage is dark, but “light is sweet, and it is pleasant for eyes to see the sun” (Ecclesiastes 11:7).
The Preacher's frustrations, compounded by his own weird way of seeing the world (as the father skewers with a few good tongue-in-cheek quips on the way home from the show at story's end), are rooted in the fact that the human heart holds longings that a closed-system world can't satisfy. As C. S. Lewis put it, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”5 But in the Preacher's case, in Advent's case, if we find in ourselves a longing which meets only futility within the world, then either creation was made for futility without hope, or else the world is not meant to be a closed system after all – the cage was meant to be broken.
The Preacher we meet in Ecclesiastes couldn't find out what was from the beginning (Ecclesiastes 3:11), but the Apostle declares that “that which was from the beginning” is what “we have heard, which we have seen with our own eyes, which we looked upon and touched with our hands” (1 John 1:1). The Preacher's failing efforts to see and hear transcendent meaning in the world, to taste eternity on earth, have somehow been satisfied in what the Apostle has heard, seen, touched, and thus known.
So tell that Preacher to yield the stage to the Apostle, because this is a wisdom that finally promises profit. The Apostle declares that “in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God; he was in the beginning with God” (John 1:1-2). That word, 'Word,' is a flexible one in Greek: Logos. It can mean a word, like an ordinary word that's spoken. It can also mean reason itself. It can mean the transcendent pattern on which the world is based. So here we find this Word, this Wisdom, which was “in the beginning with God” – beyond the walls the Preacher took as his boundaries. Our frame of reference here is decidedly not 'under the sun.' And this Word is the opposite of futility, the opposite of vanity, the opposite of fruitlessness. This Word is the basis of the rationality of existence. Before there was a world at all, there was a Word – a Divine Word.
And of this Divine Word preexisting the world, the Apostle preaches to the Preacher that “all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made” (John 1:3). This Word is the “God who makes everything” (Ecclesiastes 11:5). The pattern imprints the world, meaning that the world is modeled after rationality, not after irrationality. All things were made through the Creative Word. Nothing has come into being that doesn't bear the mark of the Word. And “he has made everything beautiful in its time” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). The world is a place of beauty, and even these curious times and seasons all flow, one to the next, as ways for the world to more diversely and fully show forth the infinite fullness of the Word its model.
Not only was “the world made through him,” but this Word “was in the world” (John 1:10). In the darkness of the prison, in the mundanity of the cage, the seeming secularity of being under the sun couldn't block out this Word. Silently abiding in the foundations of every nature, quietly shepherding the generations that come and go down the halls of history, the Word whispered to the world that there was more. “Yet the world did not know him,” the Apostle laments (John 1:10). That's the whole reason why the world seemed like such a cage! The world refused to know the Word that made the world and was in the world. “God made man upright, but they have sought out many schemes” (Ecclesiastes 7:29). “They became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened; claiming to be wise, they became fools” (Romans 1:21-22). Is there a better summary of Ecclesiastes than that?6 Because we didn't know the Word enmeshed in the world, our faculties were blinded and deafened so as not to recognize the world as founded on the Word. No wonder the world itself became opaque to us in its darkness, stripped of the only contextual reference that gives meaning.
The Apostle goes on to declare that “in him was life” (John 1:4). The grave uncertainty of the grave lacks all bearing on the Word. He restores life wherever he abides, because Life Itself is the infinite ocean of his heart. If the Word is our reference point, then the mysteries of death gain their reason back, and it becomes clear that “creation was subjected to futility... in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption” (Romans 8:20-21). But “if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (Romans 8:25). We wait because there can be, after all, a share in goodness beyond the veil of oblivion. “In him was life, and that life was the light of men” (John 1:4), “a light for the nations, to open the eyes that are blind, to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison those who sit in darkness” (Isaiah 42:6-7). The world need not remain dark, nor need it remain oppressive. This light can “establish it and uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time forth and forevermore,” if only it dawns (Isaiah 9:7).
The Word, “the True Light which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world” in a new way (John 1:9), “full of grace and truth” in our midst beneath the same sun (John 1:14). The world may feel at times like a cage, it may look like darkness, it may appear cold and confining and frustrating. But when the True Light fully dawns, “the people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shone” (Isaiah 9:2). Eternal Light moves into the world, throwing the system wide open; the cage shatters, the bars lie in ruins at his feet. That, at least, will be the message of Christmas: “the Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5).
What is Advent but the wait for the cage to be broken? What is Advent but the wait for the darkness to fade? What is Advent but the wait for the system to be flooded from the outside it assumed it was isolated from, an 'outside' which all along turned out to be more internal to the world than what the world is made of? No longer need we think that there's nothing new, that the patterns and processes of a closed-system world are on repeat. For “behold,” says a Voice from above, “I am doing a new thing! Now it springs forth – do you not perceive it?” (Isaiah 43:19). When this Sweet Light is seen, then the eye will indeed be satisfied in the seeing.
So now is the time of our longing – but a longing that has a satisfaction the world couldn't afford. Now is the time of our waiting – but a waiting upon a hope that gives its promise. If the days look few, yet “you will find it after many days” (Ecclesiastes 11:1). In this hope “you know the time..., for salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed” (Romans 13:11). If the days are dark, yet “you are not in darkness” (1 Thessalonians 5:4); we need not shepherd the wind, for the Spirit will shepherd us. So in these days of waiting, “fear God and keep the commandment” (Ecclesiastes 12:13), “for to the one who pleases him, God has given wisdom and knowledge and joy” (Ecclesiastes 2:26), “as with joy at the harvest, as they are glad when they divide the spoil” in victory (Isaiah 9:3). And “whatever God does endures forever” without subtraction (Ecclesiastes 3:14). The shadow cannot blot it out; the cage cannot keep it at bay; time and chance cannot prevail over hope! So let us, weary but not despairing, wait for the Word, Wisdom, Light from above to restore our joy. Amen.
1 Bob Goudzwaard and Craig G. Bartholomew, Beyond the Modern Age: An Archaeology of Contemporary Culture (IVP Academic, 2017), 99, 111.
2 Bob Goudzwaard and Craig G. Bartholomew, Beyond the Modern Age: An Archaeology of Contemporary Culture (IVP Academic, 2017), 232.
3T remper Longman III, The Fear of the Lord Is Wisdom: A Theological Introduction to Wisdom in Israel (Baker Academic, 2017), 28-29; Stuart Weeks, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Ecclesiastes, 2 vols. (T&T Clark, 2020-2022), 1:13.
4T remper Longman III, The Fear of the Lord Is Wisdom: A Theological Introduction to Wisdom in Israel (Baker Academic, 2017), 30-33.
5 C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (HarperCollins, 2001 [1952]), 136-137.
6 Craig G. Bartholomew, “The Intertextuality of Ecclesiastes and the New Testament,” in Katherine Dell and Will Kynes, eds., Reading Ecclesiastes Intertextually (Bloomsbury, 2014), 231.
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