Ecclesiastes and Empire

“Meaningless! Meaningless! Says the Teacher, “utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless” (Ecclesiastes 1:2, TNIV).
Ecclesiastes has long been one of my favorite books of the Bible. At various points in my life, in the midst of angst and despair, I have been bombarded with messages of hope that, while I’m sure they were well-intentioned, sounded hollow in the face of what I was experiencing at the time. In the face of pithy statements of hope in the face of what seemed to be crushing despair I found a remedy in the Teacher of Ecclesiastes and his (I thought) pessimistic outlook. I found a strange kind of hope in reading the wise words of someone who came long before me, even if his wisdom was to say that wisdom itself is ultimately for nothing.

In college I studied existentialist philosophy as a part of my course in liberal arts, and Ecclesiastes became real to me in new and exciting ways. The exhortations of the Teacher to know one’s place and find enjoyment in the toil of daily life led me to Sartre, and I found affinity between Kierkegaard and the “leap of faith” and the Teacher’s exhortation to “follow God and keep his commandments” in spite of the seeming absurdity of the world and our place in it.

This same sense that gave me hope in the face of depression and sickness while I was in college, however, would be the source of consternation as I began to read and study more about the mechanisms of empire and how closely it seemed to me that life in America was echoing life under the shadows of the empires I was studying. This way of thinking actually started at the same time as my course in existentialism as I studied the history of Rome as part of my course in Biblical studies. I began to wonder if the Teacher’s exhortation to know your place and enjoy “every moment of [your] stupid little life” (to quote Lester Burnum from American Beauty) wasn’t just a way of replacing potential resistance to the unjust order with numbness and meek acceptance, and if the urging to obey God didn’t seek in some way to supply religious legitimation for the empire - after all, Ecclesiastes is traditionally attributed to Solomon, the man largely responsible for transforming Israel from a confederation of tribes to a centralized kingdom (like the nations) well on its way to empire. However, as I’ve studied the book further I have found in Ecclesiastes not the seeds of despair and a quashing of potential resistance (the purpose Brueggemann ascribes to the book), but quite the opposite really - I believe Ecclesiastes, if read in the right way, can be a source of great insight into the nature of empire and of genuine hope for resistance.

While a cursory reading of this book would seem to cast a long shadow of despair over any and all human activity, it’s important to note that the Teacher does not necessarily condemn all activity, or at least not all of them equally. For instance, even though wisdom is meaningless, it is still better than ignorance and folly. And the meaninglessness of what happens in life does not erase the fact that it is sometimes time for one thing, and sometimes time for another – a time to be born, a time to die, a time to kill, a time to heal, a time to mourn, a time to dance, and so on. Oppression and injustice are not justified, they are presented as the result of ignorance, of the belief that gaining wealth and power are inherently good things when, as the Teacher has discovered, you can’t take it with you. In the end the Teacher presents following God and keeping his commandments as the ground of meaning in human life, a statement that necessarily requires one to look back to the Torah and its stipulations regarding love of God and of neighbor, of living in community in such a way that justice and shalom are foundational to life together.

Even the word “meaningless” does not impart the sort of existential angst that seems to be popularly attributed to Ecclesiastes; indeed, I would question whether “meaningless” is even the best translation. The Hebrew word is hebel, which has as its basic meaning “vapor” or “breath”. We see this, for example, in Psalm 39:5:

You have made my days a mere handbreadth;
the span of my years is as nothing before you.
Each man’s life is but a breath (hebel);

and Psalm 144:4:

A man is like a breath (hebel);
his days are like a fleeting shadow.

So every time you see in the text something like “this is meaningless, a chasing after the wind”, the two statements mutually reinforce each other. I would even go as far as to say that the fundamental issue for the Teacher is not that life is meaningless, but that it is a breath, a vapor, and that folly is trying to take hold of something that is fundamentally dynamic, changing, breathing, something that cannot be grasped, and seize it as something static, concrete, and tangible.

It is precisely because people are prone to this kind of folly that we should not be surprised to see injustice in the world, and I suggest that wisdom consists of seeing ourselves in right relationship to God, the world, ourselves, and each other and so seeing that which is dynamic not through our attempts to overcome it, to make it static, but rather seeing it through the lens of God’s revelation throughout history, and particularly for us through God’s self-revelation in Christ.

I suggest that the fundamental folly in Ecclesiastes and the nature of empire are essentially the same, that being an exercise of the will to godlike power over what is given as a gift, trying to seize hold of it and appropriate it for our own use. Or, in the case of empire, to apprehend people and their lives, cultural creations, and ways of being, subjugating people made in the image of God to an exploited subordinate, a commodity if you will, that exists as an object to be acted on by the structures of power, rather than as human beings in their own right.

It is only by being a community of people who “follow[s] God and keep[s] his commandments” of loving God and neighbor, by being a community of people who embrace Jesus’ mission to proclaim freedom to captives and the Jubilee of the Lord, that real and active resistance to the machinations of empire can take place. It is only by being liberated through the work of Christ, by participating in his life, death, and resurrection through the sacraments of baptism and eucharist, and by seeing the world through lenses shaped by the Word and the Spirit that we can begin to be a people who do not reject life as “meaningless” or seek to constrain it in our totalitarian categories, but rather embrace it as a gift and celebrate God’s working in history to create a tribe of people out of every tribe, tongue, and nation who will anticipate in their life together on earth the coming of the kingdom in full.

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Jason Barr is an independent recording artist, freelance writer, and graduate student from Evansville, Indiana. He holds the Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Evansville in the areas of music and Biblical studies, and is currently working towards an MA in Liberal Studies at the University of Southern Indiana. Jason is a recovering right-wing fundamentalist-cum-Christian anarchist, and is the head writer for the Christian anarchist blog “An Absolution Revolution. He lives in the “Grand Old Co-Opry”, a cooperative housing project in Evansville dedicated to mutual aid and seeking a more organic lifestyle. He intends to puruse a Ph.D in theological ethics and philosophy, with an eye towards social and political philosophy and exploring a theological basis for environmental justice. Jason describes himself as a “liturgical Anabaptist” though he currently attends St. John the Apostle Catholic Church on Evansville’s south side. He is also a novice Oblate of the Order of St. Benedict through St. Meinrad Archabbey in Indiana.

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