A Connection with Jesus' Jerusalem Lament?

In last week's sermon we looked at the Hebrew word pesach used in Exodus 12 and noted that it did not mean pass over but rather protection or shield.   In order to establish that pesach actually means protection, I referred to two other passages in the Old Testament that used the word pesach.

1 Kings 18:21 uses the word pesach as hover.  The question Elijah asks in this verse is how long will Israel go on hovering between two limbs.  Elijah is picturing Israel as a bird which cannot decide which branch to land on.  Our Bibles try to clean this up a bit by translating limb as opinion.  What I want us to take note of is that bird imagery is used here.

The other verse that uses the word pesach is Isaiah 31:5.  Here pesach is used to describe the Lord's shielding action over Jerusalem.  Again bird imagery is used.  The Lord is pictured as spreading His wings over Jerusalem and protecting the city like a mother bird protects her young.

This leads me (and others) to wonder if there is a connection to Jesus' words in Luke 13.  As Jesus is assaulted by both the Pharisees and Herod, Jesus sees His fate will end the same as many prophets before Him.   In response he utters a lament over Jerusalem knowing that the actions of the leaders of Jerusalem is going to lead to judgment, "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!  How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing."

Jesus uses the imagery of a bird protecting her young to describe his willingness to protect Jerusalem from coming judgment.  Once again we see the concept contained in the word pesach. Jesus as the ultimate passover sacrifice is offering Himself as the slaughtered lamb to once again shelter Israel from God's judgment.  This time, Israel has refused to accept God's protection and now they will not be spared from the coming plague.  In fact in a few short years, Jerusalem will be utterly destroyed by the Roman armies.

The Priestly Blessing & Ecclesiastes

At the end of Numbers 6 we are told there was a characteristic blessing for the people of Israel to be pronounced by the priests.  This blessing is sometimes known as the priestly blessing or priestly benediction.  It is often used as a benediction in Christian churches so you are likely familiar with it. The blessing is as follows:

The Lord bless you and keep you.
The Lord make His face to shine upon you and be gracious to you.
The Lord lift up His countenance upon you and give you peace.

For our purposes I want us to focus on the phrase, "The Lord make His face to shine."  The word for shine is the verb form of the word light.  So we can read this line as, "The Lord make His face light upon you."

There is a similarity between the construction of this phrase and Genesis 1:3, "And God said, 'Let there be light.' And there was light." What God says is more literally translated, "And God said, 'Be light' and light was."   So Genesis 1:3 says, "Be Light" and the priestly benediction says, "light YHWH."  You need to remember that YHWH, the actual name of God, is a form of the to be verb (that is the reason name of God is sometimes referred to as I AM).   Although the point is a lot clearer in Hebrew, the priestly blessing by reversing "be light" to "light YHWH" is indicating the hope of a return to the original state of creation.

The Israelites receiving the priestly blessing would understand the line in the priestly blessing as the hope for a renewing of their lives taking them back to the original point of creation.  The time before the creation of light would be a time before God began to delegate His rule to the creation as we see in Genesis 1:14-16.

The blessing holds out the hope of a time when the rule of God would once more be direct, when creation would no longer be under the sun.  If you remember from our last sermon, life under the sun is the problem the Preacher sees in the world and why he finds no hope for gain for humanity's labor. What the Preacher longs for is something new.

It is this hope of a renewal of creation that led Isaiah to compose Isaiah 60 and envision a time when the direct rule of God would return.  No longer would the times and seasons be delegated to the rule of the sun.   Instead creation would again be under the direct rule of God and the sun would become redundant.  As Isaiah says in 60:19, "The sun shall be no more your light by day, nor for brightness shall the moon give you light; but YHWH will be your everlasting light and your God will be your glory."

The resurrection begins this new creation.  As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, the risen Christ is the first fruit of this new creation.  As Christians participate in Christ's death and resurrection we are part of this new creation and so Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5:17, "Therefore if anyone is in Christ - new creation!"  The point is that the priestly blessing by expressing the hope that God's light would shine on the Israelites, is an anticipation that there would be freedom from the tyranny of life under the sun and a renewal of creation.

Ecclesiastes in the Canon

Last week someone asked the question, if Ecclesiastes is so different from the rest of scripture why was it included in the scriptures?  It is a great question and in order to answer it  we have to discuss the concept of canonization.

Canon comes from a Greek word mean rule as in a measuring stick or ruler.  The idea is that a canon is a standard by which something is measured.  In our usage canon refers to the collection of books that is considered authoritative.  The question is how do we know Ecclesiastes is authoritative?  The typical Christian answer to this question is a book is considered authoritative if it is inspired.  Inspired means that the author of the book wrote the book under the mediation of the Holy Spirit. The concept of inspiration is based on 2 Timothy 3:16 where Paul says that, "All scripture is inspired by God."  Of course this leads to the question how do we know what scripture is inspired by God?  If it was that simple anyone could claim that they thought a particular piece of writing was inspired.

Generally the church has used three tests for inspiration of Old Testament writings: antiquity, attestation as scripture by the New Testament, and orthodoxy.  In other words has the writing in question been traditionally considered scripture, does the New Testament cite or reference the work as scripture, and does the writing's teachings conform with the teachings of the faith?  I will answer these questions for Ecclesiastes.  

At various times there has been questions about whether or not Ecclesiastes is inspired because it is such a complex book.  Christians have typically considered it canonical because Ecclesiastes was part of the Hebrew canon.  However, we know the Jews debated the inclusion of Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs at the Council of Jamnia.  The Council of Jamnia was a group of Jewish rabbis who met in 90 AD to reconstruct Judaism after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and the devastation of the Roman conquest.  

The rabbis decided both Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs "defiled the hands" which was a technical term meaning that both books were considered holy and required hand washing before handling. Only a small segment of the rabbis questioned the inclusion of the two books in the canon.  In the end, the fact that there had to be a debate demonstrates that the two books were already included since the question was not whether to include them, but rather whether or not to exclude them.  

The Dead Sea Scrolls were the authoritative documents of a community of Jews called the Qumran community.   This collection of scrolls give us an indication of what books one sect of Jews considered authoritative as early as the 2nd century BC and as late as the 1st century BC.  Among the scrolls have been found two fragments from the book of Ecclesiastes.  The older one has been dated to 175-150 B.C.  Here is a picture of the fragment recovered from this scroll.

However, we know that Ecclesiastes was considered holy scripture even before this. In the 3rd century BC, a Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures was ordered by the King of Egypt, Ptolemy II, for inclusion in his library of Alexandria.  This translation became known as the Septuagint which is a Greek word meaning 72 because 72 Jewish scholars worked on the translation.  Ecclesiastes was included in the Septuagint which indicates it was considered holy scripture as early as the 3rd century BC.

Ecclesiastes seems to have been considered scriptural at least as far back as the 3rd century BC so it passes the antiquity test.  Now we we ask, is Ecclesiastes considered scripture by the New Testament?  The most direct quotation is James 4:13-14 where James says, "Come now, you who say, 'Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit' - yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring.  What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes."  In this passage, James not only refers to humanity's lack of control which is a prominent theme in Ecclesiastes, but also use the phrase "you are a mist."  Mist is an acceptable translation for hebel.  So it is likely James is alluding to Ecclesiastes.

Paul alludes to Ecclesiastes in chapter 8 where he talks about the creation being subject to futility.  The futility of creation is a major theme of Ecclesiastes.  In Romans 8:20 Paul uses the Greek word mataiotes which is the Greek word the Septuagint uses to translate hebel.  This seems to indicate Paul has Ecclesiastes in mind when he writes Romans 8.

There are no explicit quotations of Ecclesiastes in the gospels.  However, there are some possible allusions.  The central question in Ecclesiastes is what profit is there in life?  In Mark and Luke, Jesus asks, "For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?"  While not a direct quotation it likely Jesus has Ecclesiastes in mind.

On the surface Ecclesiastes seems to fail the test of orthodoxy.  Ecclesiastes is pessimistic and at times doubts if there is any goodness at all.  In the course of our study, I think we will find that the differences between Ecclesiastes and the rest of the Old Testament is not as great as we think.  Ecclesiastes is focused and blunt, but I think it is entirely consistent with the rest of the theology of the Old Testament.  Many of our issues with Ecclesiastes are less with the theology of Ecclesiastes as with our own sanitized interpretation of scripture.  If we read Ecclesiastes as wisdom literature and see it as a commentary on the effects of the fall, I think we will find it very much in line with the teaching of the rest of scripture.

Of course, the whole issue of what writings belong in the scripture and the history of canonization is not quite this neat.  An extended discussion of these topics would be a very long blog post.  Much ink has been spilled on this topic.  My point is not to give an exhaustive treatment of the topic but to give some helpful big picture concepts.

Four Keys to Understanding Ecclesiastes

In last week's sermon I mentioned four keys I had found helpful in understanding the message of Ecclesiastes.  I will be referring back to these periodically in our sermon series, so I thought it would be helpful to list them in print for easier access.

1.  Ecclesiastes is Complicated

Ecclesiastes resists any attempt at simplification.  It is not linear or systematic.  Little is black and white in Ecclesiastes.  There is no consensus on the structure of Ecclesiastes or if it even has one.  At no point can you devise a short summary of the message of Ecclesiastes.  However, I think this is actually a strength rather than a weakness.  Ecclesiastes is seeking to answer no less than the meaning of life and life, the universe, and everything is really complicated.  Ecclesiastes is grappling with these ultimate questions in an honest way and when we look at the world it is complex.  We are meant to engage in a journey along with the Preacher in Ecclesiastes and to feel and experience his journey along with him.  It would be dishonest if it were made simple and we should not expect easy, packaged answers.

2.  Ecclesiastes is Contradictory

Ecclesiastes is often contradictory.  I discovered that many commentators have minimized the contradictions in the text to make Ecclesiastes more manageable.  More negative passages of the book are glossed over to make the message more palatable.  Others take the opposite approach and emphasize the negative parts attempting to build the case that Ecclesiastes is trying to show bad the world is when God is removed from the equation.  I think both of these approaches are flawed because the positive and negative points are too intertwined.  We have to be willing to embrace the tensions inherent in the text if we are to properly grapple with the argument of this book.

3.  Ecclesiastes is Wisdom Literature

Ecclesiastes is part of a bigger genre of literature called Wisdom literature.  Examples of Wisdom literature in the Bible include Job, Proverbs, Lamentations, Song of Songs, and many of the Psalms.   Wisdom literature is also found throughout the literature of the Ancient Near East.

Like any genre such as science fiction or romantic comedy, we have to understand the rules and conventions of the genre to understand what the author is trying to tell us.  Wisdom literature centers on observation.  The writer makes observations about the world, discovering order a mid the chaos and then instructs others how to live in harmony with that order.  The focus is very much on the here and now and practical advice.  Wisdom literature does not focus on events and history but on universal truths.  In this way it is very different from much of the rest of the Old Testament.

The Old Testament is a mostly a story involving God's intervention in the world, particularly God's historical redemptive acts.  By contrast Wisdom literature is not a narrative and is the closest thing we find in the Old Testament to theology.  Wisdom literature is interested in repeating patterns rather than historical events.  It seeks to be ahistorical and I think this is one reason why Ecclesiastes seems relatable to modern readers.

Many Christians are bothered by Ecclesiastes because it lacks the strong theme of redemption that is found throughout the rest of the Bible.  However, this should not be surprising as Wisdom literature places the emphasis on God the Creator rather than God the Redeemer.  We find evidence for this emphasis in the heavy use of words and concepts from the book of Genesis by the author of Ecclesiastes.  Genesis tells the the story of the fall.  Ecclesiastes will explore the consequences of the fall and tell us how to live in the fallen world.  In this way, Ecclesiastes is a very this worldly and practical book.  In many ways Ecclesiastes can serve as a counter balance to a church whose teaching has increasingly focused on escaping this world and therefore has difficulty being relevant.

 4.  Revelation is Progressive

God did not deliver Christianity fully formed.  Christianity developed as part of a narrative that takes place throughout a long period of history.  As events unfolded and God acted, more and more details about God's purposes and plans were revealed.  The Bible moves from the story of creation, to the fall, to the emergence of sin into the world, to the history of Israel, to the incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, ascension, and to the second coming.  At each point we learn more and more about the character of God and His plan for redemption.

Jesus tells us that many prophets and righteous people longed to experience what the disciples experienced.  The Old Testament believers looked to God in faith, as the book of Hebrews tells us, but the content of that faith was not as well defined as it is for us.  Most Old Testament believers thought that God was in a special relationship with them and God would one day act to save them from their oppressors.  What this would look like and the consequences of God's actions were not known.  So when we read Ecclesiastes we find that the author has some concept of a future judgment but is unsure of what will happen after death.  The doctrine of resurrection was something that had not yet been revealed to the writer of Ecclesiastes.  This does not mean that the author contradicts scripture as some suppose.  It only means the writer comes at an earlier point in redemptive history.