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When the golden bowl is broken
Sermon preached by Kenneth Boyd at Evensong on 27 October 2008
Ecclesiastes 11,12 ; 2 Timothy 2:1-7
‘Remember your creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come, and the years draw near when you will say, “I have no pleasure in them”. The ‘Allegory of Old Age’ in our first lesson tonight is poignant and haunting, perhaps especially so if we only vaguely understand the meaning of its elusive poetic images:
"...the almond tree blossoms ... the grasshopper drags itself along ... the silver cord is snapped ... the golden bowl is broken ...
According to the traditional interpretation however, these elusive poetic images refer quite specifically to the limbs and organs of the aging body as they grow frail and fail:
“the guards of the house” who now tremble are the old person’s knees, the “strong men” who now become bent are the arms, the “grinding women” who become few and cease grinding are the teeth, and “those who look through the windows” are the eyes.
More obscurely perhaps, the blossoming almond tree refers to degeneration of the hip joint, and the dragging grasshopper to swelling of the ankles, while the silver cord being snapped is the tongue becoming dumb, and the golden bowl being broken is the brain disintegrating.
Like Shakespeare’s ‘Last scene of all... Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything’, it is not an encouraging prospect. The author of Ecclesiastes, whoever he was, is no great optimist about the human condition. Part of the reason for this, commentators suggest, may have been because he was living in a time, like the present, of extreme ‘economic turbulence’: ‘riches were kept by their owners to their hurt, and those riches were lost in a bad venture’, he writes earlier [5:13,14] and sounding rather like a nervous financial columnist today, he advises people to: ‘Divide your means seven ways, or even eight, for you do not know what disaster may happen on earth’. [11: 2] The author of Ecclesiastes moreover, sees nothing to hope for beyond this life: ‘The living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing… never again will they have any share in all that happens under the sun.’ [9:5,6] So his advice is often what we might call worldly wisdom:
"Rejoice, young man, while you are young, and let your heart cheer you in the days of your youth. Follow the inclination of your heart and the desire of your eyes..."
This is hardly the advice of the Mosaic Law or the Prophets. True, the author adds: ‘but know for all these things God will bring you into judgement’. But he is not very confident that God will actually reward the righteous or punish the wicked; and while at best, his guarded and ambivalent guidance echoes the middle way or mean of a Greek philosopher, at worst it sounds a bit like Polonius:
"Do not be too righteous, and do not act too wise; why should you destroy yourself? Do not be too wicked, and do not be a fool; why should you die before your time?" [7:16,17]
It would not be surprising therefore if a more robust religious believer were to ask why this book should be in the Bible at all. But to suggest that it should not be there, I think, is to misunderstand the nature of the Bible. The Bible is a book of many voices, each responding in its own distinct tones, to what the ultimate mystery of life calls on it to answer. Because these are all human voices, what each has to say is limited by its time, place and understanding; and because each of us, and each of our religious traditions, are similarly limited, no one voice, theirs or ours, can have the final word about, the definitive interpretation of, what the Word of God is saying in the Bible. On a Christian understanding of the Word made flesh moreover, the most urgent goal is not to articulate a definitive interpretation of the Word of God in words, but to respond to the Word of God, wherever we hear it, ‘not only with our lips, but in our lives’.
With that aim in view therefore, it would be a mistake to dismiss the possibility that the Word of God is saying something to us through the worldly wisdom of the author of Ecclesiastes. What he writes about the frailty of extreme old age is particularly relevant today, when more and more of us are living longer, some to the time when ‘the golden bowl is broken’, and when questions are being raised about the cost of care and even the possibility of euthanasia for elderly people. ‘The sayings of the wise are like goads’ the Epilogue to Ecclesiastes says: its author’s evocation of old age reminds us of what in the middle of life we may prefer to forget, and thus goads us into asking how we ought to relate to one another, in youth, in mid-life, and in age, as families, as friends, as taxpayers, as voters. And perhaps we need to be reminded, as the author of Ecclesiastes puts it in one of his more positive and pithy proverbs: ‘Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up the other’.
That said however, the advice of the author of Ecclesiastes is only one of the Biblical voices. His worldly wisdom is one way of responding to the ultimate mystery of life. But the wisdom he aspires to views others and indeed himself from the outside, as it were, as if he had seen everything and thus had the final view on everything, and so is able to declare: ‘there is nothing new under the sun’. [1:9b]
But can anyone have the final view on everything? And is it true that ‘there is nothing new under the sun?’ Our short second lesson from Paul’s letter to Timothy does not explicitly contradict Ecclesiastes. But in urging Timothy to be like a soldier, an athlete, or a farmer, it suggests that there is more in life to hope and work for, and more to us, than the pessimism of Ecclesiastes allows for. Like the Hebrew prophets, Paul believes that, in with and under the familiar round of all things under the sun, the author of life’s mystery is making all things new, and has much more to show us than is dreamt of in worldly wisdom’s philosophy. To be open to this possibility, not to close one’s mind down on the possibility that all is not vanity, but ultimately meaningful and good, is what Paul asks Timothy to ‘think over’ so that ‘the Lord will give you understanding in all things.’
And one aspect of that understanding, I suggest, is to catch glimpses, beyond the undeniable realism of Ecclesiastes’ evocation of old age, of something more deeply real, even there. Let me end with two modern voices, through which the Word of God may speak to us.
The first is that of the poet T S Eliot, in the first of his Four Quartets, when he writes that:
Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and porpoise. In my end is my beginning.
And the other voice is that of the twentieth century priest and scientist Teilhard de Chardin. He realises all too well that none of us knows, if, or when, for us, the silver cord will be snapped, the golden bowl broken. So he prays:
"When the signs of age begin to mark my body (and still more when they touch my mind); when the ill that is to diminish me or carry me off strikes from without or is born within me; when the painful moment comes in which I suddenly awaken to the fact that I am ill or growing old;
and above all at that last moment
when I feel I am losing hold of myself
and am absolutely passive within the hands of the great unknown forces that have formed me;
in all those dark moments, O God,
grant that I may understand that it is you (provided only my faith is strong enough)
who are painfully parting the fibres of my being
in order to penetrate to the very marrow of my substance
and bear me away within yourself.
References:
Jarick J ‘Ecclesiastes’ in Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible ed Dunn & Rogerson, 2003 : 467-473
Eliot T S Collected Poems and Plays Faber 1969:182-3
The Oxford Book of Prayer ed. Appleton, 1985: 133-134
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