A Time To Do; A Time Not To Do

Friday of the Twenty-fifth Week in Course 2024

Our first reading from the Book of Ecclesiastes/Qoheleth today may be for older Americans one of the ten most familiar Bible quotes. The atheist singer Pete Seeger penned “Turn, turn, turn” in 1959 and it became a Billboard number one song when recorded by the Byrds in 1965. That was the time of the Vietnam war and that made it a favorite among young men, who were concerned about being sent off to Southeast Asia to fight in an unpopular war. But the song eliminated perhaps the most important line from Ecclesiastes. Solomon asks again the question, “is there a transcendent reason for doing all this?” And the answer comes immediately: “I have seen the business that God has given to the sons of men to be busy with. He has made everything beautiful in its time; also, he has put eternity into man's mind, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.”

One of the very few advantages of being an only child is that, if you are not in school and in a neighborhood with no youngsters nearby, you find it easy to make up invisible friends. With that familiarity it’s also easier than for folks like me to believe that there is an invisible divine presence that has given us everything around us, each of which is “beautiful in its time.” That’s a poetic way for the author to explain the emptiness humans feel, a kind of “hole in our hearts” designed by God to make us yearn for the transcendent, to want and expect an experience of ultimate Goodness, Beauty and Truth. In other words, we want to be at one with our Creating, Redeeming Lord.

We don’t get an answer to this fundamental question from Ecclesiastes. Even the psalmist is at a loss for words. What comes to us when our breath stops, when our days pass and we don’t even make a shadow anymore?

The answer today comes from Jesus Christ, in the shortest of the three Synoptic Gospels telling the story of Jesus’s revelation to the disciples of His Messiahship. Remember, Matthew is concerned to tell about Peter’s confession and Jesus setting Peter up as the prime leader of the apostolic band. But it’s also like Christ is adding: “Peter, don’t get in the way of God’s plan for me as Messiah. Do that and you are an obstacle, not a friend.” Mark is just giving us a condensed version of the confession, as well as a prediction of Christ’s rejection by the Jews. But Luke, who is very concerned that the sacrifice of Christ be understood by his Gentile readers, has nothing to say about Peter here. He’s focused, laser-focused, on that sacrifice leading beyond this life to the Resurrection of Christ and His reunion with God the Father.

Ultimately, for all humans, the resurrection from the dead and the union with the Trinity forever is the last answer to the question from Ecclesiastes: what’s the reason for all this? The reason is summed up in the phrase “Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior.”