Like Vapor: The Medicine of Ecclesiastes

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In 2002, The Flaming Lips released the song “Do You Realize??”, a catchy yet heavy track with lyrics such as: 

Do you realize

That happiness makes you cry?

Do you realize

That everyone you know someday will die?

Listening to the song recently, I could hear in it an inherent frustration with the human situation. Good things don't always last, and this causes us to mourn. We want the good things and situations to always stay golden and thriving, yet all our trees will one day wilt under the weight of our mortality. We can’t escape this, and we truly know deep down (no matter how much we want to ignore it) everyone we love someday will die. This is a bleak confession.

In that moment I was reminded of Ecclesiastes. Like “Do You Realize??”, Ecclesiastes is like a strange friend that gives us a bitter medicine. This medicine is probably needed. I realize increasingly how much time I waste on things that don’t matter: anxiety about tomorrow, fixating on a past I cannot change, scrolling away my life instead of being in the present. The Teacher who wrote the book had a word for these distractions: “vapor.” These things vanish like smoke through our open hands.

Ecclesiastes is a summary of the human condition. All indeed is vapor; it is fleeting. Our time is short and most of us will not be remembered a few generations after we are gone. Ecclesiastes is a book about exterior distractions being stripped away, getting raw and real about our mortality, the problem of evil, and the human future. This is why his writing can ultimately be cathartic, but still unsatisfying. We want an answer; we don’t want everything to be meaningless.

I think the answer to the riddle is in the crucified God.

I don’t think that the writer of Ecclesiastes really understood that this was the ultimate trajectory of God’s work in the world: that the act of the suffering Christ would redeem the vapors of our wasted pasts, catching them and transfiguring them into gold strings in order to weave a new world. Divine suffering on the cross reveals that God suffers the most over the human situation. Meaninglessness and futility are not His intent. The resurrection of Christ gives us this hope that God will make all things new. Our sighs will turn to laughter; our tears will water the tree of life that will not wilt.

The Teacher only saw in part; his eyes could only see the vapors. Yet Jesus is the fulfillment of what was missing in his vision of human beings. In his words, he "observed all that is done under the sun" regarding human society, yet he still could not perceive the mind of God—what He intends for all our vain toil, striving, and building. The Teacher could not perceive the drama of redemption and its eventuality. This is perhaps why he says in Ecclesiastes 2:24 that although toil is vanity, it is a blessing to try to find joy in it. He does not offer a reason why it matters; to the Teacher, it is just the way of things. Yet I believe Christ is the reason why toiling and living righteously does matter: a new world is coming. Living in the Spirit is living in this new world now; it is a taste of things to come.

Yet we also need the medicine and catharsis of the Teacher’s stark and frank view of the human condition, free from the sentimental and pain-free gloss of American culture and evangelical frailty.

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