Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

Sometimes, the book of Ecclesiastes is tough. “I saw under the sun,” reads our Office Reading from Ecclesiastes, “that in the place of justice, wickedness was there, and in the place of righteousness, wickedness was there as well…. Look, the tears of the oppressed-- with no one to comfort them! On the side of their oppressors there was power-- with no one to comfort them.” If you’re looking for comfort in time of need, there’s little to be found in Ecclesiastes. Unlike Proverbs, which sees the good life as one that is wisely lived in accordance with the law of God (which is true); unlike Job which sees the good life as one which is impossible to live outside of the recognition that God is supremely and unfathomably sovereign and therefore unbeholden to us to provide us anything we might think of as good, the only thing worth calling “good” being submission to the terrible majesty of God (which is also true); unlike both Proverbs and Job, Ecclesiastes sees the good life as nothing but a matter of smoke and mirrors. According to the Preacher, life generally, good or bad, is hevel: vanity, or more accurately, smoke. All we are is smoke. The difference between justice and oppression is a matter of vain chance. And however completely unlike oppressor and oppressed may be, there’s no comfort to be found for either, and all is still smoke. A good life is just a matter of which way the wind happens to be blowing the vain and insubstantial smoke of our lives. And that is also, uncomfortably, true.

How are we to deal with these three apparently competing truths? I think the trick here is: they’re not in competition. They’re each speaking truth to a facet of the human experience. We have a deep and abiding need to recognize our utter dependence on the incomprehensibly sovereign will of God; to follow God’s law is indeed blessing and goodness and wisdom; and we fallen folks, alive in a fallen world, are caught in a tempest by which we are tossed to and fro, lifted up and laid low according to no logic at all but the logic of smoke.

Our reading from Galatians, however, provides an additional facet worth considering. The reality of the law by which we’re supposed to live a life of blessing is not a merely forensic or external reality. It’s meant to actually change our hearts—and the thing toward which the law is meant to change our hearts is relationship. Paul asks the Galatians and us in our Office Epistle, “Did you receive the Spirit by doing the works of the law or by believing what you heard [regarding Jesus Christ]?” And believing what we heard regarding Jesus Christ means being in relationship with a majestically sovereign God who freely chose to come among us...and to identify as an outsider, as one rejected, oppressed, a criminal, and a curse in the eyes of world and in the eyes of power. Which means that whatever we might call a good life henceforward, it cannot look like a life of smoke and mirrors, it cannot look like a life tossed about by every wind of this world, it cannot look like a life defined by the world’s fickle changeableness; it cannot look like a life of sin, nor complicity with sin and worldly structures of sinfulness by which so many appear to rise in this world (even as they truly fall) and by which so many others are devastated. Instead, the good life will look like a life rooted in love, a life rooted in identifying with the oppressed, with the outcast, the rejected, the criminal, and all that the world in its vanity considers a curse. And even though such a life may be hard or even lead to calamity and/or penury, it is still the only life worth living, the only life of substance, the only life lived according to the law of love, which is grace—unearned and unearnable—living and alive in us. This sort of life is the only life rooted in and ruled by the majestic sovereignty of God who is love and whose glory is love. It is, in fact, the only sort of life from which, by grace, miracles are made, the hungry fed, the wounded healed, the world changed.

Beloved Friend! A miraculous life, a life of wonder, a life of goodness, is a life lived in solidarity with the oppressed with whom our God, in Jesus Christ, chose to identify so completely that he went to the cross for us to undo every oppression and every curse from the inside of the human experience…so that our lives would no longer be ruled by shadows and smoke—by sin and death, by such things as injustice and racism—but by the sure, firm and abiding reality of Love. What is stopping us today, dear Friend, from receiving this new and awe-full and glorious and wonderful life—by grace, through faith—from the wounded hands of Heaven’s High Sovereign, the One who truly loves us and who desires us to truly live his own life of Love?

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+