It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, because that is the end of every man, and the living takes it to heart.
– Ecclesiastes 7:2
What would you think if I asked if you would rather go to a birthday party or to a funeral? Some people would consider the answer to be obvious. Who would prefer to go to a sad occasion rather than a happy one? Given the choice, we intentionally build our lives around happiness. We plan vacations to places where we anticipate fun and relaxation. It would appear to us very strange to do otherwise. To people who naturally gravitate toward happiness and away from grief, the wisdom writer’s words here seem very odd.
In the first six verses of Ecclesiastes 7, the writer offers thoughts on how mourning is more profitable to us than celebration. This doesn’t mean our wisdom writer rejects any form of happiness in life. Any reading of Ecclesiastes will show that is not the case. It is all about perspective, and the perspective he offers on this topic points us once again toward our Creator.
To begin, the writer reminds us that times of grief will come to us all. We may not like it, and no one typically wishes for it. In fact, we may subconsciously put great effort into avoiding grief to the greatest possible extent. Grief may be like the proverbial “elephant in the room” of our life. If we can work around it and pretend it isn’t there, that becomes our chosen strategy. Sooner or later, though, it becomes unavoidable. Times of mourning await every person. This is “the end of every man.”
There is more to this than a superficial reality. It is not enough to just say, “bad stuff happens and grief will come our way, so you might as well just accept it and move on.” The wisdom writer is not a pessimist; he is searching for meaning. Ecclesiastes asks the question, “is there meaning that comes from times of grief?” The answer is, “yes.” We can point ourselves in the direction of this meaning by asking another question: between celebration and mourning, which is more likely to drive us to consider eternal matters? Our experience tells us that mourning does this much more powerfully than celebration. Go to a birthday party (or whatever equivalent you might prefer) and you can easily come away with no reference to God or things of eternity. But what are the chances of that happening when you’ve been to a funeral? Do you see the difference? Ecclesiastes does not tell us that grief and mourning are more fun that feasting and celebration. It tells us that grief and mourning have a much greater capacity to drive us toward the only One who can make our lives worthwhile.
An illustration from scripture can be found in Luke 15, where we find a parable about a son who has left his father’s house to pursue his own life of personal fulfillment. In the parable, the son’s newly found freedom was marked with what some would call the good life, full of celebrations and fair-weather friends. Picture a scene from this stage of his life, with friends, laughter, and every kind of carefree merriment. Can you hear the laughter? That laughter is what the wisdom writer calls the sound of crackling thorns in Ecclesiastes 7:6. It is the sound of the fire that is about to consume you, to which you are completely oblivious. When in the parable did the son recover a meaningful life? It wasn’t in his days of merriment; it was in his days of mourning. It was then that the son turned his attention back to the father.
Chapter seven of Ecclesiastes begins with a pair of ideas that would appear unrelated, but in reality help us tie this all together. “A good name is better than a good ointment, and the day of one’s death is better than the day of one’s birth.” Why would the day of death be better than the day of birth? Because one is a day when we enter this temporal life that can be filled with meaninglessness, and the other is a day when we will stand before our Creator. The only things that matter are things that can stand in the presence of God. This is why a good name is better than any of the world’s precious goods. The prophet Ezekiel mentions three Old Testament characters who may be our best examples of godly living: Noah, Daniel and Job (see Ezekiel 14:14). Their good name was of far greater worth than anything they could possess in the world. And how did that good name come about for them? The answer is simple: fear of the Lord.
Just a little heads up: this is precisely where the writer is headed with Ecclesiastes.
See you along the Winding Path.
The Winding Path 