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What’s the Point?

Matt Stallabrass gives some personal reflections on Ecclesiastes 3: 1–9 and Revelation 21: 1–4

There is a time for everything and a season for every activity under heaven: a time to be born and a time to die … a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance … What does the worker gain from his toil?

Ecclesiastes 3: 1, 4, 9

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea … I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying “Now the dwelling of God is with men, and He will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”

Revelation 21: 1–4

Barely three months ago I had to read these verses at my father’s funeral and you can no doubt work out what was going through my head, however these two passages seem to sum up for me not only all that I was feeling that day but also a lot about the Christian faith itself. The passage from Ecclesiastes is, for me, the best that human wisdom has to offer, a series of unsatisfying answers to crucial questions. It is a passage which puts everything down to chance and impersonal factors saying that “there is a time for … ” yet the writer himself realises that this explanation does not satisfy, ending with that simple yet devastating question “What does the worker gain from his toil?” Is man’s brief appearance on the stage of history meaningless and his deeds ultimately worthless or is there something else, something to give us hope?

The passage from Revelation is the response to this, a reaction to man’s questioning in the most glorious way. It gives man the hope that he so desperately seeks, an answer to his question with a promise not only of another life but a better life, one where the impersonal factors and the blind eye of chance can no longer cause such suffering and grief. Yet the greatest promise is that God himself will live among us, it is God himself who will wipe every tear from our eyes.

As I read these passages I knew that no words would, at that moment, wipe the tear from my eye yet I also knew that in these passages was the reason why these tears would go, an assurance that death was only a temporary separation

Matt Stallabrass

Last modified: 25th November 2005