27 June 2020 — Sabiduría y necedad desvariada
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Everything about the wasp, except why.” Thus says the narrator in “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” by the poet Dylan Thomas, as he laments the “Useful Presents” that he received for Christmas when he was a small boy. In addition to all of the scarves and hats and mittens and galoshes he needed to survive the cold winter, he was often given the kind of educational books that taught him, he said, “everything about the wasp, except why.”
Apparently the boy had an inquiring mind. He loved to ask, “Why?” Most children are equally inquisitive—not just about insects but about everything. Why do you do what you do? Why don’t you do it another way? Why is the universe this way rather than that way? Why? Why? Why?
Eventually most people stop asking so many questions. We get enough answers that we can live with, or else we learn to be content without knowing all the answers. But some people never lose their intellectual curiosity. They never stop asking, “Why?”—especially when it comes to the big questions about God, the universe, and the meaning of human existence. They want to know the “why” about everything, including (but not limited to) the wasp.
Qoheleth’s Quest
The man who wrote Ecclesiastes had this insatiable curiosity about life. He called himself Qoheleth cojélet (Ecclesiastes 1:1, 12), which means “the Assembler,” because his calling in life was to gather God’s people for spiritual instruction. Today we would call him “the Preacher,” or maybe, since he also identifies himself as the king of Jerusalem, we would call him the Preacher-King. Although he never comes right out and mentions his name, from the way he describes his wealth and his wisdom, Qoheleth seems to identify himself with King Solomon.
Whether he was Solomon himself or Solomon’s ghostwriter, Qoheleth loved to ask, “Why?” In order to make sense of his world, he went on a long and difficult quest to find meaning in life. When he failed to find the answers he was looking for, he did not give up but kept looking even harder.
At first the Preacher thought that the pursuit of wisdom would give him all the answers (Ecclesiastes 1:12–15), but there were so many things in life that he couldn’t straighten out or that didn’t add up that his quest soon ended in failure. Information failed to bring transformation. So Qoheleth turned to morality. Perhaps knowing the difference between right and wrong would give him a sense of purpose (Ecclesiastes 1:16–18). Yet this only added to his sorrow and vexation.
Next the Preacher-King pursued pleasure (Ecclesiastes 2:1–11). If wisdom ended in sorrow, maybe self-indulgence would lead to happiness. So he built magnificent buildings and created beautiful gardens. He savored the luxuries of wine, women, and song vino, mujeres y canción. Never abstaining from pleasure or restraining his appetites, Solomon grabbed for all the gusto he could get. Yet even the greatest pleasures in life failed to satisfy his soul. If he said it once, he said it a thousand times: it was all vanity and a striving after wind. There was nothing to be gained under the sun.
Still, Qoheleth continued his quest. He couldn’t help it. The man wanted to know “Why?” and he refused to give up until he knew he had the answer. So with persistent perseverance Entonces con perseverancia persistente, he kept looking for the meaning of life. Anyone who wants to know the truth about things should follow his example. Do not shy away from the difficult questions. Do not settle for easy explanations that will not hold up to careful scrutiny. Keep searching until you find your way to God.
With the goal of understanding, the Preacher tells us that he
Después volví yo a mirar para ver la sabiduría y los desvaríos y la necedad; porque ¿qué podrá hacer el hombre que venga después del rey? Nada, sino lo que ya ha sido hecho.
[End with …y la necedad…]
If these words sound familiar, it is because Qoheleth said almost exactly the same thing in Ecclesiastes 1:13, when he applied his heart “to seek and to search out by wisdom,” inquirir y a buscar con sabiduría and again in Ecclesiastes 1:17, when he applied his heart “to know wisdom and to know madness and folly.” dediqué mi corazón a conocer la sabiduría, y también a entender las locuras y los desvaríos The seeker has returned to look again at something he has considered before.
This is what people often do when they are looking for something that is missing. First they look in the most logical place to find it. When that fails, they start to look elsewhere. But if they still can’t find what they are looking for, they say to themselves, “Maybe I missed something. I should probably go back where I started and look more carefully.”
I witnessed this common phenomenon the night before my wedding. Some of my friends (so-called) kidnapped me, blindfolded me, tied me up, and threw me in the trunk of a car. To their dismay and my delight, I managed to wriggle out of the ropes, so that when they opened the trunk, I leaped out of the car and ran away. While they scoured the neighborhood, I carefully worked my way back to a hiding place where I could keep an eye on the car. About fifteen minutes later, two of them came back to the car and opened the trunk to make sure that I wasn’t there. Apparently they had trouble believing that I was really gone because they did the same thing fifteen minutes after that!
This is the way we operate. When something is missing, we go back to the place where it ought to be, even if we have looked there before. So Qoheleth cojélet returned “to consider wisdom and madness and folly.” volví yo a mirar para ver la sabiduría y los desvaríos y la necedad
“Madness” and “folly” los desvaríos y la necedad go together. The Preacher is not describing three different categories but only two. On the one hand there is “wisdom,” which is used here in its most general sense to refer to human thinking at its very best. Wisdom in this sense is not the deep spiritual understanding that begins and ends with the fear of the Lord, but simply good, moral, practical advice for daily life that comes from people like Benjamin Franklin, Emily Post, Oprah Winfrey, and Dr. Phil.
On the other hand, there is “madness and folly,” los desvaríos y la necedad or maybe it would be better to say “mad folly” necedad desvariada because these terms belong together. Here Ecclesiastes uses a figure of speech called hendiadys endíadis, in which two words are joined by the word “and” to express a single idea. For example, when Shakespeare’s Macbeth says that life is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,” una historia contada por un idiota, llena de sonido y furia, he is not making a careful distinction between sound and fury but is putting them together to describe the furious sound that comes from someone who cannot speak but only roars and groans. rugidos y gemidos
What the Preacher is telling us, therefore, is that after pursuing pleasure, he reconsidered the claims of wisdom and mad folly necedad desvariada. He wanted to compare the two, studying the difference between the right way and the wrong way to live, and then see if that would help him understand the purpose of life.
His reason for reconsidering is to make sure that life has been considered from every conceivable angle. todos los ángulos posibles The Preacher wanted to write the last word about the meaning of life. Thus he desired to make his quest as comprehensive as possible, a desire that comes through in what he says next:
Después volví yo a mirar para ver la sabiduría y los desvaríos y la necedad; porque ¿qué podrá hacer el hombre que venga después del rey? Nada, sino lo que ya ha sido hecho.
[start with …porque ¿qué…]
Admittedly, this is a difficult verse. As it stands in most English translations, it seems to be another way of saying that there is “nothing new under the sun” y nada hay nuevo debajo del sol. —a common theme in Ecclesiastes (e.g., 1:9). On this reading, the verse means that even when a new king follows the old king, he will not do anything that is really new. Others are not so sure of this meaning, however, or even that the verse has a meaning at all. One well-known commentator claims that the verse “makes no sense as it stands.”
But I believe that the verse does make sense and that it helps us understand the purpose of Ecclesiastes. Michael Eaton offers the following literal translation: “And I turned to consider wisdom and madness and folly, for what kind of person is it who will come after the king, in the matter of what has already been done?” When he speaks of “the matter of what has already been done,” "Y me volví para considerar la sabiduría, los desvaríos y la necedad, porque ¿qué tipo de persona es la que vendrá después del rey, en relación con lo que ya se ha hecho?" Cuando habla de "la cuestión de lo que ya se ha hecho" Qoheleth cojélet seems to be referring to his present struggle to understand the meaning of life. When he speaks of the person “who will come after the king,” venga después del rey he is looking ahead to the future and is wondering who else will have the same questions that he has about human existence. With those people in mind, he wants to write a definitive statement about wisdom and mad folly necedad desvariada. As the wisest and wealthiest king, he is in a unique position to do this. Who could ever add anything to the experience of someone like Solomon? He is the ultimate test case. If he cannot find the meaning of life, who can? What hope is there for anyone to answer these questions? But if the Preacher-King is able to understand the purpose of our existence, then what he says about the meaning of life will stand.
A Brief Glimmer of Hope
As he compares wisdom to mad folly necedad desvariada, Qoheleth cojélet offers us a brief glimmer of hope breve destello de esperanza. After announcing the goal of his quest, he proceeds to tell us what he discovered:
Y he visto que la sabiduría sobrepasa a la necedad, como la luz a las tinieblas.
Until now, everything has been vanity and striving after wind. But here, as the Preacher-King praises the relative value of wisdom, we see some progression in his thought. Perhaps it is true that wisdom is unable to straighten out what is crooked enderezar lo torcido or to count what is missing. It may well be the case that having more wisdom increases vexation and sorrow. But all other things being equal, having wisdom is still better than the alternative. Earlier Qoheleth said there is nothing to be gained in life, but here he admits that wisdom is at least somewhat advantageous. Though limited, its value is legitimate, for it is better to be a wise person than a mad fool! es mejor ser una persona sabia que un necio desvariado.
Qoheleth expresses the contrast between wisdom sabiduría and folly necedad in terms of light and darkness luz y tinieblas. It is better to be in the light than to be in the dark, as everyone knows. We notice this when the lights are out. Even if we think we know where everything is, we often end up tripping over things that turn out to be in our way. In the same way, foolish people go stumbling through life.
Then the Preacher extends his comparison by saying,
El sabio tiene sus ojos en su cabeza, mas el necio anda en tinieblas; pero también entendí yo que un mismo suceso acontecerá al uno como al otro.
[End with …anda en tinieblas…]
“The wise person has his eyes in his head, but the fool walks in darkness” (Ecclesiastes 2:14). The value of wisdom is not simply that it gives light, but that it enables us to see. It gives vision, not just illumination. To say that the wise person has “eyes in his head” means that he can actually see what he is doing and where he is going. He has a useful perception of life. By contrast, the fool does not have eyes at all but walks in darkness. This darkness is not just around him but inside him because he has no eyes with which to see.
I witness the difference between light and darkness whenever I spend time with the blind when I worked at a blind camp, whose blindness often puts him at a relative disadvantage. He is able to live and work and play to the glory of God. But his blindness makes it impossible for him to see the beauty of nature (even though he can hear it, taste it, and touch it). Light is better than darkness.
The Bible often makes this contrast. Sometimes it uses light and darkness to show the absolute difference between knowing God and living without him or between living in holiness and stumbling through life in the darkness of sin (e.g., John 3:19; Ephesians 5:8; 1 Peter 2:9). Here the Bible simply says that the difference between wisdom and folly sabiduría y necedad is like light and darkness luz y tinieblas. According to the paraphrase by T. M. Moore, “I saw that wisdom was more valuable by far than folly. It makes more sense to pursue the course of wisdom than to waste one’s life in revelry and merriment. This was as clear as night and day to me.” “Vi que la sabiduría era mucho más valiosa que la necedad. Tiene más sentido seguir el curso de la sabiduría que desperdiciar la vida en juerga y alegría. Esto fue tan claro como la noche y el día para mí ".
The Great Equalizer
To this point the Preacher has given us the conventional wisdom about wisdom—that it is better to be wise than to be a mad fool necio desvariado. We find the same perspective in many of Solomon’s proverbs.
Los proverbios de Salomón.
El hijo sabio alegra al padre,
Pero el hijo necio es tristeza de su madre.
Again he says,
El sabio de corazón recibirá los mandamientos;
Mas el necio de labios caerá.
So far so good; but then the Solomon of Ecclesiastes has a troubling thought. This is typical of him. Never content simply to accept the conventional wisdom, he always wants to press an issue.
Here the Preacher explores wisdom and folly to the absolute value, pushing them all the way to the edge of life:
El sabio tiene sus ojos en su cabeza, mas el necio anda en tinieblas; pero también entendí yo que un mismo suceso acontecerá al uno como al otro.
[Start with …pero también …]
To translate this verse as it appears in the New International Version, “the same fate overtakes them both.” un mismo final les espera a todos.
This verse may simply mean that the wise and the foolish necio experience the same ups and downs in life. In that case the word “fate” is not being used fatalistically but refers generally to anything and everything that happens in life. Whether we live by wisdom or by mad folly necedad desvariada, we will get caught up in many of the same events, including the same calamities and catastrophes. As Jesus says,
para que seáis hijos de vuestro Padre que está en los cielos, que hace salir su sol sobre malos y buenos, y que hace llover sobre justos e injustos.
[Start with …que hace salir…]
It does not matter how smart we are, many things in life are beyond our control. Thus many of the same incidents will happen to us that happen to everybody, both for good and for ill.
Yet when he talks about “the same event,” mismo suceso or “the … fate” mismo final that overtakes us all, the Preacher seems to have something more specific in mind. He is talking about the one thing that happens to everyone—death. This becomes perfectly clear in verse 16, where he says that “the wise dies just like the fool!” morirá el sabio como el necio But already in verse 14 he is talking about the fate mismo final that awaits us all. As we go through life, it is better to be wise than foolish. But what will happen to us in the end? We will all die anyway. So what really is the use of being wise? Once we are dead, our wisdom will not do us any good. Whatever advantage we gain from wisdom is strictly temporary estrictamente temporal. Whether we are wise or foolish, either way we will soon be dead, and who will remember us then? Death is the great equalizer. La muerte es el gran ecualizador.
Many years ago, Dr. Haddon Robinson preach from Ecclesiastes, he recounted what it was like for him to stand at the graveside of a man who had a working knowledge of thirty-four languages. Most people know only one or two languages, at the most, but here was a man who understood nearly three dozen. Yet in the end it didn’t matter how smart he was—he was still as dead as could be.
Pues verá que aun los sabios mueren;
Que perecen del mismo modo que el insensato y el necio,
Y dejan a otros sus riquezas.
Death is no respecter of persons la muerte no ace acepción de personas. This tragic absurdity frustrates all of our efforts to find meaning in life. We go through life desperately trying to deny the reality of our mortality; yet we are haunted by death just the same. Gregg Easterbrook writes about this in The Progress Paradox. First Easterbrook demonstrates that even though the lives of average Americans are constantly improving in material terms, we never get any happier. Then he tries to figure out why people are feeling worse at the very time that life supposedly is getting better.
Easterbrook has a variety of answers to this question, many of them based on sociological research. But at a certain point he wonders whether perhaps the problem might have something to do with death. Maybe “people grow steadily better off,” he says, “yet seemingly no happier, because there is a baseline anxiety in all our hearts, and that anxiety is the fear of death.” For a brief moment Easterbrook opens a window to the human soul. If only he had the answer for our anxiety!
It is one thing to believe that all men are mortal, accepting the reality of death in intellectual terms, but it is something entirely different to recognize that we ourselves must die. This is something every soldier confronts in wartime. Many soldiers go into their first battle with the naive expectation that although other men will die, somehow they will manage to survive. But when they see their first comrade fall in battle, they think, “That could have been me” and are compelled to confront their own mortality. enfrentar su propia mortalidad
When the Preacher confronted his mortality, he talked to himself in the privacy of his innermost soul.
Entonces dije yo en mi corazón: Como sucederá al necio, me sucederá también a mí. ¿Para qué, pues, he trabajado hasta ahora por hacerme más sabio? Y dije en mi corazón, que también esto era vanidad.
Sooner or later everyone comes to the same shocking realization: One day I am going to die; my heart will beat one last time, my lungs will exhale one final breath, and that will be the end of my days on this earth.
This painful reality makes the wise man wonder how wise it really is to pursue wisdom. In view of his impending demise, figuring out the meaning of life now seems like a lot of wasted effort. Jean-Paul Sartre would have agreed, for the famous existentialist existencialista has been quoted as saying, “Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.” La vida no tiene sentido en el momento en que atraviesa la ilusión de ser eterno
There is a further problem with death, and again it is a problem that afflicts the wise every bit as much as the foolish: death has the power to erase the very memory of our existence. Sometimes people try to overcome this problem by earthly achievement, but death still wins out in the end. The filmmaker Woody Allen acknowledged this when he said, “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying.” "No quiero lograr la inmortalidad a través de mi trabajo. Quiero lograrlo no muriendo ". Yet the reality is that we all must die. And who will remember us when we are gone?
In the introduction to his book, Qoheleth said, “There is no remembrance of former things” No hay memoria de lo que precedió (Ecclesiastes 1:11). Here he says,
Porque ni del sabio ni del necio habrá memoria para siempre; pues en los días venideros ya todo será olvidado, y también morirá el sabio como el necio.
Earlier, in one of his many famous proverbs, Solomon said that
La memoria del justo será bendita;
Mas el nombre de los impíos se pudrirá.
[end with …será bendita…]
but now he is not so sure. Will anyone remember us after all?
Apparently not. Alexander the Great learned this lesson in a dramatic way from his friend Diogenes Diógenes, a famous philosopher. Alexander found Diogenes standing alone in a field, looking intently at a large pile of bones. When Alexander asked what he was doing, Diogenes gave this reply: “I am searching for the bones of your father Philip, but I cannot seem to distinguish them from the bones of the slaves.” "Estoy buscando los huesos de tu padre Philip, pero parece que no puedo distinguirlos de los huesos de los esclavos".
Whether we are rich or poor, death will bring an end to every advantage we have in life. So Qoheleth’s quest busqueda de Cojélet has failed again. A fresh investigation has come up with the same old findings. Human wisdom cannot overcome death, and therefore it cannot solve the problem of meaning in life. Death brings everything to a halt. “If one fate comes to all,” writes Derek Kidner, “and that fate is extinction, it robs every man of his dignity and every project of its point.” "Si un destino llega a todos", escribe Derek Kidner, "y ese destino es la extinción, le roba a cada hombre su dignidad y cada proyecto de su punto".
Hating Life Itself
By this point in Ecclesiastes, the Preacher’s refrain is all too familiar. The equalizing power of death leads him to conclude—yet once more—that life is only vanity, like the steam that rises from a boiling kettle and then disappears. But this time his attitude seems much more negative. The repeated failure of his ongoing quest is in danger of embittering his heart:
Aborrecí, por tanto, la vida, porque la obra que se hace debajo del sol me era fastidiosa; por cuanto todo es vanidad y aflicción de espíritu.
It is one thing to be disappointed with life and all its frustrations Una cosa es estar decepcionado con la vida y todas sus frustraciones., but hating life is another thing entirely. The Solomon of Ecclesiastes seems to be spiraling down into absolute despair. It is not just his life that he hates but life in general—the whole enterprise of human existence. So he has reached what one scholar calls “a nadir of anger and despair.” un nadir de ira y desesperación
What his experience shows, maybe more clearly than anything else in the Bible, is the reality of life without God. Remember that we are still looking at things from a merely human perspective, based on the worldly wisdom of people living “under the sun.” From that perspective, life is so pointless that eventually it leads to despair. la vida es tan inútil que eventualmente conduce a la desesperación.
Many thinkers have reached the same conclusion. Like Qoheleth, the philosopher Voltaire, when writing to a close friend, said, “I hate life, and yet I am afraid to die.” Odio la vida y, sin embargo, tengo miedo de morir. The young C. S. Lewis, in the days when he was still an atheist, said, “Come let us curse our Master ere we die, / For all our hopes in endless ruin lie. / The good is dead. Let us curse God most High.” Venga, maldigamos a nuestro Maestro antes de morir, / Por todas nuestras esperanzas en una ruina interminable. / Lo bueno está muerto. Maldecimos a Dios Altísimo. Or consider these words from Francois Mauriac, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1952: “You can’t imagine the torment of having had nothing out of life, and of having to look forward to nothing but death, of feeling that there is no other world beyond this one, that the puzzle will never be explained.” No puedes imaginar el tormento de no haber tenido nada de la vida, y de tener que esperar nada más que la muerte, de sentir que no hay otro mundo más allá de este, que el rompecabezas nunca será explicado.
Such is life under the sun. The Preacher hated aborrecía life because of the certainty of death and the absurdity of losing all his wisdom as a result. Maybe you hate life for some other reason—for its physical pain perhaps or its unjust suffering or its broken relationships or its financial hardships or its many other disappointments. But whatever the reason, as long as we look at things from an under-the-sun perspective, there are many things to hate about life.
Wisdom beyond the Grave
The only way out of that hatred is to find wisdom that comes from above the sun and life that comes from beyond the grave. Providentially, and graciously, the Bible shows us where to find that life-giving wisdom when it invites us to
Si, pues, habéis resucitado con Cristo, buscad las cosas de arriba, donde está Cristo sentado a la diestra de Dios.Poned la mira en las cosas de arriba, no en las de la tierra.Porque habéis muerto, y vuestra vida está escondida con Cristo en Dios.Cuando Cristo, vuestra vida, se manifieste, entonces vosotros también seréis manifestados con él en gloria.
These words open up a perspective that can help us love life instead of hating it. Rather than only looking at things “under the sun,” the apostle tells us to lift our gaze higher, to the throne of the universe, where Jesus Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Rather than limiting ourselves to human wisdom, as useful as it is in many ways, we are encouraged to set our minds on heavenly things.
What do we see when we look at life from this lofty vantage point? We see Jesus Christ, who is the perfection of all wisdom, the one
en quien están escondidos todos los tesoros de la sabiduría y del conocimiento.
Jesus Christ is the very wisdom of God. Furthermore, he is the life of God. Jesus Christ is “the true God and eternal life” el verdadero Dios y lavida eterna (1 John 5:20; cf. John 17:3). We see his life in Colossians 3:1, where the Scripture declares that Jesus has been raised to the right hand of God. After Jesus was crucified for our sins, after he was dead and buried, he was raised back from the dead by the power of the Holy Spirit. Then he was exalted to the right hand of God, which is the place of all authority and power over the universe. Jesus Christ is alive from the dead.
Because Jesus is alive, the grave is not the end for anyone who is wise enough to trust in him. The Preacher hated life because he saw that it would bring an end to all his wisdom. But he was only looking at things from an earthly perspective—“under the sun.” debajo del sol For those who set their minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, there is life and wisdom beyond the grave.
This means that who we are will not be forgotten but will be remembered for all eternity. Jesus is our very life, and the Bible promises that when the risen Jesus comes to earth again, we will be with him, alive in glory. The Bible assures us further that our lives are “hidden with Christ in God” vuestra vida está escondida con Cristo en Dios (Colossians 3:3). This verse implies not so much that our lives are concealed but that they are protected. All our memories are safe with God in Christ. The word the apostle uses for “hidden” comes from the Greek root (krupto cripto) that forms the basis for English words like encryption encriptar, which is one helpful way to think about the spiritual implications of this verse: our lives are encrypted with Christ in God. God so preserves us in his Son that nothing essential to who we are will be lost forever. God will remember us even when we can scarcely remember him and when we fear that no one else will remember us at all.
Are you afraid of death? Do you hate life? Do you ever worry that you will be forgotten? Are you discouraged by the vanity of your existence? Do you feel like you have been striving after the wind? Look above the sun to the Son of God. He will raise you up from the dead and will protect your life forever.