Confronting Qohelet's Shrug

Wisdom Requires Accepting Responsibility

Ecclesiastes is dominated by the voice of Qohelet, a character whose Hebrew nickname is often translated “Teacher” or “Preacher.” Famous for declaring that everything is “meaningless” or “vanity” or “enigmatic” or “ungraspable” or “a fleeting mist” (the Hebrew word is notoriously tricky to translate), he also offers several searing reflections on injustice. Check out this one:

Again I saw all the oppressions that are practiced under the sun. 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. (Ecclesiastes 4:1)

Solomon writing Proverbs by Gustave Doré

Qohelet’s observation is devastating. Sometimes, the oppressed lack both:

• sufficient power to confront their oppressors, and

• “comforters” who stand in solidarity with them.

Scripture suggests we need wisdom if we are going to practice the justice to which God has called us. At first glance, Qohelet seems to provide us with a model. He sees past the propaganda and discerns something sick in the political system in which he lived. Surely this is just wisdom!

Or is it?

One of the things that makes Ecclesiastes so complicated is that it includes both a narrator—the voice that introduces Qohelet in the beginning of the book and provides a closing reflection at the end—and Qohelet himself. As my friend

Craig Bartholomew

argues so well in his commentary on Ecclesiastes, one implication of this structure is that readers are led to trust the narrator, but invited to be more suspicious about Qohelet. He is a character in the story who seeks wisdom in the midst of an existential crisis. His words are confusing and contradictory. At any point in the book we have to ask: Qohelet says this is what wisdom looks like . . . but is it? Sometimes the answer seems to be yes. Other times it’s almost certainly “no” (remember: Qohelet claims that he was “guided by wisdom” when he “tested” drunkenness, folly, and a whole heckuva lot of questionable sex; see Ecclesiastes 2).

Questioning Qohelet on Injustice

Disciples gain wisdom in part by wrestling with and alongside Qohelet in his difficult journey. So are Qohelet’s reflections on the “oppressed with no one to comfort them” rooted in just wisdom? Lately, I’ve been thinking the answer is “No.” Just look at what he says next:

And I thought the dead, who have already died, more fortunate than the living, who are still alive; but better than both is the one who has not yet been, and has not seen the evil deeds that are done under the sun.

My hunch is that Qohelet’s reflections on injustice turn to folly right at this point. He goes from reflecting on the “oppressed” who lack a “comforter” to painful self-reflections on the meaninglessness of life. But surely just wisdom would have led in another, outward direction:

Qohelet, why not become a “comforter”?

Or take Ecclesiastes 5:8-9

If you see the poor oppressed in a district, and justice and rights denied, do not be surprised at such things; for one official is eyed by a higher one, and over them both are others higher still. The increase from the land is taken by all; the king himself profits from the fields.** (Ecclesiastes 5:8-9)

Again, Qohelet’s initial diagnosis is spot on; our political communities and economies can become so plagued by injustice that nearly everyone is implicated.

And yet what right does Qohelet have to speak in this detached, almost-ironic way? “Don’t be surprised,” he muses. “The problems run straight to the top.” Yet, according to Qohelet himself, he was “king” in Jerusalem (Ecclesiastes 1:12). He introduces himself as a powerful ruler in the introduction, but now when he gets around to reflecting on injustice in the system, he adopts the stance of a critical, disengaged, outside spectator. You can’t say, “Well, you know, kings be kinging” if you’re a king yourself.

Even if Qohelet isn’t a ruler anymore,* he certainly doesn’t seem like a powerless outsider. While his reflections on injustice start out with a bang, they end with a shrug: “what do you want me to do about it?”

But of course, that shrug is part of what makes Ecclesiastes so relatable. We live in an age filled with oppression and injustice. We’ve been trained to call it out. But identifying and calling out oppression doesn’t always lead to action. Sometimes it just leads to a shrug . . . at least for me, anyway.

As I reflected on Ecclesiastes this week, I found myself haunted by how much I relate to Qohelet. When I look back at my evangelical upbringing, I’m amazed that one of the most powerful and united voting blocks in the country (white evangelicals), so often shrugged about politics. We talked about how (at least relatively) unimportant political engagement was, or justified disengagement by reflecting on how political action probably wouldn’t make a difference, anyway.

The church that raised me taught me to care about poverty. But I’ve since encountered Christians who use Jesus’ words that the “poor will always be with you” to create a wall of apathy that protects them from costly action on behalf of those who suffer. This false wisdom funds an enormous “shrug” in regards to caring for the poor in the way we “work, earn, spend, save, and give.”

I turn 40 this year, and have spent my adult life involved in Christian community development initiatives of one kind or another. You may think that makes me a “social justice warrior,” but if so, I find Qohelet’s “shrug” convicting here as well. It makes me reflect on how often observing injustice has led to me to nothing more than what

Michael Wear

refers to as “political hobbyism.” Drawing on the political scientist Eitan Hersh, he argues we political hobbyists spend enormous time reading online articles and signing petitions, but far less time getting involved in the actual work of dialoguing with our neighbors or mobilizing for political action around an issue.

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve been to a few protests and resident’s association meetings. I’ve gone to City Hall a time or two, and know how to call my elected representatives. But I’ve spent a lot more time on Twitter. Even if some of that’s been valuable in some way, more than I care to admit probably falls into the “hobbyist” category. Unfortunately, Wear argues political hobbyism is making our politics worse. Ouch.

More disturbing still, I wonder if many of us from the justice generation find ourselves wrestling with a nagging tendency toward apathy as we get older. Our “change the world” aspirations set the bar pretty high, after all, and settling into a “long obedience in the same direction” doesn’t seem nearly as sexy. I wonder if we increasingly talk a big game while quietly retreating from loving service towards our neighbors. I wonder if we, like the Ephesians in Revelation, have turned back from “the works we did at first” (Revelation 2:5). Perhaps like Qohelet, we pride ourselves on seeing the injustice “those Christians” can’t see . . . while quietly embracing the privilege of living no differently in response?

I honestly don’t know. But these are questions Ecclesiastes won’t let me shake. The extent to which Qohelet makes me feel “seen” is disconcerting.

Proverbs Talks Back to Qohelet . . . and to Us

Maybe we should allow Proverbs 24:10-12 to confront the shrug.

If you faint in the day of adversity,

your strength being small;***

if you hold back from rescuing those taken away to death,

those who go staggering to the slaughter;

if you say, “Look, we did not know this”—

does not he who weighs the heart perceive it?

Does not he who keeps watch over your soul know it?

I’m haunted by these lines. How often do we find ourselves saying “Look, what do you want me to do about it?” But the sages of Proverbs suggest that, sometimes at least, we downplay what we can do in order to avoid doing what we could do. Protesting that we lack “great strength” becomes an excuse for refusing to use the “small strength” we’ve got. And the sages confront this shrug with a terrifying warning: the Lord knows, the Lord sees, the Lord will judge.

Just Wisdom Means Accepting Our Responsibility

Perhaps Ecclesiastes invites us to wrestle with Qohelet’s half-hearted engagement with injustice so that we can learn an important lesson: just wisdom includes accepting responsibility.

This is a complicated lesson, not least because the modern world is constantly selling us the delusion that we are responsible to act on everything. One reason we keep posting and re-posting is because we’ve bought into the lie that we must engage every issue. In a world where we can see the amount of violence and oppression we do on our screens, the sense that “silence is violence” keeps us constantly shouting.

We struggle to remember, as my friend Kelly Kapic has spent a brilliant book reminding us, You’re Only Human . . . and that’s a good, God-given thing. Nobody is called to act on everything, and one of the paralyzing features of our world is that we’re constantly being bombarded by images and news stories of far more suffering than we can possibly respond to.

In Just Discipleship, I drew on John Goldingay to argue that biblical justice is about the faithful exercise of power in community, particularly on behalf of the vulnerable. That definition means we have to acknowledge that we don’t have limitless power. Our strength may indeed be “small” (Prov 24:10), or at least smaller than we’d like.

But I suspect this is precisely why we need Proverbs and Ecclesiastes to grab us by the shoulders and shake us with this warning about apathy. We are not called to do everything. We are not called to guilt-ridden paralysis in the face of the world’s suffering. But we must not let our reflections about pervasive injustice turn into an ironic shrug that justifies disengagement, because we are called to exercise the “strength” we have in the day of adversity, even if it seems all-too-small to us.

Indeed, both Ecclesiastes and Proverbs suggest that the decision to shrug and say “well, my strength’s too small to do anything about that” may actually be self-serving. Downplaying the power we do have can become a strategy for justifying inaction.

I don’t know what that means for you today. It makes me want to:

• double down on actual, and especially local, political engagement (for instance, our resident’s association here is currently advocating for speed bumps after a number of accidents and a traffic death, and I probably owe my representatives back home a call).

• listen to Christians practicing wise engagement in the political realm, and finding ways to support their advocacy efforts.

• reflect with Rebecca on how we could take another step in giving generously to Christians on the front line of just causes that we are distant from

• discerning where we can take another step in trying to practice justice in our own neighborhood.

• pray that the Spirit would uncover sinful apathy in our hearts and open our eyes to opportunities to be “comforters” in a world filled with suffering

What about you? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments. And if you found this helpful, please consider sharing with others.

Looking Ahead…

Of course, the reality is that Christians often disagree passionately about what’s actually going on in our world, and what biblical justice requires in our public lives. Next week, I plan to reflect on how Proverbs might help us grow in our ability to discern together what God might be calling us to. See you then.

Extras:

• Just Discipleship includes a whole chapter on Just Wisdom in Proverbs. If you’re interested in reading further, the Kindle version is 75% off right now on Amazon.

*The question of Qohelet’s identity and its relationship to Solomon is somewhat complicated. For my purposes, I think it’s clear that Qohelet remains a relatively powerful person with agency enough to actually do something about the injustices he describes.

**This last phrase is really difficult to translate. It may mean something like “but this all works for the best in the end.” If so, the apathetic shrug remains clearly, and problematically, on display.

***This phrase can be translated differently. The NIV has “how small is your strength!” On that translation, it remains an indictment, but from a slightly different angle. Your strength should be stronger in the face of horrific injustice.