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 ⁴ The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning,
       but the heart of fools is in the house of pleasure.

 ⁵ It is better to heed a wise man’s rebuke
       than to listen to the song of fools.

So far in Ecc. 7, we’ve seen 2 things: 1)We need to keep our eyes on Heaven, to be joyous of people’s passage there, and to look forward to it ourselves. 2)Mourning and sorrow are signs of a heart that loves and delights.  Verse 4 builds on that, saying that such are the wise.  Essentially, fools seek out pleasure because they lack love and delight… but they never find it because they won’t themselves feel pain, and only those who can feel pain can feel love.

Then verse 5 takes it even another step, to the point of saying that if someone cannot feel sorrow, then you should not heed their advice.  It’s a nod to the old adage, “It’s better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all.”  Of course now when I hear that saying, I now see Tommy Lee Jones from Men in Black responding sharply with, “Try it.” Ouch.  I guess K doesn’t agree, but then he was pretty bitter… didn’t even seek out pleasure, so I wouldn’t call him a fool, but was he wise?  Maybe a little, but if he was real, I would tell him that he really needs to heed Ecc. 7, and get a new perspective on his losses.  Still though, as a man of sorrow, he was more wise than he was a fool.

 ⁶ Like the crackling of thorns under the pot,
       so is the laughter of fools.
       This too is meaningless.

Sticking with the Men in Black theme, this makes me think of those spineless aliens who spent all their time smoking and drinking coffee.  I mean that’s all they did, and they were certainly fools… if funny ones, and they seemed to be in pleasure all the time, but ultimately it was meaningless, as was obvious in Men in Black 2, when they had to evacuate and their top priority was to remember the coffee pot… and at height of the movie, while everyone else is waiting for the world to end, they’re playing Twister.  Right.  A funny moment to be sure, but how happy were they?  Not as happy as K when he was spying on his love of 20 years via satellite; made him sad, but his heart was content, if for a moment… just to be wrenched back into his sorrow.  But you see, he saw a bigger purpose in his choice, and he’d have made that choice again.  I know that the MIB writers weren’t trying to create an illustration of Biblical truth, but that aside, K was someone that everyone went to, because he created an umbrella of safety and surety around him that everybody looked to… of course that’s the kind of role Tommy Lee Jones plays in every one of his movies (except perhaps for Under Siege with Steven Segall), but that’s not the point.  The point is that I’ve never really thought about this before, but now that I am, it jives with both my life’s observations, and apparently others’ (to the extent that those observations make their way into movie scripts).

 ⁷ Extortion turns a wise man into a fool,
       and a bribe corrupts the heart.

Verse 7 is rather disappointing.  It basically says even someone who has been wise, can be turned to the “dark side” so to speak.  Sticking to my movie theme for a moment, it’s what happened to Anakin Skywalker in the Star Wars franchise.  As happy as Anakin could be is as sorrowful as he became at the loss of his mother, and subsequent apparent loss of Padme.  But he didn’t understand his sorrow and what it was for in life, and that made him susceptible to bribery by Senator Palpatine.  What was the bribe?  Ultimate power over the universe.  Anakin was actually on a path toward wisdom; he had indeed learned it.  But, the temptation of power to remove his sorrow, instead of embracing his sorrow as a path to happiness, corrupted him.  He saw sorrow as a path to hopelessness, and so he became a fool, looking always for the power and means to impose his satisfaction on everything and everyone around him, so that he would never feel sorrow again… and he succeeded.  But it made him a fool, and his satisfaction quashed any happiness he could have ever hoped for… until Luke rescued him from his foolishness in Return of the Jedi (not exactly a tearful moment, but it’s as close as George Lucas could get), which brings me to verse 8…

 ⁸ The end of a matter is better than its beginning,
       and patience is better than pride.

Amen to that!  I even think Anakin and K would both agree.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 7th, 2009 at 6:59 am and is filed under Whatever, Bible Commentary, Devotional Notes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.