The Great Reduction
solomon seeks the key to peace
Jay Trott
THE GREAT REDUCTION
Solomon Seeks the Key to Peace
Copyright © 2020 Jay Trott. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
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paperback isbn: 978-1-7252-6478-6
hardcover isbn: 978-1-7252-6479-3
ebook isbn: 978-1-7252-6480-9
Manufactured in the U.S.A. August 12, 2020
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to those who kindly read and commented on the manuscript, including Fr. James Wheeler and my wonderful wife, Beth. This book is dedicated to the glory of God.
THE GREAT REDUCTION
Ecclesiastes is a remarkable little book about how to find contentment—and how not to find it.
For my own part, I’m just now realizing that I have not been allowing Solomon to say what he really wants to say all these years. Seems the story I brought along with me kept drowning out his story.
But now I’m in pretty much the same boat he was in when he wrote it. I’m getting a little long in the tooth myself and trying to stay away from mirrors. And as a result, his amazing book is starting to come into focus for me in an entirely new way.
I’ll call my story the justice narrative. It goes something like this: the just and the good are rewarded and the wicked get what’s coming to them. Ecclesiastes is the antidote to that story. In fact it shows what happens when such stories fall apart—the devastating impact this can have on identity.
You’ll remember Solomon as a younger man, full of his proverbs. The justice narrative was strong in him. But as an old man he has seen far too many things. The justice narrative has begun to take on water, and he finds himself casting about, a little desperately, for something to grasp onto.
Without knowing it, I have been keeping Solomon in a box. His name means “peace,” and maybe I wanted his book to fit into certain peaceful dreams I had about things. He is described as the wisest man in the world, and maybe I wanted his book to glorify wisdom, as he does in Proverbs.
I used to enjoy reading lovers of wisdom like Plato and Aristotle, the philosophers. They wrote beautifully about how to find happiness. Their books were like a dream, full of sweet words and pleasant assurances; and perhaps that is what I wanted Ecclesiastes to be. But that is not what it is at all.
Looking back, I suppose I might also have been defensive about the church, or perhaps guilty of the presumption of thinking it needed me to save it, like Uzzah. It may have been this vanity that prevented me from allowing poor old Solomon to be himself or say what he wanted to say.
The way to make a church look good is to make it look successful. Build a massive cathedral, have a megachurch and a choir, do exciting programs, wow everyone with your preaching, present a smiling face to the world, etc. But Solomon has something simple to say about that. All is vanity.
And he was the expert. He built the most famous church of all.
The problem is the naked God on the cross. You cannot be naked and also be successful in the world. On the cross, Christ appeared to be a miserable failure. Even his own disciples deserted him. We tend to gloss over this uncomfortable fact on our way to making things shiny and nice.
It occurs to me that I haven’t been looking at Christ at all, up there on his crucifix. I’ve been nodding at him all my life without realizing he was naked. Because I did not see he was naked, I also did not see how much he was suffering. I thought it was about the nails, but that was only physical.
He had a much deeper pain, which was his shame. He was hung up naked for all the world to see. “He that is hanged is accursed by God.” His enemies laughed at him and triumphed over him. Apparently his notion of success was not their notion of success.
We talk in the church about standing at the foot of the cross, but maybe we should try looking at it from his point of view, hanging up there naked. Maybe we should think less about ourselves and where we happen to be standing and try to comprehend his deep shame.
Why? Because we are all headed to the same place. There is “one event” in which we are all naked, whether or not we want to admit it. Solomon found himself approaching this event and saw his nakedness very clearly. That’s what his little book is all about.
The people standing at the foot of the cross saw their stories falling apart before their very eyes. The one they called “lord” now seemed powerless and frankly ridiculous. Until then, they had very different notions about him. They thought of him as a conqueror in the style of Joshua or David.
To see Christ on the cross was to be deprived of a story that was the source of identity and pride. It was to enter into a state of being where nothing seems real, nothing seems solid. They were lost as they stood there looking up at him, but by looking up they were also found. This is a great mystery.
Nakedness became a source of shame in the garden because of sin, and nakedness is what we see in Solomon in Ecclesiastes. He may have been “arrayed in all his glory,” but in his old age he was utterly naked in another way, utterly powerless and ashamed of his weakness in one vital area.
And that is in the little matter of contentment. To see Solomon in his own words is to see a very unhappy man with no remedy in sight because he is old and has nowhere left to hide. This was doubly painful because he had cultivated the image of a wise man who knew how to make himself happy.
To the world, “wisdom” has a smiling face. It indicates that happiness has been found. But in Ecclesiastes wisdom has become a source of sorrow and vexation. Solomon is beginning to realize that wisdom is far off and cannot give him the peace he is so desperately seeking.
Aristotle wrote a charming book called the Nicomachean Ethics. It meanders along in its discursive way almost as if he were chatting to us in person. This discursiveness not only draws us into his argument but is also meant to represent his happiness, his contentment.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that Aristotle cast a spell over the world. Whole ages of philosophy and even theology can be traced to his sunny influence. The spell consists of his unparalleled ability to convince us that happiness is a real thing—and he has found it.
This spell is just what we mean by “narrative.” Happiness is a cheerful tale cleverly told, and we are all under its spell. We do not have to read Aristotle to absorb it. The tale comes to us in innumerable ways, even in the underwear ad we see while watching football on dusky November afternoons.
The Nicomachean Ethics appears to be a book of philosophy when in fact it could also be called a very charming story. Happiness is the pretty girl, and we are all in love with her and caught up in pursuit of her. The ending of the story is a satisfactory one. Happiness has been found.
But happiness is the very thing Solomon cannot find as he tosses and turns on his bed on dark nights. A young man may be proud of his good looks, but old age takes them away. A young man may be proud of his energy and industriousness, but the time will come when he will have to lay them both aside.
The pursuit of happiness is based on some desirable goal. The reason