T
he message of this week’s scripture readings seems pretty straightforward:
you can’t take it with you
. No matter how rich or poor you are, none of your material possessions will mean a thing once you die. So if your life has been spent in pursuit of
stuff
then ultimately it’s all for nothing. All things are vanity, like Qoheleth says in Ecclesiastes.
Is life just vanity? This would be true if the material world were all there is — if the only things of value were things that we could see and touch, measure and accumulate. If matter were all that mattered, then life would truly be folly. No matter how long we lived or how rich we became, we all end up in the same hole in the ground. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust. How depressing.
But is that really all there is...?
