What has been before will continue to be,
and what has been done before will continue to be done —
there’s nothing new under the sun!
—Ecclesiastes 1:9
Sometimes we feel just like the writer of Ecclesiastes. We get stuck in our daily routine. Everything seems predictable, safe, perhaps a little dull. “So what else is new?” we say. We become oblivious to the possibility of change, of experiencing something a little different. Our comfort level is perfectly stable.
Well, every now and then something happens to shake us out of our complacency. What could be more dramatic than the sun’s light being extinguished in the middle of the day? Yet that is what we are expecting to experience during tomorrow’s solar eclipse.
It is as if God were trying to get our attention. As the psalmist writes, “The heavens herald your glory, O God, and the skies display your handiwork” (Psalm 19:1). “Wake up,” God is telling us. “Look around you, and sense my presence.”
It may be hard to imagine anything topping this celestial display in terms of proclaiming something new under the sun. Yet, just last Sunday our church celebrated the most astounding manifestation of God’s greatness imaginable: as the youth described in Mark’s Gospel proclaimed, “He has risen; he is not here” (Mark 16:6).
This Jesus, the Christ, was God made flesh, who lived among us, and whose death and resurrection established a new relationship between us and God.
As the apostle Paul writes, “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” (2 Corinthians 5:17, NRSV) This is “something new” that we can indeed celebrate.