The Great Equalizer: Memento Mori
from Ecclesiastes 9:1-12
Back in the Roman era, when a general returned to the city victorious, the crowds would gather for a triumphant processional through the streets, cheering, playing music, celebrating the conquering hero riding in his chariot. But riding alongside him would often be a servant, leaning in close amid all the noise to whisper a single phrase into his ear.
"Remember, you must die."
Memento mori.
Amid all the honor and glory and roaring crowds, someone was assigned to remind the general that he was mortal, finite, no different from the people he'd just conquered. He would die too, one day.
The teacher in Ecclesiastes has already been walking us through something similar. He's told us it's better to go to a funeral than a party, better to contemplate our own death than celebrate a birthday. It's a lot. But he's got a point.
We are more insulated from death than any generation before us. Not that many generations back, a simple cut on your hand could turn septic and kill you within days. Infant mortality was common enough that no one assumed a baby would survive its first year. Death was close, constant, unavoidable. Today we've built a world that lets us mostly forget it's coming.
That's exactly why Ecclesiastes 9 matters. We need the reminder.
Where Death Came From
So much of wisdom literature traces back to the opening chapters of Genesis, back to the garden, back to how everything got broken in the first place. God's first command to Adam was simple: eat from any tree you like, except one, "for on the day you eat of it, you will surely die." Adam and Eve didn't know what death was. It hadn't happened yet.
They ate anyway, and death entered the world, not as punishment God wanted, but as the natural result of being cut off from the tree of life. Arguably the first death recorded in Scripture comes just after, when God fashions clothing from animal skins to cover the couple's shame. An animal had to die for that leather to exist. And the very next chapter, Cain kills his brother Abel. In the span of a few pages, we go from no death at all, to the death of an animal, to murder.
Death was never part of God's original plan. It's a symptom of our fallenness, and at its core, death is separation. Separation between God and man, man and wife, humanity and creation. That's why we mourn: we are separated from the one we loved.
One Fate for Everyone
The teacher lays it out plainly in verses 1 through 6. The righteous and the wise are in God's hands, but even that's ambiguous, is that a good thing or a terrifying one? Hebrews 10 says it's a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. Isaiah 41 says God's hand holds us up. The teacher doesn't know which one applies to him. He's writing from that side of the cross, without the hope we now have in the resurrection.
What he does know is this: death comes for everyone. The righteous and the wicked, the religious and the irreligious, the good and the bad, they all share the same fate. Death doesn't discriminate. It's the great equalizer, the one fact of life none of us escape, no matter how well we've lived or how much power we've accumulated.
He offers a strange comfort here: "a live dog is better than a dead lion." In his world, dogs were scavengers and pests, not pets, they represented the lowest of the low. Lions represented royalty and power. His point is that a living beggar is better off than a dead king, simply because the living still have hope. Once you've taken your last breath, that door closes.
So Eat Your Bread
From that bleak assessment, the teacher pivots into one of his famous "seize the day" passages. Go, he says. Eat your bread with pleasure. Drink your wine with a cheerful heart. Wear white. Don't skimp on the oil for your head. Enjoy life with the spouse you love, for all your fleeting days. Whatever your hands find to do, do it with all your strength.
This isn't hedonism. It's an invitation to actually receive the gifts God has given us instead of letting them pass by unnoticed. Joy is different from happiness, happiness depends on circumstances, joy is a posture of the heart that can coexist with sorrow. You can have joy even while staring down the reality of death.
And maybe the fleeting nature of these good things is exactly what makes them valuable. That night out with your spouse can't last forever, and that's precisely why it matters. Savor it while it's here, because you cannot hold on to it.
Time and Chance
The teacher closes this section with a hard truth: the race isn't always won by the swift, the battle isn't always won by the strong. Time and chance happen to everyone.
Consider the 1904 Olympic marathon in St. Louis, arguably the strangest race in Olympic history. Officials scheduled the nearly 25-mile race for 2:30 in the afternoon, in August, in Missouri heat, with only one water stop because the organizer wanted to study the effects of dehydration. Only 14 of 32 runners finished. One competitor stopped mid-race to steal peaches from spectators and raid an orchard for apples that turned out to be rotten, forcing him to nap through stomach cramps. He still finished fourth. The apparent winner had actually ridden 11 miles in a car before hopping out to jog across the finish line, and was exposed as a fraud before the medal ceremony. The real winner was so dosed on a stimulant cocktail of rat poison, egg whites, and brandy that he had to be carried across the finish line, legs still churning in the air.
That's life. You can prepare all you want, and time and chance will still find you. The man who works decades for retirement and gets a cancer diagnnosis two weeks later. None of us are as in control as we'd like to believe.
A Conversation With Jesus
Imagine the teacher in Ecclesiastes sitting down with Jesus, another son of David, to talk through chapter 9.
"The righteous and the wise are in God's hands," the teacher says, "but who knows if those are good hands?" Jesus answers from the cross itself: "Father, into your hands I entrust my spirit." The Father's hands are good hands.
"There's one fate for everyone," the teacher presses. "It doesn't matter how you live." Jesus responds with the parable of the sheep and the goats, what we do in this life matters, and one day it catches up with us, for good or for ill.
"Still," the teacher concedes, "a live dog is better than a dead lion. Better to be living." "You're right," Jesus might say. "We must work while it is day, for night is coming for us all." No one understood limited time better than Jesus, and he made the most of every hour he had.
Finally, the teacher laments that the dead are forgotten, their names erased along with their memory. Jesus answers from Revelation: "The one who conquers will be dressed in white clothes, and I will never erase his name from the book of life." Your name won't end up on a road sign nobody remembers. It'll be written somewhere permanent.
What A Ride
Hunter S. Thompson once wrote, “Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming ‘Wow! What a Ride!’”
You're going to die. So you might as well live. And because we live on this side of the resurrection, we get to choose, every day, to die to ourselves and rise into the new life Christ has given us.
Think About It
The sermon points out that we're more insulated from death than almost any generation before us. How does that distance shape the way you think about your own mortality, and what would change if death felt closer or more familiar?
The teacher in Ecclesiastes wrestles with whether being "in God's hands" is a comforting thought or a frightening one. Which way do you tend to lean, and why? How does knowing what we know this side of the resurrection change that answer?
Ecclesiastes says a "live dog is better than a dead lion," meaning even the lowest status is better than death, because the living still have hope. Where in your own life do you feel like you're waiting for a "someday" to finally live differently? What would it look like to stop waiting?
The sermon draws a line between joy and happiness, joy being about attitude and perspective rather than circumstances. Can you think of a time in your own life when you experienced joy in the middle of hard or sorrowful circumstances? What made that possible?
The imagined conversation between the teacher and Jesus ends with the promise that our names are written in the book of life, not on a building or a road sign. What are you currently pouring your time and energy into that won't outlast you, and what might it look like to invest more in what will?
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