Remember Your Creator

We’re very good at not thinking about death. We color the gray, count our steps, and talk about the elderly in the third person, as though old age were a country other people move to. That avoidance tells on us, because what a person refuses to look at is usually the thing he isn’t sure God can handle. Today’s readings won’t let us look away. The Preacher of Ecclesiastes ends his book by walking a young man into old age and the grave: trembling hands, darkened windows, the almond tree in blossom, the silver cord snapped. And Luke gives us Jesus in a crowd that can’t stop marveling at him, turning to his disciples to say the one thing nobody wanted to hear. They didn’t understand him, and Luke adds the detail that makes the scene ours: they were afraid to ask.

Franciscan Media sets Pope Saint Paul VI before us today, on the anniversary of his birth in 1897, though the Church keeps his feast on May 29. He died at 80, at Castel Gandolfo, on August 6, 1978, the Feast of the Transfiguration, the mountaintop that stands right behind today’s Gospel. Today’s readings place before you and me one of the most important questions we can wrestle with. What are we afraid to ask God about our own ending?

The Readings

First Reading: Ecclesiastes 11:9-12:8

Rejoice, O young man, in your youth, and let your heart cheer you in the days of your youth; walk in the ways of your heart and the sight of your eyes. But know that for all these things God will bring you into judgment. Remove vexation from your mind, and put away pain from your body; for youth and the dawn of life are vanity.

Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come, and the years draw nigh, when you will say, “I have no pleasure in them”; before the sun and the light and the moon and the stars are darkened and the clouds return after the rain; in the day when the keepers of the house tremble, and the strong men are bent, and the grinders cease because they are few, and those that look through the windows are dimmed, and the doors on the street are shut; when the sound of the grinding is low, and one rises up at the voice of a bird, and all the daughters of song are brought low; they are afraid also of what is high, and terrors are in the way; the almond tree blossoms, the grasshopper drags itself along and desire fails; because man goes to his eternal home, and the mourners go about the streets; before the silver cord is snapped, or the golden bowl is broken, or the pitcher is broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern, and the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it. Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher; all is vanity.

Gospel: Luke 9:43b-45

But while they were all marveling at everything he did, he said to his disciples, “Let these words sink into your ears; for the Son of man is to be delivered into the hands of men.” But they did not understand this saying, and it was concealed from them, that they should not perceive it; and they were afraid to ask him about this saying.

Scriptural Analysis

Today’s First Reading is the last movement of Ecclesiastes before its epilogue, and it bends the whole book toward the end. It opens on what sounds like permission: “Rejoice, O young man, in your youth … walk in the ways of your heart and the sight of your eyes” (Ecclesiastes 11:9). The Navarre commentators head off the obvious misreading. “The Preacher is not recommending hedonistic materialism,” they write; “one needs to be ever mindful that God punishes and rewards,” although, as Qoheleth sees it, that happens within the bounds of this life.¹ So the same verse ends with a hook: “But know that for all these things God will bring you into judgment.” Enjoy the day God gave you. Then give an account of it.

Then comes 12:1, the verse the whole poem hangs on. “Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth.” The Hebrew for “your Creator” is bôrĕʾêkā (bor-EH-kha), built on bara (bah-RAH), the verb of Genesis 1:1, which Scripture uses only with God as its subject. Qoheleth picked the word that reminds a young man he was made, that his strength is on loan, and that the one who lent it will want it back. The Navarre editors put it plainly: “Viewed from the perspective of death, man’s life is a temporary gift given him by God,” and helping people see that, so they can make free and responsible choices, “is truly the office of a teacher of wisdom.”²

The poem that follows (12:2-7) works by indirection. It describes a great house going dark. The keepers of the house tremble, the strong men are bent, the grinders stop because only a few are left, and the ones looking out the windows can barely see. A man is up at the first bird because he can’t sleep, and every song sounds faint. Read it slowly, and you can put a face on it: hands that shake, legs that won’t straighten, missing teeth, clouded eyes, a thin voice. “The almond tree blossoms,” white against bare hills, the way hair goes white. And the reason comes without softening: “man goes to his eternal home, and the mourners go about the streets” (12:5).

The Fathers wouldn’t let the poem end in the cemetery. Saint Cyril of Jerusalem, catechizing candidates for baptism, heard the passage as a prophecy of the Lord’s return and read the almond blossom as the end of winter: “our bodies, after the winter, then, are to flourish with a heavenly bloom.”³ The white flower Qoheleth used for old age, Cyril saw as the first bloom of the resurrection spring. Verse 6 gives four pictures of the end: the silver cord, the golden bowl, the pitcher at the spring, the wheel at the cistern. Saint Jerome read the golden band as “the soul that returns to the place from which it descended,” and the broken pitcher and wheel as “allegories for death,” since a worn-through pitcher can’t draw water and a broken wheel leaves the well to go foul.⁴

Then verse 7, the sentence the Catechism chose. “The dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.” Qoheleth is reading Genesis backward. The dust God shaped and the breath he blew into it (Genesis 2:7) come apart again, and each goes home (Genesis 3:19). The Catechism quotes exactly these verses in its teaching on death: “That aspect of death lends urgency to our lives: remembering our mortality helps us realize that we have only a limited time in which to bring our lives to fulfillment.”⁵ Saint Gregory the Wonderworker drew the conclusion in one line: “For people lying on earth there is one salvation, if their souls acknowledge and fly up to the One by whom they were brought into being.”⁶ Remember your Creator, because he is where you’re going.

Verse 8 closes the circle the book opened in 1:2: “Vanity of vanities.” Navarre says that “true wisdom consists in realizing this and accepting it,” and is honest about Qoheleth’s horizon: “The wisdom of man cannot penetrate beyond” death.⁷ Saint John Chrysostom, preaching on Solomon’s verdict, pointed past it. “Let us believe him and lay hold on that in which there is no vanity,” he said, and love God “from desire of the kingdom. For what is comparable to seeing Christ?”⁸ Qoheleth walks us to the edge of the grave and stops there. For what lies on the other side, we need someone who has gone through it.

Which is exactly where Luke has Jesus heading. The Gospel comes in a tight run of scenes: the Transfiguration on the mountain (Luke 9:28-36), then the next day a desperate father whose only son the disciples could not heal but Jesus did (9:37-43a). “All were astonished at the majesty of God.” Pablo Gadenz notes that Luke, unlike Matthew and Mark, mentions no change of place, binding the two moments together: “Precisely while all are astonished and amazed at the miracle, Jesus makes his second passion prediction to his disciples.”⁹ Joseph Fitzmyer names what the applause lacked: “marveling and incomprehension, but no faith.”¹⁰

“Let these words sink into your ears.” The Greek says, literally, put these words into your ears, and Fitzmyer calls it “a solemn and impressive figurative substitute” for Mark’s plain “he taught his disciples,” perhaps an echo of the Lord’s command to Moses to put the matter “in the ears of Joshua” (Exodus 17:14).¹¹ Saint Cyril of Alexandria, in the Catena Aurea, explains the timing. Jesus had just shown his glory on the mountain and driven out an evil spirit, and the disciples might be shaken to see the one they took for God go to his death, so he bids them “lay up in their minds as a certain deposit the mystery of His passion.”¹² The glory comes first so the cross can be carried.

What Jesus deposits is one sentence: “the Son of man is to be delivered into the hands of men.” Fitzmyer hears the wordplay, anthrōpos (AN-thro-pos) against anthrōpos, the Son of Man handed over to men, and he reads the passive as theological: Jesus is handed over according to God’s plan.¹³ The verb paradidosthai (par-ah-dee-DOS-thai), “to be handed over,” is the language of Isaiah’s fourth Servant Song, where the Greek text says the servant was handed over on account of our sins (Isaiah 53:12), and Gadenz points out that Jesus will quote that verse on the night before he dies (Luke 22:37).¹⁴ Titus of Bostra, in the Catena, says why the prediction breaks into the miracle stories at all: “For miracles do not save, but the cross conveys the benefit.”¹⁵

Then verse 45 stacks up the disciples’ failure in three clauses: they did not understand, it was concealed from them, and they were afraid to ask. Gadenz holds both causes together. Their incomprehension “is due to their weakness,” but “it is also part of God’s plan,” and only after the resurrection will Jesus open their minds (Luke 24:45).¹⁶ Saint Bede traced the blindness to their affection. They could not believe that the one they took to be God would really die, so they assumed he was speaking in a figure.¹⁷ And the fear? Fitzmyer wonders whether Luke kept it “because he wants to hint that the disciples are beginning to realize that the destiny facing Jesus may have implications for them too.”¹⁸ That is the fear we know. We sense that his road and ours run in the same direction, and we’d rather not ask where it ends. Theophylact, the last voice in the Catena on this passage, is gentle with them: “fear is the first step to reverence.”¹⁹

Put the two readings side by side, and they answer each other. Qoheleth looks at death clearly and can only say “remember.” Jesus looks at his own death and walks toward it. The Catechism says he “accepted it in an act of complete and free submission to his Father’s will,” and that “the obedience of Jesus has transformed the curse of death into a blessing.”²⁰ The dust still returns to the earth, and now the spirit that returns to God has a road to travel, because the Son of Man went first and commended his spirit into his Father’s hands (Luke 23:46).

Daily Application

The interior movement these readings ask for is easy to name and hard to do: stop being afraid to ask. The disciples had the answer standing in front of them, and they let the question die in their throats because they suspected it would cost them something. Most of us treat our own mortality the same way. We pray about the job, the kids, the test results we hope come back clean, and we never once say to God, out loud, “I’m going to die. What do you want me to do with the time before that?” The Catechism calls that awareness urgency, and the urgency is a mercy. It frees a man to set down what doesn’t matter.

So ask. Tonight, take 10 minutes with Ecclesiastes 12 open and read the poem slowly as a description of your own body in 20 or 40 years. Then put to the Lord the question Qoheleth’s young man needed to hear: when you bring me into judgment for these days, what will you want to see in them? The Church has already built this prayer into your day. Every Hail Mary ends “at the hour of our death,” and the Catechism quotes The Imitation of Christ with a line worth taping to the mirror: “If you aren’t fit to face death today, it’s very unlikely you will be tomorrow.”²¹ If that stings, most parishes hear confessions on Saturday afternoon, and today is Saturday.

The second practice is for someone else. The poem is a portrait of somebody you know: the parent whose hands shake pouring coffee, the grandmother who can’t follow the conversation at the table, the man at the end of the pew who takes a long time to stand. Go see one of them this week. Sit close enough to be heard, and ask what they’ve learned that you haven’t yet. The daughters of song are brought low, and the voice that remains has things to tell you.

Pope Saint Paul VI walked Qoheleth’s road with his eyes open. Born near Brescia on this day in 1897, he spent 30 years in the Vatican Secretariat of State, helped prepare the Second Vatican Council, and as pope carried it to its close, a task Franciscan Media says “he completed with grace and integrity.”²² His last months read like the end of Ecclesiastes 12. In the spring of 1978, Aldo Moro, his friend since Montini’s years as chaplain to Catholic university students, was kidnapped and murdered, and a devastated Paul VI presided at his funeral. That August the pope himself went to his eternal home, dying at Castel Gandolfo on August 6.²³ It was the Feast of the Transfiguration, the day the Church remembers the glory Jesus showed his disciples just before he told them to let these words sink into their ears.

Remember your Creator today, while the silver cord still holds and the wheel still turns at the well. Let his words sink in. Then ask him what you’ve been afraid to ask. He has already walked that road, and he won’t send you down it alone.

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Notes

1. ↑ The Navarre Bible, Old Testament, commentary on Ecclesiastes, by members of the Faculty of Theology of the University of Navarre (Dublin: Four Courts Press; New York: Scepter Publishers, 2004), 294.
2. ↑ Navarre Bible, commentary on Ecclesiastes, 294-295.
3. ↑ Saint Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures 15.20, in J. Robert Wright, ed., Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: Old Testament IX (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2005), 278.
4. ↑ Saint Jerome, Commentary on Ecclesiastes 12.6, in Wright, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, 280.
5. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 1007.
6. ↑ Saint Gregory Thaumaturgus, Paraphrase of Ecclesiastes 12.7, in Wright, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, 281.
7. ↑ Navarre Bible, commentary on Ecclesiastes, 294-295.
8. ↑ Saint John Chrysostom, Homilies on 1 Timothy 15, in Wright, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, 281-282.
9. ↑ Pablo T. Gadenz, The Gospel of Luke, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2018), 189.
10. ↑ Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I-IX, Anchor Bible 28 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1981), 813.
11. ↑ Fitzmyer, Luke I-IX, 813; Gadenz, Gospel of Luke, 190.
12. ↑ Saint Cyril of Alexandria, quoted in Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels, Collected out of the Works of the Fathers, vol. 3, St. Luke (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1843), on Luke 9:43-45.
13. ↑ Fitzmyer, Luke I-IX, 813-814.
14. ↑ Gadenz, Gospel of Luke, 190.
15. ↑ Titus of Bostra, quoted in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, vol. 3, St. Luke, on Luke 9:43-45.
16. ↑ Gadenz, Gospel of Luke, 190.
17. ↑ Saint Bede, quoted in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, vol. 3, St. Luke, on Luke 9:43-45.
18. ↑ Fitzmyer, Luke I-IX, 814.
19. ↑ Theophylact, quoted in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, vol. 3, St. Luke, on Luke 9:43-45.
20. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 1009.
21. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 1014.
22. ↑ “Saint Paul VI,” Saint of the Day, Franciscan Media, accessed September 25, 2026, franciscanmedia.org.
23. ↑ “Saint Paul VI,” Franciscan Media.

Books Cited

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• Faculty of Theology of the University of Navarre, The Navarre Bible: Wisdom Books (Scepter Publishers)
• J. Robert Wright, ed., Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: Old Testament IX (InterVarsity Press, 2005)
• Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Doubleday / Image, 2003)
• Pablo T. Gadenz, The Gospel of Luke, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Baker Academic, 2018)
• Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I-IX, Anchor Bible 28 (Doubleday, 1981)
• Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels, four-volume edition (Baronius Press)