Something New Under The Sun

Your eye is never satisfied with seeing. You already know this about yourself, even if you’d never put it that way. There’s the phone you check before your feet touch the floor, the headline you refresh at lunch, the package on the porch that thrilled you for about 4 minutes. Today’s First Reading diagnosed all of it more than 2,000 years before the first smartphone: “the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing” (Ecclesiastes 1:8). The Preacher watches the sun go around, the wind go around, the rivers pour into a sea that never fills, and he tells you your appetite runs on the same track. It moves constantly and arrives nowhere.

Then the Gospel hands us a man with exactly that appetite and a throne to feed it. Herod Antipas keeps hearing reports about Jesus, and he can’t settle what to make of them. John back from the dead? Elijah? One of the old prophets? So Herod “sought to see him.” That’s as far as it ever went. Put the two readings side by side, and they expose something uncomfortable: a person can be fascinated by Jesus, can want to see him, can even ask the right question (“Who is this?”), and still be circling like the wind in Ecclesiastes.

Franciscan Media sets Saint John Henry Newman before us today, although the Church keeps his feast on October 9. Newman asked Herod’s question for most of his life. He asked it honestly, and it carried him out of the circle, and the words on his grave say where it took him: out of shadows and images into the truth. So when your restless heart goes looking for Jesus, what is it after: one more thing to watch, or him?

The Readings

First Reading: Ecclesiastes 1:2-11

Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity. What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun? A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains for ever. The sun rises and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises. The wind blows to the south, and goes round to the north; round and round goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns. All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow, there they flow again.

All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; and there is nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing of which it is said, “See, this is new”? It has been already, in the ages before us. There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembrance of later things yet to happen among those who come after.

Gospel: Luke 9:7-9

Now Herod the tetrarch heard of all that was done, and he was perplexed, because it was said by some that John had been raised from the dead, by some that Elijah had appeared, and by others that one of the old prophets had risen. Herod said, “John I beheaded; but who is this about whom I hear such things?” And he sought to see him.

Scriptural Analysis

Ecclesiastes opens with a name and a word. The name is Qoheleth (ko-HEL-et), which the RSV renders “the Preacher.” Saint Jerome explains it: Solomon is given this name “for he gathers the assembly [qahal], that is, the church” (qahal is pronounced kah-HAHL), and his word is directed “not only to one person but to everyone.” ^[1] The word is hebel (HEH-vel), and verse 2 uses it 5 times in a single breath. The Navarre commentary says the Hebrew root means something like vapor or air, a thing with no consistency to it, and that some scholars link it to a root meaning “fleeting.” “Vanity of vanities” is the Hebrew superlative, the same construction as “Song of Songs.” ^[2] So hear verse 2 the way a Jew heard it: vapor of vapors, all is vapor. Your breath on a January morning, there and gone.

Who is the Preacher arguing with? Navarre places him as a Jewish teacher steeped in the Law and in Israel’s wisdom, writing when Greek philosophy had arrived in Judea and was being put forward in the squares and streets, with hedonistic ideas that took no account of God. His complaint is that the seekers never go to the root of the problem. Navarre gives the book’s purpose in the words of Saint Basil: it shows us the vanity of the things of this world “so that we might come to understand that the passing things of this life are not worth hungering for.” ^[3]

The Fathers would not let “all is vanity” slide into contempt for creation. Jerome puts the objection bluntly. If everything God made is “very good,” he asks, how can everything be vanity, “and not only vanity, but even vanity of vanities?” Saint John Chrysostom answers: “The heaven is not vain, the earth is not vain … nor the sun, nor the moon and stars, nor our own body.” Vanity lives in us, in “being busied about vain things.” Saint Augustine locates it in the person who pursues “that which is last as if it were first.” ^[4] The sun is fine. What Qoheleth mocks is a man who asks the sun to make him happy.

Then the poem of verses 3 through 11: and it has a clever structure. Four witnesses testify in turn: the earth (v. 4), the sun (v. 5), the wind (v. 6), the waters (v. 7). The Navarre editors point out that the Greek teachers held the whole cosmos to be made of 4 elements, earth, fire, air, and water, and the Preacher calls each one to the stand to show that all their motion changes nothing in the established order. Man is the same: try as he may, he finds nothing new. ^[5] Look at the verb for the sun in verse 5. The RSV says it “hastens” back to where it rises; the Latin Vulgate that Navarre prints with it says anhelat, it pants, like a runner who never gets to stop.

Saint Gregory of Nyssa preached on this poem, and he read it as a mirror. “You human beings, as you look upon the universe, recognize your own nature.” Then he turned the sea of verse 7 on the greedy man. The sea takes in innumerable rivers and never rises; human nature is the same, since it “cannot enlarge its appetite to match the extent of its acquisitions; while the intake is endless, the capacity for enjoyment is kept within its set limit.” Saint Ambrose made verse 8 a description of an ordinary day: “We arise each day to eat and drink; yet no one is filled so that he does not hunger and thirst after a short time. Daily we seek profit, and to greed there is set no limit.” ^[6]

Verse 9 is the famous one. “There is nothing new under the sun.” Some in Augustine’s day twisted it into a defense of the philosophers’ endless cycles, in which Plato would teach at the Academy again and again through innumerable ages. Augustine shut the door on that in The City of God: “Far be it from us, I say, to believe this. For Christ died once for our sins; and ‘having risen from the dead, dies now no more.'” Navarre draws the book’s lesson: the reasonable thing is “to put one’s trust in God, for all the wisdom of this world is in vain,” and that trust finds its object in Christ, “in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Colossians 2:3). Olympiodorus compressed it into one line: “The great sun, when compared with the Sun of righteousness, is vanity.” ^[7] Hold on to that line. Luke is about to show us a man chasing the sun.

Herod Antipas, son of Herod the Great, ruled Galilee under Rome, and Joseph Fitzmyer notes that Luke gives him his proper title, “tetrarch,” where Mark calls him “King Herod,” a title that belonged to his father. This is the Herod who imprisoned John (Luke 3:19-20) and, we now learn, beheaded him. Word of “all that was done” reaches him, and Luke’s verb for his reaction, diaporeō (dee-ah-por-EH-oh), means he was at a loss. Luke Timothy Johnson describes it as perplexity and indecision: in Luke, Herod is trying to choose among conflicting reports, whereas Mark has him jumping to a conclusion. Fitzmyer says Mark’s version “sounds there like a guilty conscience speaking,” and that Luke reshapes the scene so Herod’s question, “Who is this?”, becomes the question the rest of the chapter answers. ^[8] It gets its answer 11 verses later, when the same three rumors come back, and Peter says, “The Christ of God” (Luke 9:18-20).

Look closely at the three rumors, because every one of them is a rerun. John back from the dead. Elijah, who was promised to return (Malachi 4:5). One of the old prophets risen again. Pablo Gadenz notes that the reports are inaccurate or incomplete, though they rightly sense that Jesus is a prophet, and then adds, “Ironically, he is the one who will rise from the dead.” ^[9] Theophylact, in the Catena Aurea, observes that the Jews of the day expected a resurrection back into fleshly life, eating and drinking, “but those that rise again will not be concerned with the deeds of the flesh.” ^[10] Every theory on Herod’s desk is Qoheleth’s theory: what has been is what will be. Galilee could imagine a famous man coming back. The genuinely new thing was still beyond its imagining: a man who would rise from the tomb and never die again (Romans 6:9).

“John I beheaded.” Saint John Chrysostom, also in the Catena, hears Herod talking himself down, “allaying his fears” by reminding himself that John is dead. And he names what drives the whole scene: “sinners fear both when they know, and when they are ignorant; they are afraid of shadows, are suspicious about every thing, and are alarmed at the slightest noise.” ^[11] Herod’s perplexity has a grave in it.

“And he sought to see him.” Gadenz weighs two motives, evil intent (Luke 13:31) or idle curiosity (Luke 23:8), and notes that the New Testament never records Jesus visiting Sepphoris or Tiberias, Herod’s two capitals: “Jesus sought to avoid him.” Fitzmyer is blunter. Herod’s desire to see Jesus “reveals nothing of any belief in him, only curiosity.” Johnson adds that Luke cuts to Herod here “to let the shadow of political opposition fall” over Jesus and the Twelve. ^[12] Luke pays the line off at the Passion. Herod finally gets his wish: he is very glad to see Jesus, he hopes to see some sign, he questions him at length, and Jesus answers him nothing (Luke 23:8-9). The eye that was never satisfied with seeing got its look at last, and it changed nothing.

Put the two readings together, and they are one diagnosis. The Catechism begins its whole account of faith with it: “The desire for God is written in the human heart,” and only in God will man “find the truth and happiness he never stops searching for.” It names what can smother that desire, including “the cares and riches of this world” and “that attitude of sinful man which makes him hide from God out of fear and flee his call.” Then it gives Augustine the last word: “you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” ^[13] Qoheleth shows that the sun cannot give that rest. Herod shows that even seeing the Son won’t give it, if all you want is to watch.

Daily Application

The interior movement today’s readings ask for is to turn curiosity into seeking. The two look alike from the outside, and Herod shows how far apart they are. Curiosity wants Jesus as the next interesting thing to look at, which drops him into Qoheleth’s circle beside the headline and the package on the porch. Seeking wants to be answered, and it is willing to be changed by the answer. Plenty of us live on Herod’s side of that line. We watch the apologetics videos and follow the latest news out of Rome, and never once put the question to Jesus himself with any intention of doing what he says.

So start with Gregory of Nyssa’s diagnosis, because it is also a kindness. Your capacity for enjoyment is fixed; the intake can grow forever, and you will not feel fuller. ^[14] Name your sea, the river you keep pouring in expecting it to fill: the feed, the news, the shopping cart. Then fast from it for one day. From the time you wake until dinner, no scrolling, no headlines, nothing bought for the thrill of it. Take 10 minutes of the time you get back and spend them before the tabernacle, or with Luke 9 open on your lap, and ask Herod’s question as your own: Lord, who are you, for me? Notice where Luke says the answer came. Jesus asks his disciples who he is “as he was praying alone” (Luke 9:18). Peter’s confession was born in prayer.

Then deal with the shadows. Chrysostom saw that Herod’s restlessness had a dead man in it, and a lot of ours does too. There’s the sin you buried years ago and hoped would stay quiet, the one that comes back as a vague unease whenever God comes up. The Catechism calls it hiding from God out of fear. The way out of that circle is the confessional, where the thing you’re afraid of gets named, forgiven, and put to rest for good. Go this week.

Saint John Henry Newman is the right companion for today, because his life was Herod’s question asked in good faith and followed all the way to the end. Franciscan Media tells how historical research made him suspect that the Roman Catholic Church stood in closest continuity with the Church Jesus founded, and in 1845, at 44, after 17 years as vicar of the university church at Oxford, he was received into full communion. When he was made a cardinal, he chose the motto Cor ad cor loquitur, “Heart speaks to heart.” ^[15] Herod wanted to see Jesus perform. Newman wanted Jesus to speak to him, heart to heart, and he let the answer rearrange his whole life. His epitaph states the conclusion: Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem, out of shadows and images into the truth. ^[16]

Qoheleth was right about the sun. Nothing it shines on will fill you, so stop asking it to. Turn to the one new thing that has ever happened under it, the Son who rose and dies no more, and let him answer the question. Seek him today the way Newman did, on your knees and ready to follow wherever the answer leads.

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Notes

1. Saint Jerome, Commentary on Ecclesiastes 1.1, in J. Robert Wright, ed., Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: Old Testament IX (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2005), 192. ↩
2. The Navarre Bible, Old Testament, commentary on Ecclesiastes, by members of the Faculty of Theology of the University of Navarre (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004), 264. ↩
3. Saint Basil, In principium Proverbiorum 1, quoted in Navarre Bible, commentary on Ecclesiastes, 264. ↩
4. Saint Jerome, Commentary on Ecclesiastes 1.2; Saint Augustine, Of True Religion 21.41; and Saint John Chrysostom, Homilies on Ephesians 12, in Wright, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, 194-195. ↩
5. Navarre Bible, commentary on Ecclesiastes, 265-266. ↩
6. Saint Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on Ecclesiastes 1, and Saint Ambrose, Death as a Good 7.28, in Wright, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, 197-199. ↩
7. Saint Augustine, The City of God 12.14, and Olympiodorus, Commentary on Ecclesiastes 1.5, in Wright, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, 197, 199; Navarre Bible, commentary on Ecclesiastes, 265. ↩
8. Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I-IX, Anchor Bible 28 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1981), 757-758; Luke Timothy Johnson, The Gospel of Luke, Sacra Pagina 3 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991), 146. ↩
9. Pablo T. Gadenz, The Gospel of Luke, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2018), 173. ↩
10. Theophylact, 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 9:7-9. ↩
11. Saint John Chrysostom, quoted in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, vol. 3, St. Luke, on Luke 9:7-9. ↩
12. Gadenz, Gospel of Luke, 173; Fitzmyer, Luke I-IX, 759; Johnson, Gospel of Luke, 148. ↩
13. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), nos. 27, 29-30. ↩
14. Saint Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on Ecclesiastes 1, in Wright, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, 198. ↩
15. “Saint John Henry Newman,” Saint of the Day, Franciscan Media, accessed September 23, 2026, franciscanmedia.org. ↩
16. Juan R. Vélez, “Newman Documentary, Day 6: Birmingham,” Saint Cardinal John Henry Newman, May 16, 2025, cardinaljohnhenrynewman.com. ↩

Books Cited

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• J. Robert Wright, ed., Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: Old Testament IX (InterVarsity Press, 2005)
• Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I-IX, Anchor Bible 28 (Doubleday, 1981)
• Luke Timothy Johnson, The Gospel of Luke, Sacra Pagina 3 (Liturgical Press, 1991)
• Pablo T. Gadenz, The Gospel of Luke, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Baker Academic, 2018)
• Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels, four-volume edition (Baronius Press)
• Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Doubleday / Image, 2003)