Reflection Questions: Ecclesiastes 11.1-6

1. Why does one business venture succeed and another fail when both use similar strategies?

Why does a storm system hit a particular town, and due to an unpredictable change in wind, do little damage to another?

Why does a fruit harvest fail in one year (due to an unheard of early frost) and succeed the nine other years?

If this is the kind of world live in, a world where despite the best efforts of good, skilled, people, sometimes our endeavours fail, why try anything at all? 

Discuss.

2. The 1984 NIV offers a more literal reading of v1:

Ecclesiastes 11.1 ‘Cast your bread upon the waters, for after many days you will find it again.’

What kinds of logical inconsistencies do you strike if this is taken as a literal command? Have you ever found and eaten old soggy bread? What would that be like?!

3. Deuteronomy 8.1-10 is a key text in Deuteronomy. In v3  of that passage a distinction is made between the ‘bread’ or provision needed for the physical body, and the word of God that the heart needs in order to live. So bread stands for all physical provision, the livelihood the Lord provides his people. Now turning to Ecclesiastes 11.1, to ‘cast bread upon the waters’ probably meant to trade your surplus bread, goods and produce. Even to trade commodities mined or harvested from the land. To engage in international sea trade.

What kind of God must the Lord be, if the Israelite should expect a profit from trading their goods, produce and commodities far and wide? What does this say about the Lord’s power, presence in the earth, and character?

4. The Israelite is given two pieces of wise advice by Solomon, to avoid an overall loss in trading or farming. What are those two pieces of advice (see 11.2, and v6)?

5. Why is it foolish to wait for perfect conditions (studying the weather too long) as a farmer? Is it possible to eliminate all risk of damaging winds or drought (11.3-4)?

6. Ecclesiastes 11.5 is the key verse in chapter 11. What difference does it make to our daily work in the world -in business, trades, providing goods or services- that fruit from our labour is a gift from God and not something we can automatically assume? We can’t control or fully understand how success comes, like the development of a child in the womb or the wind can’t be fully controlled or understood by us! What differences does it make to know that only God fully understands and controls success?

7. Read Mark 4.1-20. Seed is a metaphor for the word of the Gospel, sowing for all we do to promote and share it. With that in mind, what lessons can be drawn from Ecclesiastes 11.1-6 for the spiritual work of sharing, promoting, and teaching the Gospel? 

8. If Jesus was allowed his discipleship of Judas to end in failure, and his redeeming death on the cross to fail in the case of those who don’t turn to him, how does that change our attitude to failure in our Gospel witness? 

What was even more important to Jesus than whether he was accepted by his people or humankind?

9. What promise is held out for you (and St Luke’s) by the existence of the good soil in the parable of the Sower in Mark 4?