What has been will be again; what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, “Look! This is something new?” (Ecclesiastes 1:9-10)
I don’t know about you, but it’s my experience that in a round of golf, it’s not uncommon to have something unprecedented happen. And it’s not necessarily always golf-related.
A friend and I played at a local course two years ago. We were on a dogleg left par five, and we’d both hit our balls into the fairway. There was a group on the green ahead of us. As we waited, a couple of large birds high overhead caught our attention. On closer inspection, they were two bald eagles.
I’d never seen one bald eagle in our neck of the woods, let alone two. As we watched, they flew at each other, locked talons, and began to helicopter slowly towards the ground since two birds joined at their feet don’t fly particularly well.
They separated just above the level of the trees and then flew away. We wondered what was going on there. Mating ritual? Defense of territory? We Googled it later, and it’s a behavior sometimes seen in bald eagles that is not well understood. You can find clips of it on YouTube.
Our subsequent claim has been that we both had an eagle on that hole. (Har har.)
On a different course and day but with the same friend, I experienced another unique golf event—a par three over water. I hit my tee shot two feet from the hole. Go me. My friend hit his ball behind a left rear green side bunker and had a second shot that required him to loft it over the bunker to a green that sloped away from him towards the water. We both birdied.
His was a Mickelsonesque flop shot that landed on the fringe and trickled slowly to the hole. After our tee shots, I’d have put the odds of two birdies happening seriously low.
Think about it. How often in a round of golf does something unprecedented happen? I saw a beaver in our club’s pond several weeks ago. I have never seen one there before. It seems to me it’s not too uncommon after a round of golf to have had something unprecedented happen.
But Solomon was pretty sure there was nothing new under the sun. He’d been around the block a few times, had a check in the “wisdom” box, and knew that he was the first candidate for the Messiah – a descendant of David whose reign would be eternal.
If you read the rest of Ecclesiastes, though, Solomon makes it clear that he’s sure his reign wouldn’t be eternal. He does a lot of whining about the fate of the wise man (him, no doubt), and the fate of the fool is the same: the proverbial “dirt nap.”
The “new under the sun” event was the arrival of a descendant of David whose dirt nap was only three days long and whose death atoned for Solomon and all the rest of us. The new “under the sun” was resurrection from the dead, which is considerably more interesting than a pair of eagles falling from the sky.
Prayer: Thank you, Father, that your Son was indeed unprecedented and that He resolved the oldest problem of mankind.