Please read the passage before reading the commentary
This is a well-known passage and often used at funerals. There is a time, a time for this and a time for that, back and forth, hither and yon, seven couplets in all. We recount the seven times of creation and the fourteen (seven times two) times from Abraham through David to the Babylonian Exile and unto the coming of the Christ (Matthew 1:2-16). There is a time for everything under the sun as Qoheleth recounts seven couplets of different times we experience.
Maybe these times are boring for us, as we await something new. Perhaps even more so are we bored because we eagerly want timelessness, which God has put in our hearts. Timelessness expresses our notion of eternity, our notion of God’s existence. If time measures change according to before and after, God has neither before no after: it is always now for God. Right now, we want that eternal now that God will share with us in heaven. Our hearts are made for God, and we can only rest in God when the times we had to for this and that are subsumed into the eternal nowness of God.
We measure time by beginnings and endings. A dash on a tombstone indicates the wholeness of the life the person has lived. Our beginnings and our endings represent the totality in between. Knowledge from A to Z represents all knowledge. Male and female represent to whole totality of genders possible. Love and hate represent the totality of emotions. Blood pressure, cholesterol, Body-Mass Index, and such are known by their highs and lows. We measure things by the extremes each thing has.
We cannot, however, measure God according to before and after or according to any other set of extremes. God is timeless, always infinitely loving, always infinitely generous, always infinitely forgiving always calling us into God’s own timelessness.
As of now, we are in time for opposites until we come into the full presence of God in God’s timelessness. When there, no more boredom, no more thises and that’s, no more extremes, but only the pleasant and beautiful timelessness of God when God is all in all.