The four seasons of the year follow in a cycle just like nature itself and the yearly repetition seems to indicate that there is no real future and so no real escape from the endless monotony of time. Qoheleth sounds very pessimistic but his work points out the folly of this pagan way of looking at history. Against this pagan concept stood the concept of history revealed by God, the Lord of history: all time and history is moving towards a very definite future, the Day of the Lord.

Herod and others fell into this pagan way of thinking: they could only think of Jesus as a re-incarnation of John the Baptist or Elijah or one of the other prophets. As such, they missed entirely what was new in the life and mission of Jesus. The ordinary people, however, were often astonished at Jesus and realized that God was at work in Him in an entirely new way: There was indeed something new under the sun. Where nothing new is possible, there is no hope. But God makes all things new in Christ and so in Christ is our hope.