Be Not Overly Righteous

For years, Ecclesiastes 7:16 has puzzled me. I come back to it again and again. How can the wisest man who ever lived tell us to not be overly righteous or overly wise? To counsel as much is the same thing as declaring that there is such a thing. You can be excessively righteous. You can be excessively wise. But how can that be? The answer has everything to do with motives. Wisdom and goodness are perhaps not ends unto themselves, but must be understood in the context of loving God with all our being and loving one another as we love ourselves. Otherwise we fall into the same trap the Pharisees did. Otherwise we run the risk of trying to beat God's high score on the pinball machine that is morality and virtue. As it turns out, trying to be holier than the Lord is a very hubristic ambition, and not one with even the slightest chance of success. And this must be understood as a subset of what it means when we read "Be holy for I am holy." Our righteousness is filthy rags unless it is actually Christ's righteousness. And our wisdom is actually folly unless it is the wisdom of God.  But in that case, we are bound to subordinating our definition of what does or does not constitute righteousness and wisdom. God sets the standard, and we cannot improve it by making it more strict or severe or austere.