If the book of Genesis presents work as one of two tasks within our fundamental human vocation, then the Gospel sheds additional light on the same.
All four Gospels are at one in presenting a remarkable portrait of the figure of Jesus Christ, especially as he is manifested to us through his public ministry.
He teaches.
He heals.
He dies on the cross and, on the third day, rises from the dead.
His work is principally the work of redemption.
Christ’s redemptive actions illuminate the whole of our Christian lives, including the wide arena of work.
But this work of redemption goes beyond his public ministry; in fact, there is a larger part of Christ’s life that relates to our work in a surprisingly immediate way: the hidden life of Christ, his time growing up in obedience to Mary and Joseph, his increasing in wisdom and stature (see Luke 2:51–52), the first thirty years of his life… all this is to say, the overwhelming majority of Christ’s life relates to our work in an immediate way.
During much of this time, Jesus would have worked side by side with his earthly father, Joseph, first as a less than helpful child, then as an apprentice, and finally, as an equal collaborator.
The work performed by these two craftsmen would have been surprising if only for its ordinariness: sometimes light, sometimes grueling, sometimes trivial, sometimes critical.
But at all times— and this is the main point— it would have been well done, excellent in its quality and craftsmanship.
Doing our work and doing it well is, perhaps surprisingly, the first teaching of the Gospel on work.
In an essay entitled “Why Work?” Dorothy Sayers (1893–1957) has made this often-forgotten point in memorably fighting words:
“The Church’s approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sundays.
What the Church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables.Church by all means, and decent forms of amusement, certainly— but what use is all that if in the very center of his life and occupation he is insulting God with bad carpentry?
No crooked table legs or ill-fitting drawers ever, I dare swear, came out of the carpenter’s shop at Nazareth.
Nor, if they did, could anyone believe that they were made by the same hand that made Heaven and earth.”
Again, it isn’t that Christ’s public ministry has nothing to say about human labor— quite the contrary!
But the foundational, though inconspicuous, teaching of the Gospel on work comes to light most effectively by meditating on the concrete details of Jesus’ hidden life, the work that he performed, and the undoubtedly excellent fruit of this labor.
Come before your heavenly Father in prayer, asking him to help you keep in mind the careful, precise, and beautiful work that came from Jesus’ well-worn hands and to enable you also to always keep in view the excellence of your work, whatever type it may be.ate on the consequences of the Fall and how you experience them in your work.
Ask the Lord for the grace to see how these consequences are also an expression of God’s mercy, intended to lead us back to him.
