It may come as something of a challenge to connect the positive message of Christian faith with a scriptural reading like the one we have in the Book of Job today. Job asks, “Is not man’s life on earth a drudgery?” We all may have been tempted at some time—when facing the challenges of day-to-day work, or the threat of burn out—to feel exactly the same way. All work and no play. Right? “Please Deacon,” you may say, “don’t set the tone for the week. I had planned on taking it easy!”
Job, in asking his question, establishes something of a baseline for seeing things from more than one point of view. From Job’s vantage point we see life in light of humanity fallen from grace. The Catechism of the Church teaches us that originally our daily work was not a burden, “but rather the collaboration of man and woman with God in perfecting the visible creation.”
The Christian faith allows us to see everything from the point of view of life having been transformed; that is, from a view that differs from the reality of fallen humanity. Indeed Christ has the power to redeem work along with everything else in the world. Through his transforming grace, work—rather than remaining drudgery—becomes what God intended it to be from the start: collaboration between humanity and God.
One of my relatives recently posted a quote on Facebook: “Life is not really a useless endeavor, but it might be liberating to give in to that orientation: Especially when faced with the enormity and the majesty of why we are really here.” He told me that I might not want to cite his source (Norman Mailer). I told him that I once quoted Woody Allen at a wedding.
In both the readings from First Corinthians and the Gospel of Mark today there is a strong sense of obligation, duty, responsibility, and stewardship—“for this purpose I have come,” Jesus says speaking of his own call or purpose. Most of us probably can relate to the idea of obligation. In my work as a deacon, and away from the parish as special education teacher, I have often reflected on duty and obligation, and on my lot in life, though not so much in terms of it being my sole purpose—especially on difficult days. However, I do believe that in terms of Christianity purpose does play heavily as does the aforementioned ideas of duty, obligation, and responsibility. They’re the true stuff of Christian ethics.
In Christ human labor is transformed by grace and humanity becomes a partner with God in work. I think it would probably be a mistake to consider this as relating to our particular jobs only—say teacher, homemaker, engineer, or manager, whatever it might be that we do each day—and just stop there. There’s something more about work and purpose that we should consider.
The apostle Paul talks about himself being a slave to all. The only reason one might consider becoming a slave is to set slaves free. It’s hard, or at least it is for me, to take the image of slavery lightly. Slavery plays heavily in American cultural memory—it hasn’t really been that long ago—and it may come as a surprise to some that slavery is still an issue in our world today, but it’s true. Even in our own country slavery is a reality through certain kinds of forced prostitution and pornography. In other places in the world forced labor is still a reality. I believe Paul knew that the only way to break the strongholds of the world was to place himself totally in the service of building a new world through grace.
Sometimes we make the mistake spiritualizing the idea of God’s transformation so that we think it only pertains to our inner lives. In the case of the idea of God transforming work it might be easy to say, “So okay, God has transformed my work. That’s nice to know—I can pray about it— but I still have to put in my hours and on many days it still seems like the same old same old.” I personally try to avoid thinking of my work as drudgery, but we all do it at times. Just out of practicality, perhaps we should work to find out what makes our work seem that way and attempt to improve it, whether we’re talking about tons of paperwork or difficult interpersonal relationships.
The truth is that the pain and drudgery of the fallen world we hear about in Job is still an existing reality. As Christians we have the duty and obligation to meet the fallen world with grace infused into our actions. Our Christian ethics go beyond the merely personal things we experience. The world is larger than we think. In a foremost way Christian ethics demand that we address the social injustices that exist in the world outside ourselves, injustices like true human bondage, and regardless of whether it is the evil of a certain a certain kind of slavery, or the kind of business and economic practices that put material gain above the needs of the least among us, we as Christians have an obligation to act.
Our obligation, our duty and service, only begins by considering the fact that for many people daily life is not filled with freedom and grace. Our true obligation is to be bringers of grace, healing, and reconciliation where the need is greatest. If we truly believe that Christ transforms our work from burden and drudgery into the original collaboration that existed between men and women with God, then to bring it about we have to be the active agents in this collaboration. We must discover Christ’s activity in the world—his purpose in the world—and actually work alongside him in the things that he does.
True Christian action in the world, true responsibility, is not about withdrawing from the world; far from that, it’s about stepping up to the real duty that sees as its object humanity that suffers from injustice and the absence of the grace that we have been given to share. It is nothing less than the majesty of why we are really here.
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