By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground… you are dust, and to dust you shall return. Genesis 3:19.

We were created to find fulfilment in our working. The Fall spoiled all that and put a negative connotation on the word ‘work’. Paul criticised idleness and exhorted Christians to work (2 Thessalonians 3:6). For Marx, ‘the shortening of the workday’ and never good work itself is portrayed as the entrance to the ‘realm of freedom’. Simone Weil writes about the holiness of the poor – the peasant, the labourer, the worker – who at the end of the day drops on the bed from exhaustion. There’s an integrity about doing one’s daily work to the best of one’s abilities and energies. Work is not the antithesis of human fulfilment. We are not creatures destined for freedom who are now trapped in an alienated realm of necessity. We are called to manifest the image of God, to be free precisely in and through our work.

All human activities are equally God-given. None can claim religious priority over another. Tyndale declared that ‘to wash dishes and to preach is all one, as touching the deed, to please God.’ We are not apprentice angels, better suited to and waiting for an existence on another spiritual plane. Paul made no distinction between physical and spiritual work and used the same terms to refer to both the manual labour by which he earned a living and also his apostolic service.

May the blessing of God the creator, Jesus the carpenter, and the Spirit our helper, be on you and your work, now and always. Amen.