What the Early Christians Thought About Work

Last time we concluded our look at how Our Lord and His Apostles connected and collaborated through work with this:

His example would eventually inspire them to work for the rest of their lives to spread His Good News. That work would build His Church, our Holy Catholic Church. We stand here today, members of His Church, because of their efforts.

Now it's our turn to continue that work. 

To avoid any misunderstanding, though, the point wasn't that we're all going to run around and preach the Good News full time. In fact, even though some of the Apostles did apparently give up their regular jobs, some, like St. Paul did not. (If you remember, he talks about how he could justify doing so, but chose instead to support himself by his own labor rather than accept the charity of others. His choice.) In fact, until the Holy Spirit descended on them after Our Lord's Ascension, the Apostles went right back to their regular work after that first Easter. Remember how they saw Him on the shore some time after His Resurrection while they were fishing?

But whether they continued working their old jobs, or left those jobs for full-time evangelizing, the Apostles and the early Church raised the very idea of work up a notch. In Working Your Way into Heaven, Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski explains that pagans despised work. Work was for slaves and servants. Christianity, however, did away with that:

It brought about the real liberation and elevation of human work.

As we've noted many times, work was never a consequence of Adam and Eve's Original Sin. Work was a part of human life, and a noble part at that. In a sense, we were created to work. And as we've previously seen, our work, done diligently and in the right spirit, helps God complete His own work. The difficulty, exhaustion, frustration, anxiety and even suffering we experience in our work was the consequence of our first parents' disobedience. You can thank them for whatever it is about your work that wears you down. So given the fact that work is integral to our lives as creatures of God, we can and should use our work as a means of getting to Heaven. When we apply diligence and dedication appropriate to our own specific work, when we offer our labor to God, for His greater glory, we continue and enhance the elevation of work from the pagan view of a distasteful necessity to be avoided if at all possible to a higher calling. And that goes for any kind of work.

The first Christians, even the rich ones, sometimes showed their membership in the Church by doing physical work. They professed Christ not only in word but in deed...This attitude conquered the dislike the pagan world had for any sort of work.

What is more, the Christian world emphasized the importance of uniting spiritual and physical work. We see this especially in the monastic life, where the most sublime contemplation has gone hand in hand with manual labor.

We're going to take a short break from our exploration of Cardinal Wyszynski's teachings about work. Meanwhile, you may want to spend time with Working Your Way into Heaven. You'll begin to better understand the fundamental role work plays in our lives as creatures of God. More importantly, though, you'll see how Our Lord elevates daily work from a kind of drudgery to avoid at all possible cost to our gateway to eternal happiness.