The Bible and Life

by Edwin Holt Hughes

The New Testament is less specific in its descriptions, but it often gives us the like hint. Matthew was at the seat of custom when he was invited into the fellowship of the disciples that he might tell men of the eternal exchange. James and John were engaged in their occupation as fishermen when they heard the voice on the shore and pulled their boat over the blue waves that they might become fishers of men. The shepherds were in faithful watch over their flocks by night when they heard the evangel of song and were startled by the message of peace. The illustrations make us feel that the favorite meeting place of God with man is the meeting place of man with his work. A motto says that “the best reward of good work is more good work to do.” The providence of God upholds the motto. The Bible shows a preference for the workers as against the shirks. It puts the premium on industry, whether the type of toil be manual or spiritual.

Here, as in all other themes of real life, we come to Christ for our highest teaching and our best example. We have noted elsewhere that he made the home the illustration of our relations with God; and we now note that he made the common work of earth the illustration of our responsibility for service to God. This he did so often and so urgently that we are driven to feel that work was not only the form of illustration but also the form of service itself. How many parables did he gain from the ways of toil? He would say, “The kingdom of heaven is like unto—,” and straightway his hearers’ minds were sent to the places where men wrought for their daily bread. In most places the blanks can be supplied by some form of employment. “The kingdom of heaven is like unto—” a merchant and his pearls; a sower and his field; a woman and her leaven; a fisherman and his net; a husbandman and his vineyard; a merchant traveler and the intrusted talents. Where his words were used as deft and quick illustrations rather than as lengthy and formal parables, he gathered his material from the realms of toil. The builder and the house; the shepherd and the sheep; the axman and the tree; the tailor and the cloth; the housewife and the coin; the rich man and his steward; the woman and her grinding; the man and his plowing; the watchman and his vigil; the husbandman and the vine; all these entered into his speech as showing what God would expect of men. Here we have almost a cyclopedia of labors. Inasmuch as Jesus commended the qualities shown in these various phases of service, we are allowed to think that he regarded the legitimate occupations of everyday life as both representing and fulfilling the kingdom of God. Nor will reverent thought be satisfied with any less comprehensive view. There would be a dread of living if we were made to feel that the work which we must do, both to meet our own sense of self-respect and to provide for the needs of ourselves and our beloved, was either in opposition to the grace of God or stood for neutral territory between the realms of good and evil. The teaching of Jesus saves us from that practical atheism. He allows every honest man to take the oft-repeated phrase, “The kingdom of heaven is like unto—,” and to complete a portion of its meaning from his own form of labor. If a man is engaged in any task that makes sacrilege and blasphemy when it is used to fill out the sentence, then let that man look well to his own heart and life. Every man’s work should serve as a parable of Christ.

But Jesus was not simply the doctrinaire of toil; he was its exemplar. The emphasis here is usually placed upon the fact that Christ was a carpenter. He transformed crude materials into useful tools. An overdone stress on this point is itself a confession that manual toil needs an apologist! The significant thing is that such a stress is wholly absent from the speech and attitude of Jesus. With him carpentry seems to have been a natural part of life. He never refers to it as something that he had outgrown. His backward look toward the occupation of his youth betrays no condescension, like to that occasionally seen in so-called self-made men! After he had left the carpenter’s bench he said, “I work.” When he saw the night closing down about him, the brevity of the working day became an incentive to more work, and he said, “I must work.” Even in the agony we can catch the exultation of the cry, “I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do.” It was his meat to finish his “work.” Jesus did the appointed task for each period of his life. Then he passed on to the task of the next period without the least hint that the varying tasks were not joined in the harmony of the divine purpose. The work of his life was like his garment; it was all of one piece. From the building of the Nazareth cottage on to the building of the “many mansions,” there is no consciousness of contradiction. With Jesus the working life was a unity.

And at the risk of being mechanical in the use of bungling divisions we may declare that Jesus entered into all the large divisions of toil. The note of universality is seen here as it is seen elsewhere. We have been told that the three forms of temptation that Jesus encountered on mountain top and temple pinnacle exhaust all the types. It has been said, too, that the thankfulness of Jesus is directed toward all the channels by which the good of life can flow in upon us. This same characteristic of universality appears in the work of Christ. As a carpenter he worked upon material things. As a healer he worked upon the bodies of men. As a teacher he worked upon the minds of men. As a preacher he worked upon the souls of men. All the workers of the world can be brought into one of these divisions, and so all true workers can enter into partnership with Jesus. We call him the Carpenter, the Great Physician, the Greatest Teacher, the World’s Saviour! The manual toilers claim him. The doctors claim him. The teachers claim him. The evangelists claim him. He is at home in the shop, in the hospital, in the schoolroom, and in the temple. All the classes of toilers can appeal to the sanction of his example.

Still we must again assert that these clumsy divisions were not emphasized by Jesus himself. There has been an age-long debate, ofttimes degenerating into a wrangle, as to the relative hardships of the different forms of labor. Men who cling to their occupations will still declare that those occupations have trials beyond all others. Into this debate Jesus did not enter. He never set one form of toil against another by entering into any comparisons or contrasts. As he experienced all the general forms of labor, so did he honor all forms. In his view they were all good and all cooperative. On the surface they may seem to be rivals, but in the center they are actual partners in the divine program. Hence Jesus passed from one realm of work to another with little sense of transition. Carpenter, Healer, Teacher, Preacher, he was ever the servant of the Kingdom. Faithfulness, honor, industry, efficiency, patience—in short, all the virtues were possible in any good way of work. The life of Jesus unites all our types of labor in a divine purpose and rebukes that quarrelsome spirit which so often sets the manual laborers and the mental and moral laborers in opposition. The hand cannot say to the head, “I have no need of thee,” nor can the head utter the like speech of egotism and self-sufficiency. The workers are all one body, and every one members of another.

So do we find Jesus putting himself with willing sacrifice into his varying tasks. He had said to his parents in Jerusalem, “Wist ye not that I must be amid my Father’s matters?” and then he went into what men call the silent years. But they were not wholly silent. The attentive can hear the sound of the hammer. The point is that in passing from the Jerusalem temple to the Nazareth shop Jesus did not depart from his Father’s business. We may all resent the particular descriptions of the quality of his work as a carpenter; and we may be quite content in our faith that all his work was done faithfully and well. Holman Hunt’s “Shadow of the Cross” relates Jesus’s work in the shop to his sacrificial character. At the end of a weary day the Nazareth Carpenter extends his arms to relieve his weariness. The sunshine coming through the window casts his shadow on the wall in the form of a Cross. His mother glancing in through another window sees the Cross foreshadowed there and gets her glimpse of the sword that should enter her own heart. Nor did Jesus escape hardship and exhaustion when he became a healer and teacher of the people. The crowds thronged him wherever he went. The hillside became like an open-air hospital. The multitudes hung upon his words of instruction. Some have said that one reason why he commanded men who were healed or who were told the deeper secret of his nature that they “should tell no man,” was that he might avoid the greater press of the throngs. Be that as it may, we are surely justified in saying that he gave himself lavishly to the work of each period. In each section of his life his action said, “I must work.”

It would be easy, however, to overstate Jesus’s relation to work. He did not labor all the time. Knowing how to toil he knew likewise how to rest. Men may plead the example of Satan against a vacation season, but they cannot plead the example of Christ! He rested after he had worked and in order that he might work again. When the crowd became importunate and the drain upon his power had become severe, he sought the desert and in its quiet restored himself for the new labors. He bade his weary disciples to come apart to the spot of respite. He was the exemplar of proper rest even as he was the exemplar of proper work. Industrious men often need one lesson even as lazy men need the other. There are persons who are greedy of toil. They are as avaricious for it as the miser is for gold. They are what Carlyle would call “terrible toilers.” They die before their time because they work after their time. Jesus knew this danger. He wished to guard against it by keeping the Sabbath for man. He wanted to save the resting place between the weeks because he wanted to save man to his best self and work. He prescribed the working day and the shop, and he prescribed the resting day and the desert.

We need not be surprised, then, to find that the new day puts the emphasis on the sanctification of common work. Professor Peabody gives the contrast between two well-known poems as illustrating a change that has come over the personal side of the social question. A generation since Lowell gave us his “Vision of Sir Launfal.” The hero of this poem, after traveling in many lands, finally finds the holy grail in the cup which he had filled for a way-side beggar, while the more personal presence of Jesus is discovered in the beggar himself to whom the searcher has given alms. The characteristic of the new day is seen in Van Dyke’s “The Toiling of Felix.” The hero of this later poem, after seeking the direct vision of his Lord in caves and deserts of idle contemplation, at last secures the coveted revelation as he enters gladly into a life of toil and particularly as he flings himself into the swollen river to rescue a fellow laborer. Felix finds that there is a holy literalness in the words which he found on the piece of papyrus as a recovered gospel of Christ:

Lift the stone, and thou shalt find me;
Cleave the wood, and there am I.

The ranks of labor are “the dusty regiments of God.” The Lord, being a worker, is mindful of his own: