Redeeming Work with Jesus and the Hulk
I was four years-old when the knock sounded on our front door and probably sitting at the kitchen table forcing down mom-mandated oatmeal. I was getting ready for my day at Kiddie Kollege, the preschool where I spent those weekdays while both my parents worked full-time. The morning knock was quite the surprise—an interruption to our daily ritual. On the other side of the threshold stood a man who I can only describe as “hulkish” because he quite literally looked like the Incredible Hulk. The enormous black-haired man’s name was Michael Danford, and he was my grandad’s farmhand. My grandparents lived next door, and Michael wanted to know if he could “borrow” me for a few minutes.
Apparently, the farmhands had dropped a screw into a crack on a combine tractor, and none of them had arms long enough to reach it. I was the creative solution to their problem—just the right size to go into the abyss and emerge with their necessary piece of metal in hand. I remember Michael needing to assure my mom that I would suffer no harm. I didn’t get hurt, and I did emerge with the tractor part. Most importantly, I gained the praise of the Hulk. It was my earliest memory of an experience I’ve now come to understand as the dignity of work. For the first time in my life, I experienced the satisfaction of a job well done.
Work is commonly misunderstood today—a necessary evil that earns the money we need to live. The goal is to quit working as soon as possible and to make as much money with as little work as necessary. Monday begins a weekly countdown until Friday when we can finally announce “TGIF!” because it marks our two-day period of freedom from work before we must do it all over again.
The Bible, however, links work, not to humanity’s fall into sin, but to creation. Work was part of God’s good design for his image-bearers from the very beginning. We were created in God’s image to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion” (Gen 1:28). God placed Adam in the garden of Eden “to work it and keep it” (Gen 2:15). Just as God worked six days in creating the universe before resting in satisfaction over the goodness of the finished product, so his image-bearers follow his lead. Work dignifies us by raising us up to Godward heights as we too delight in the outcome of our labor—a manicured lawn or a finished house chore or a degree earned or a completed work project.
Sin introduces difficulty to work. Because of our rebellion and the impact of our sin on the world around us, we must now contend with complications from the outside and inner contempt from within our own hearts. Work itself is a created good. Human sin is the source of our frustrations.
It’s interesting to think about Jesus’s calling of Peter, James, and John in the context of our relationship with work. In Luke 5:1-11, Jesus uses their vocation as fishermen as a parable about joining his work of proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom. Their frustration with work is evident as Peter admits that they had worked “all night long and caught nothing” (v. 5). Jesus wants Peter to cast his nets into the water one more time in broad daylight—a request the experienced fisherman clearly thinks futile.
Nevertheless, Peter obeys because Jesus is the one asking. And, of course, the result is a catch of fish unlike anything they had ever seen before. Jesus wants Peter and the others to know that success in their new work of catching men will not depend on their own expertise, but on their obedient faith. Jesus is the one who brings the fish into the net, or the men into the kingdom.
We should expect the perfect man, the second Adam, to come working just as the first Adam did at creation. And indeed, Jesus comes “to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10). In working to redeem his people, he redeems work along the way by directing it back toward the glory of God, the purpose for which it exists. However, he chooses not to work alone. The people he saves he enlists to join his work—the mission of the kingdom. We regain the dignity of work as we connect it to this same mission. Our work, no matter what it is, increases in gravity as we submit it to our King.
Jesus does not call everyone to leave their vocation to follow him. In preparing people for the coming of Jesus, John the Baptist did not require the crowds, tax collectors, and soldiers to leave their vocations (Luke 3:10-14). He did, however, call them to repent of using their work selfishly—of serving their own interests by exploiting others. We participate in the redemption of work as we submit our own work to Jesus’s eternal purposes. Whatever we do—whether we’re teachers or construction workers or stay-at-home moms—our work regains its dignity as it folds into Jesus’s purposes.
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