The Dignity of Work

A teacher at a noted prep school had a troublesome student.  This student handed in slap-dash assignments when he bothered to do them at all.  He paid no attention in class, often distracting the other students with side-talk or irrelevant questions.  One day, the teacher’s patience simply wears out.  He calls out the student in class and said, “Mr. Smith, there are four words that describe your future in this world.”  Responding to the student’s inquisitive look, the teacher says, “Want fries with that?”  Everyone in class chuckles, for certainly this was not what they had in mind for themselves.  They would do so much better.

As someone who enjoys clever repartee, I was amused when a fellow teacher related this story to me.  However, on reflection, I realized that it denigrated an entire class of honest work; work which our Church teaches us has great dignity.  It is by our work that we participate in the creative nature of God. It is though our work, at least in part, that we live out our nature as God’s children.  Our catechism states, “Human work proceeds directly from persons created in the image of God and called to prolong the work of creation by subduing the earth, both with and for one another.” (CCC 2427)

Our celebration today, lauding St. Joseph the Worker, is a relatively recent addition to the liturgical calendar, for it was only in 1955 that Pope Pius XII instituted this celebration.  Yet, the concept of celebrating work has roots deep in our faith’s past.  St. Joseph was a carpenter, a creative job for sure, but also a job that required long hours and its share of drudgery.  Yet this is the work that St. Joseph taught our Lord to perform.  This is the work that Jesus did to help support his family and to serve the village of Nazareth.

As the teacher denigrates the work of serving fast food burgers, the townspeople of Nazareth denigrate the lowly carpenter’s trade.  Jesus can’t be the prophet he claims to be, he is the son of a carpenter! (Mt 13:54-58)

And yet God has lifted up the lowly carpenter from Nazareth to be the savior of the world.  Our faith insists that each human being shares a great dignity – created in the image and likeness of God, loved and cherished by our infinite and eternal God, and entrusted by God to steward and care for all of God’s creation through the dint of honest work.

But I often fall into the same trap as the teacher in our story and the people in Nazareth.  I impute greater dignity to certain types of work, implying less dignity in other work.  I may deem intellectual work more dignified than manual labor.  Alternatively, I often equate the dignity of the work with the money that it earns.  Worse, it then becomes easy for me to assume that the people doing this less-dignified work must be, ipso facto, less-dignified human beings.  I cannot be following Jesus at that point, as Jesus never goes there.

Jesus calls each one of us, the CEO and the McDonald’s clerk, the lawyer and the garbage collector, the scientist and the homemaker, to follow him.  He calls us to be loving, kind, generous, joy-filled, and merciful harbingers of the kingdom of God, recognizing the dignity of every person, each created in God’s image and likeness.  Whatever what we do for a living, Jesus calls us to work for life.

Jesus knows that this will not be easy.  He tells us that it will entail suffering and drudgery, for it is being a slave to all.  It will seem fruitless at times, as it may inspire hatred from the very ones whom we love, who are the objects of our service.  Yet it is part of our nature, a nature that Jesus took on and a nature that Jesus redeems by his work, by his suffering, and by his death on the cross.

St. Joseph the Worker, pray for us.