‘I’ among us who loves as we should love. We can take his food, gorge on it, and then learn to imitate his sacrifice.
It is not simply a matter of example. Let us think a little about that sacrifice. The bread is not quite how we would like it; not in nice soft white slices. It is a rough and broken bread, ‘my flesh for the life of the world’. The agony of the Cross is not an obvious sign of the love of God. But Christ’s love is so full, and so different from ours, because it was taken even to the last resort: ‘Father, forgive them, they do not know what they are doing.’ We have to appreciate the depth of choice involved in the Passion of Jesus. At any point he could have answered his taunters and saved himself. At any point he could have summoned the power that stilled storms and gave sight to the blind. At any point, God could have intervened in tiny, invisible ways to prevent the situation becoming humanly inevitable.
He did not, for the same reason that he will not just punish us, or scrap the whole world and start again. Christ resisting his Cross would have been an act of self-defence, of aggression such as we do every day. He could have defended himself, with swords or thunderbolts, but at the expense of those around him. This is what makes the difference. His love consists of a total giving of himself, unmixed with anything else, any other interest, any other motive. It is the love which the Father and Son share in the Holy Spirit, the same love which overflowed in the creation of you and me and the whole world, and the same love we were meant to show to each other in him and to him in each other. But we say ‘no’ to God and to ourselves and to others in a thousand little ways each day. Christ fulfilled the will of God, gave to the Father a total ‘yes’ because at each stage he responded with the gift of love. At last, there was a part of creation which no longer held up God’s grace with resistance.
All we have to do is get in touch with Christ, and keep in touch. The Church exists simply as a way of doing this, so that Christ walks with each person the path of life. In some senses, it is the way of doing this. Catholics believe that in the Church, God gives us the love of Christ, and a community in which to share it. The theological term for this is ‘sacrament’. Before we think about sacraments, however, it is time to make concrete some of the doctrines we have looked at. We now have sufficient resources to make some sense of everyday life.
But they give solidity to the created world.
Ecclesiasticus 38:34
The aim of this chapter is to show how the doctrines we have been exploring can impact on the way we see everyday life. The Gospel is about Jesus Christ, the God who lives with us. Let us begin with the part of life which is perhaps the least likely candidate for finding God: the daily drudge of working (or, worse, not working) for our living.
The modern period has witnessed a large degree of confusion about the purpose and value of work. In the ancient world, things were much simpler. Greek culture, for example, thrived on the institution of slavery, which left a large leisured class able to enjoy the delights of politics, the theatre and warfare. Such a way of organizing society was not simply convenient, it actually reflected what were perceived as fundamental facts about human beings. It was not just the case that slaves were people who had fallen on hard times, or were the captives of vanquished enemies. People became slaves because they were that type of people, understood as almost a separate species. As Aristotle put it, ‘The natural slave is one qualified to be, and therefore is, the property of another or who is only so far a human being as to understand reason without himself possessing it’ (Politics, 1.5).
It is hardly necessary to trace the path of such thinking through history. Perhaps the clearest expression is in the eighteenth-century description of those who did no work at all as ‘people of quality’. Nor is it fair to blame the Greeks. Aristotle was cited only because he gives such a bald statement of what is so easily assumed. The same perceptions would have been found in ancient – Old Testament – Israel. Even in this economically very simple, agricultural society, wealth, and the consequent ability to have servants and be freed from daily drudge, was seen as a sign of righteousness and of blessing. Though the wicked may prosper for a short while, the psalmist assures us that this is done on credit, and that we shall soon see his widow and children begging in the streets. When Job is suddenly cast into utter destitution, the only explanation his comforters can find is that he must somehow have sinned without knowing it. It is but a step from saying that riches are a sign of God’s favour to saying that rich people are the people that God likes. Such thinking underlies the Pharisees’ statement about Jesus in St John’s Gospel that ‘as for this man, we do not even know where he comes from’. Which is simply a way of saying that he obviously does not come from the right place, the right people.
The market place
We have to face the fact that for most people, the word ‘work’ is synonymous with that of ‘toil’. There are two opposing tendencies, which to some degree are present in everyone. One is to minimize work as much as possible, to adopt the attitude of one who ‘clocks’ on and off with little regard for what is done in between, and little sense of purpose in it. The other is to be workaholic, to be someone who cannot stop, who stays late at work or even brings it home at weekends. In some senses, work has become his, or her, life. It would be unwise to rhapsodize about the supreme Christian value of work unless it is taken on board that work is for many a kind of trap, in either futility or the hectic pursuit of rewards that the pursuer then has no time to enjoy. An example of the first is the treadmill of industrial production so well documented in Victorian social fiction, and still to be seen in the sweatshops of emerging Asian economies, while the second is a phenomenon recognizable to many a tired commuter.
What is it that lies at the root of these problems, that has made work a more deadly enemy of the soul than idleness? Perhaps it might be summed up in the word ‘alienation’. The issue can be put very simply. Some people have work which is obviously fulfilling. Take doctors, for example. They spend their day either curing people or helping them to bear their suffering. At the same time they do much to support friends and relatives of the sick, and provide a genuine and real witness of love in society. Their work contributes, and they see the result. While most doctors would seek to diminish the rosy glow about their profession, it remains an example of what the Second Vatican Council had in mind when it said:
When men and women provide for themselves and their families in such a way as to be of service to the community as well, they can rightly look upon their work as a prolongation of the work of their creator, a service to their fellow men, and their personal contribution to the fulfilment in history of the divine plan.
Gaudium et Spes, 34
The same could easily be said of teachers, social workers and many others. But again, if we look around at the majority, it just does not seem to apply. How does a man in a production line turning out, say, sports cars, contribute to society? You might say that he provides necessary means of transport. But who buys sports cars? Not many people, and certainly not the men who make them. A rather disproportionate amount of society’s resources of labour and materials thus goes towards providing a particular, and perhaps unnecessary, means of transport for rather a few people. If we raise the stakes, as Gaudium et Spes
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