Judging from the Gospels, Jesus was a devotee of laziness, and I mean that with no disrespect. In fact, while his laziness is rarely discussed, and is not noticed by anyone in the New Testament, Jesus’s striking freedom from work may well exert an unconscious power over the common man, who will, undoubtedly, view it as a divine quality.
Of course, despite having no record of doing any “honest work,” as the people call it, Jesus was in support of working on the Sabbath, the one day when people were not supposed to work. How’s that for counter-culture contrarianism?
The same anti-work ethic is evident when Martha, the sister of Mary, complained that her sister should be at home doing her chores instead of hanging out with Jesus. Jesus, of course, told her that Mary had “chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her” (Luke 10:42). But Jesus was wrong, for Jesus would be taken away from Mary.
So how did Jesus support himself during those three years of preaching? He knew tax collectors; he had friends in high places; when he needed a dining hall for his last supper, he simply told his disciples to speak to a certain person who would provide it.
Jesus didn’t even bear his own cross, as Simon, the one named Peter, helped him in that rare moment of honest work.
Jesus said, “The poor will inherit the Earth,” yet he did not stipulate that they would have to work for their inheritance. While this may be a great relief to Christians, the political function of this wild inheritance promise was likely to pacify the poor and to prevent their uprising against the rich land owners, slave owners and so on and so forth.
While Jesus did little or no work himself, he was not against using work as symbols of Christian devotion. When he spoke to the people, he even compared the struggle to enter Heaven to the field laborer’s work for a penny. If that image isn’t provocative enough, to provoke more questions he insisted that both the laborers who worked an inhumane 11 hour-day and those who worked for just 1 hour would get the same reward, a penny. There’s a good warning against making any effort for Heaven.
While the above mischievous reading of the one-penny parable may be entirely valid, it was not the one that pleased those who commissioned the Gospels, namely the clergy, who would have interpreted this same parable as clear proof of the Catholic Church’s right to administer a certain sacrament to people on their death bed, a sacrament which cleansed the soul of a lifetime of sin and, consequently, sent the 1-hour or death-bed Christian to the same reward as the 11-hour or lifetime Christian.
Without a trace of irony, the commissioned authors of the Bible achieve the same effect that one finds with literary irony: one level of Gospel meaning exists to preserve the political structure that benefits the powerful, the other level exists for the amusement of nut crackers and laughing owls.
