Description
A revolutionary understanding of work
It’s no accident that the Cross of Christ is called the work of Christ. Geoff Shattock takes a look at those remarkable six hours and relates them to the hours we spend at our own workplaces, where stress and struggle meet reality and meaning.
Starting to focus I t was reported by a man formerly in financial services that a man currently in the armed services was a witness to a series of events which shocked and surprised him. Even for a military man, used to assaults on the eyes as part of his chosen profession, this was an extraordinary scenario to observe.
The episode lasted six hours and the officer’s conclusion was typically terse in true clipped, precise army language. “Surely” he exclaimed “he was the Son of God!”1
Something else that was sure about this moment, was that the soldier had little grasp of the significance and the meaning of the drama he had just seen, nor the words he had used to respond to his experience. It is certain that when he used the phrase “Son of God” he would have had little in common with the later understanding of the phrase nor even the thinking of the man who preserved his words in the first book of the New Testament.
But what had he seen? Over the previous six hours, or even eighteen hours, depending on how long he had been on duty, this unnamed soldier had witnessed a northern carpenter turned teacher tortured to death in the distinctive Italian style.
This episode, along with the accompanying astronomical and geological convulsions, had so moved and terrified him that he was inspired to pronounce his profound verdict on this remarkable day.
Hindsight and insight With the luxury of a couple of millennia we can now look at these events and harness the benefits of hindsight to deepen our levels of insight, applying our minds to their meaning and significance. The question we face, however, may be very similar to the soldier’s challenge. What are we actually looking at here? What do we see?
I would suggest to you that he saw an extremely complex series of events but one of the central meanings and activities which he saw had to do with work. In 1618 the Catholic priest and scholar Robert Bellarmine described the cross itself as “The pulpit of the preacher, the altar of the sacrificing priest, the arena of the competent and the workshop of the wonderworker”.2
Applying our millennia of experiences to the same event we seem to have focused well on the pulpit, the altar and the arena but not seen the workshop very clearly. This is not to say that we…
