At least, we are workers in this current world, and in a painful way.

If you’ve read a bit of philosophy, you might have read up on a philosopher named Hannah Arendt. In her The Human Condition, she focuses on the three kinds of activities she has identified in human experience: the dreary, fleeting but necessary life-sustaining work, called “labor”; the creation of enduring objects that can help ease labor (tools or machines) or do many other things (elicit emotions), called “work”; and the voting and enacting of policies that demonstrate one’s or one’s society’s values, called “action.”

As far as rough divisions go, these three concepts do meaningfully divide human experience into activities with different goals. Merely sustaining one’s life is not as exciting or fulfilling and often reminds how our existence is jailed to our circumstances, while action is the dynamic, self-expressive type of action that makes us feel most “free” and “ourselves.” Creating tools and works can make labor less painful (or even enjoyable, turning it into some light sort of game), make work itself less painful (we make machines called “factories” to create other machines), or help facilitate action (creating ballot boxes, educational material, and media platforms to influence others’ views and make sure one’s own correct view gets the most likes). Since “work” is usually there to help with labor or action, we will drop Hannah’s term here and strictly use work to refer to the non-theoretic concept of work in general.

I think it is interesting to see how we would analyze these concepts in terms of the Bible, or to see if the Bible has similar or different ways of viewing these realms of “doing.” Before Adam sinned, the kind of work he would do was naming the animals, a kind of science. It takes investigation to know which name you would give to each animal. Would that be tiring “labor”? If physics worked in largely the same way in the Garden of Eden, then technically you are exerting energy, but not really that much. In fact, you probably exert so little energy in doing anything that your efficient body is like the average American—you store energy as fat and have to “labor” to get them off you! But after Adam sinned, God cursed the ground such that Adam would have to do so much more work to just stay alive. Of course, there is still a surplus (or else he couldn’t have stayed alive for nearly a thousand years). But life was now uncomfortable.

But was the uncomfortableness of labor just all about staying alive? What about one’s relation to God? When one worships God and obeys God, that is something more like action. It is an expression of a worldview, a law, a decision. And it seems like labor can be distinct from action. Jesus makes some interesting remarks about work and survival:

John 4:34 Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work.

The survival-object is his job or work, the thing that he is to do. The labor-food is not just the result of doing action. The labor-food is action. Gaining or keeping life is obeying God’s will. With Adam before the fall, it would have been so, and remained so, if Adam didn’t sin. But because we are sinners, we would just die if God did not divide a new kind of “labor” from the original work that is both political (since it upholds God) and laborious (but not that laborious). So now there is work for us to sustain our life one day at a time. But Jesus does the one, unified labor-action work of sustaining both his life and others’ (our own) lives, by preaching repentance and taking our place on the cross of suffering and death according to God’s will. We are invited to share in his work-life by obeying him as his helper, the church. With him, we turn death to life.

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