Toil and drudgery: any volunteers? Mostly we do our best to avoid these monsters and we can do so with Mr Dyson and other wonder-workers to help us. There’s not much future in selling hearthstones, washing-boards and ashpans. We have moved on since domestic drudgery was the lot of starry-eyed young brides.
So what are we to make of the reference in 1 Thessalonians 3.8 to these two undesirables? Is the writer holding up for our approval what we now see as outmoded dutiful misery as an appropriate part of a Christian’s moral responsibility? And is the twin claimant on our time part of the human dilemma, to be with us for ever as Genesis 3.19 suggests?
No. The sooner we eliminate toil and drudgery, the better we shall be. We have seen the back of a feudal system that consigned an army of mostly female drudges to a career in domestic service, with a butler as sergeant-major and gardeners and ostlers digging and cuirry-combing for all they were worth to please a master.
But some repetitive and mind-numbing jobs still have to be done. Some of them are concerned with computers; others with motor-vehicles, whether powered by internal combustion or electricity. Mostly we pay to have these maintenance jobs done by people who know what they are about and get paid appropriately for doing it.
When we look at the context of the above-mentioned admonition in the letter to the Thessalonians, we find that the writer is somewhat indignant about those early Christians turning their backs upon daily responsibilities and idling their time away. This is not a pattern for Christians to follow.
To put it another way, being a Christian is not a hobby, a spare-time activity like collecting antiques or model-making. It is about main-line activity, about what we do to put bread on the table, about making things better for everybody. Paul and his associates managed to do that and to propagate the Gospel as well. There is a place for toil and drudgery; it is the alternative to idleness, the kind of idleness that results from a belief that ‘the world owes me a living.’
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