Christmas and Work: Work in the Christmas Story of Luke

Christmas and Work? What comes to mind when you read these two words together? You may think of Christmas as time away from work. One of the gifts of Christmas is getting at least one day off, though millions of people work on Christmas Day, either because it’s required or because they can’t quite get away from their digital leashes. 

If we think of work as more than just our paid occupations, then Christmas can actually require lots of extra work. Somebody has to buy and wrap all of those Christmas presents, not to mention confronting the “some assembly required” challenge they may present. And somebody has to buy, cook, and serve the holiday food, and then clean up after the meal. 

Christmas and Work. I’d like you to consider these two realities in this reading plan. Take your cue, not from the experiences noted above, but rather from the Christmas story in the Gospel of Luke. Read slowly through this narrative, pausing to consider how what you’re reading relates to your work.

The first thing to note is that you wouldn’t have this narrative apart from the hard work of its author. Tradition identifies the writer of the third gospel with Luke, a medical doctor and companion of Paul. The introduction to this gospel shows that Luke worked very hard on writing it. He “carefully investigated” the wide array of oral traditions and written accounts of the ministry of Jesus (1:2-3, NIV). Then, on the basis of his research, he sought to “write an orderly account” so that someone named “Theophilus . . . may know the certainty of the things you have been taught” (1:4). Luke is a serious historian, one who has labored intensely to produce the gospel associated with his name.

Whether Luke intended his gospel for more than just one primary reader is something scholars debate. But I'm pretty sure that the writer of the third gospel did not imagine that millions of people would be reading his “orderly account” almost twenty centuries after it was written. 

The case of Luke reminds me that we don’t really know the ultimate impact of our work. Our task, it seems to me, is not to work on polishing our legacy, but rather to work faithfully and diligently with whatever the Lord has given us to do, leaving the ultimate results of our labor to him.