LIKE MANY OF you, I’ve held a variety of jobs in my lifetime, and some of those work environments were…less encouraging than others. There are good bosses and bad bosses, people who are dedicated to their jobs and others who would rather be anywhere else.

Before my wife and I got married, I worked for a company where one of my jobs was to take the company’s receipts to the bank. This was, of course, in the days before electronic deposits. I had to carry a zippered case filled with thousands of dollars worth of checks. The vice-president, who tended to be both authoritarian and a bit paranoid, worried that the courier might get mugged and the money stolen. He therefore established the rule that somebody else would drive the car and drop the courier at the door, in view of both the driver and the bank’s security guard. Anyone in the secretarial pool could be asked to drive.

One morning, I approached one of the secretaries and asked her to take me. “I’m busy,” she said, without looking up. “Find someone else.” I asked someone else and got a similar response. When I had asked all of them and they all refused, I quietly signed out a car and ran the errand by myself. Apparently, after I left, a bit of panic ensued: He didn’t…did he? The vice-president cornered me when I returned, asking me why I had broken the rule. I calmly told him what happened.

Let’s just say that I never had any difficulty finding a driver again.

But the incident was symptomatic of the spirit of the entire company. The rank and file had no love for middle and upper management, and few, if any, enjoyed their jobs. Most did the minimum they needed to do to keep earning their paycheck. I can’t say I blamed them, for some of the work was mind-numbingly boring and repetitive. But this created a pretty glum environment, where the attitude was, “Let’s just get this over with.” Nobody wanted to go the extra mile for anyone. I remember walking from one department to another and coming across another employee who had just dropped an armload of papers. Naturally, I stopped to help him pick the papers up — and he looked at me as if I had just descended from heaven. Nobody, he told me, had ever helped him with anything before.

Is that just how it is? Would it make a difference if an employee was a believer, even in a non-Christian environment? And if so, what kind of difference would it make?

. . .

IN RECENT POSTS, we’ve been looking at Paul’s version of a “household code,” the rules for the good order of a household. The version we find in Colossians is shorter than the one in Ephesians, but both address the relationships between wives and their husbands, children and their fathers, and slaves and their masters. Note that in each relationship, one of the parties includes the paterfamilias, so much of Paul’s instruction is aimed at the head of the household in his various roles. And as we’ve seen, while much of what he tells wives, children, and slaves seems to reinforce the status quo, the rest of his instruction assumes the transformation of the attitude and behavior of the paterfamilias. Paul is changing the household from the inside out, as he teaches them to put Christ first.

That includes changing how slaves think of their work. Here are Paul’s words again, this time as translated in the Common English Bible:

Slaves, obey your masters on earth in everything. Don’t just obey like people pleasers when they are watching. Instead, obey with the single motivation of fearing the Lord. Whatever you do, do it from the heart for the Lord and not for people. You know that you will receive an inheritance as a reward. You serve the Lord Christ. But evildoers will receive their reward for their evil actions. There is no discrimination. (Col 3:22-25)

And here’s the parallel passage from Ephesians:

As for slaves, obey your human masters with fear and trembling and with sincere devotion to Christ. Don’t work to make yourself look good and try to flatter people, but act like slaves of Christ carrying out God’s will from the heart. Serve your owners enthusiastically, as though you were serving the Lord and not human beings. You know that the Lord will reward every person who does what is right, whether that person is a slave or a free person. (Eph 6:5-8)

As I suggested earlier, Paul is neither reinforcing Roman cultural norms nor supporting institutionalized slavery. He is addressing slaves who are also believers, and doing so in a way that entire congregations will hear everything he says to everybody. Again, I like to think that in Colossians, he has the situation between Philemon and Onesimus in the back of his mind, as surely the Colossians themselves did, but he has similar things to say to the slaves in both churches. What he wants is for all of them to experience the inside-out transformation of fearing the Lord instead of fearing their slave owners.

Some slaves were right to fear their owners, for owners could legally treat their slaves brutally. And even when their owners were relatively good bosses, slaves might still respond to the disparity of power by trying to ingratiate themselves into the owner’s goodwill. For them to fear the Lord instead meant to imagine working for Jesus as their boss and doing everything for his pleasure and glory. They would do their work gladly, trusting that they would eventually receive a reward for their faithfulness from Jesus the king.

Note that Paul gives both a promise and a warning in Colossians: do right, and the Lord will reward you; do wrong, and you’ll be punished instead. The warning is missing in Ephesians. Why? There’s no way to know, but again, I suspect that the story of Philemon and Onesimus in Colossae may have had a role. Paul didn’t want anyone to think that he was condoning Onesimus’ behavior in running away, even if he stood up for Onesimus with Philemon.

Whatever the truth of the matter, Paul’s words to slaves could just as well apply to any believer in any job, and particularly one they didn’t like. So imagine it: what would it be like to do our work as if Jesus were our boss?