Is work a blessing from God or a punishment?
When for our ancestors work was only a punishment, they gave birth to the first murderer - Cain, but when work became a blessing, then Abel appeared - the first martyr.
The Apostle Paul is very categorical: if anyone does not want to work, he should not eat (2 Thessalonians 3:10 ), but at the same time we also know the Gospel: He who works is worthy of reward for his labors (Luke 10 :7), so that when he earns labor then needs, we always receive a reward. And not only with our daily bread, but also with the blessing of God.
The current opinion that God punishes only for the triumph of justice is too one-sided. Human understanding of “justice” is always subjective and determined from the point of view of one’s own sinfulness. God punishes only those who are able, sooner or later, to see in His punishment a demonstration of the truth, that is, the Lord educates and admonishes. So for those to whom God is not alien, work is His blessing, even if the understanding of this comes through punishment.
What is the difference between labor and creativity?
Creativity is the multiplication of one’s own talents, and they, by default, are God’s gift. You can realize your talents, that is, not bury them for safety, but develop them in every possible way, only through work.
I know a wonderful artist for whom washing brushes and cleaning his studio is an extremely unloved activity. He never wants to do this work and does it only when he has nothing else to paint with and when he is waiting for potential buyers.
Not long ago I needed a gift for a kind benefactor, so I asked my friend to depict a small pastoral village landscape, especially since I had photos of an old, no longer existing farm where this benefactor once lived. The artist looked at the photograph, smiled very sadly with a sigh and stated that such a landscape requires not only a canvas and paints, but also clean brushes, coupled with order both in the head and in the surrounding interior.
There can be no successful creativity without routine work.
“By the sweat of your brow you will earn your bread”—is this a commandment or a definition, a statement of fact?
There are ten commandments. The fourth is quite specific: “Six days you shall work and do all your work, and the seventh—Sabbath—is a day of rest, which you shall dedicate to the Lord your God.” The Old Testament Saturday gave way to the New Testament Sunday, leaving the same six days of labor, despite the introduced five-day period.
It is impossible to do otherwise, because my mother gave birth to me in sins (Psalm 50) and our sinful inclinations have not gone away. Without work, sin tends to multiply very quickly. Any social vice, including unemployment, is the result of an empty pastime, when bodily pampering and carnal pleasure are put at the forefront. After a delicious lunch, you don’t feel like working hard, praying, or creating a cultural masterpiece. Other priorities are determined. If bread becomes an easy commodity and does without sweat, then we are in the first stage of developed hedonism, where the concepts of sin, God or compassion have no place.
“Come on, let’s take it!” Poster by I. A. Serebryany, 1944
Bread by the sweat of your brow: the Christian and his work
By the sweat of your face you will eat bread
,” God said to Adam (Gen.
3:19
). The gates of heaven closed, and from that moment fallen man must work to live. Work, that is, labor activity for the sake of a piece of bread, as well as for the sake of realizing personal abilities, and finally, for the good of society and the country, is a huge and practically integral part of the life of the majority of our Orthodox parishioners. But how different it can be!
Not every one of us can say that he likes the work he is busy with, that he found himself in it and would not want for himself any other place under the sun. Not every job is interesting; not every job can give you what is commonly called moral satisfaction. But can the hours spent at work be considered dead time, erased from real, living life? Perhaps there are too many of them for this - working hours; They make up too much of our time on earth. They are also our life - hours spent on “uninteresting”, boring, joyless work; therefore, they must serve our spiritual training, growth and salvation of the soul. But how to achieve this?
Suppose you succeed in achieving something: the working day, which seemed spiritually meaningless, takes on meaning. However, if a person is not deprived of abilities - and in fact, none of us are deprived of abilities, one or another - he inevitably faces the problem of their implementation, in other words, the demand for his talents and knowledge by society. Sometimes this problem becomes a tragedy: a person either blames others for his unfulfillment - loved ones, others, colleagues, bosses, “this country” - or falls into fruitless self-flagellation: I’m bad, I’m weak, I’m no good. The other, “positive” extreme is that a person works and grows, he is confident enough in himself and wants to succeed; but he forgets that success - whether in art, in science, in public service - is still not an end in itself, it is good only when it serves something higher and eternal; and selfish careerism is also a road to a dead end, although this is not immediately and not everyone realizes.
It also happens: a person is not selfish, he wants and can do good, and he has the opportunity to work - a lot, interestingly, creatively, helping people, even saving them. There are problems and sorrows, of course - there is no life in this world without them - but at least no one has cut off the oxygen: work hard, bear fruit. And the person suddenly realizes that he doesn’t want to work; that he had lost interest in the matter; that he no longer feels sorry for the people who need him and no fruits please him. Why? Overtired? He takes a vacation, rests, but upon returning to work, he is convinced: it has not gone away... What is the reason? By the way, about fatigue, exhaustion: what to do with it? Is this just a psychological problem or a spiritual one too?
Perhaps the most painful of the problems that we intend to discuss is the compliance of everything that we have to do at work with Christian beliefs. We are not talking now about criminal “professions”, of course, about obviously illegal activities; but that’s the trouble with our life, that the boundaries are blurred, the pegs are knocked down, the very concept of honesty is humiliated, ridiculed, perceived as some kind of foolishness. What should a university teacher do who is forced to give test after test to a young man who is not even familiar with the basics of the subject being taught, just because he is the son of the main sponsor of ostentatious university events? And the journalist from whom they demand - urgently go to his room! - an interview with the parents of a girl who was just killed by a maniac? What should an investigator do who is ordered to compose a completely illegal resolution to terminate a criminal case?.. Not every person will find the strength to say “no”, risking (or even directly sacrificing) a job, career, professional future... the opportunity to feed their children, in the end. And not everyone will simply take moral responsibility for these actions; many will reassure themselves with the formula: “What am I, I’m a forced person.” But it is unlikely that this can be repeated at the Last Judgment...
Another situation: a person earns his living without seemingly bringing any harm to anyone. He simply entertains people who want to have fun, and occupies those who, it turns out, have nothing to occupy their minds with. He does it well, with invention, or, as they say nowadays, creatively. Well, what’s wrong with that, it would seem? Demand gave rise to supply, that’s all. But where does it come from in a person - not in everyone, of course, but in someone who has turned his soul to God, felt within himself a Christian conscience and what is called spirit - constant pain, discomfort, a feeling of shame, duality, and sometimes simply spiritual devastation, destruction? However, this can be connected with many types of activities... In what cases does a priest advise a parishioner to change jobs? What kind of work can be considered mentally harmful?
There are professions to which the lofty word “service” is easily applied. The profession of a doctor, say, a teacher, a warrior, who by definition does not work, but serves; ideally - a policeman, prosecutor, judge; and the priest, of course, if we are not afraid to apply the word “profession” to the priest too. Well, if a person works as some kind of accountant in a private company, a cashier in a store, a waiter in a cafe - what kind of ministry is there... Or does any job become a ministry for a Christian? If yes, then how?
We will try to talk about all this.
Not for fear, but for conscience
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We talk about the problems that a parishioner, an Orthodox Christian, may have in connection with his work, about how work activity is combined with spiritual life, with Archpriest Sergius Ksenofontov, a cleric of the Holy Spiritual Cathedral in Saratov.
— Father Sergius, do you ever encounter situations where work poses a spiritual problem for a parishioner?
“Parishioners have problems with work, this is inevitable. Our work activity occurs precisely at that age, at that time in life when we are most ready for spiritual development. We have left childhood and adolescence and entered the era of maturity. And the end of our work activity precedes old age, the end of our life’s journey. Old age is the result of life, its assessment, a time of wisdom... or a time of disappointment. Old age will check what we have managed to earn and save for ourselves during our lives and what kind of “pension” (in the spiritual sense) we will now receive from this.
Thus, working age is the very time that the master gave his slaves to increase their talents (see: Matt. 25
, 14–30), which means it should become a time of intense spiritual life. But it is precisely at this time that we are required to exert tension in our work. And these two demands on us, these two tensions often come into conflict - this is where our problems begin. It's hard for us, we're tired. While creating the material basis of our life, we do not have time to comprehend it spiritually, to think about what is right and what is wrong in our work activities. When we stop, take a minute out of the hustle and bustle of work, we try to comprehend: here, I’m working, I’m doing what’s necessary for my loved ones, for my family, but where is my spiritual life? It’s as if she doesn’t exist. We have to admit that we spend most of our lives racing and bustling. At best, we try to separate some part from this life and give it exclusively to spiritual development. But then the question arises: what about the rest of our time, is it spiritless? Is it spiritually dead?
“It’s impossible to believe in God from seven in the evening to eight in the morning, and the rest of the time live as if He doesn’t exist...
“It’s impossible, but another person unconsciously tries to do just that.” He tries to live a spiritual life, prays, goes to church, but, not loving his work, he perceives it as an alien part of his life, as spiritually dead time. He is just waiting for the workday to end and he can again turn to spiritual subjects. When we try to live like this, Satan laughs at us. He steals our time - hours spent at work. He doesn’t even steal - we give them to him ourselves, because he can’t take anything from us if we don’t give it to him ourselves.
What's happening? The time of a person’s life, the time given to him by God, is not spiritualized, and in this time a person suffocates. And that part of his life that he tries to devote to spiritual things does not become complete, because it is a chain with missing links. We may have been working on ourselves spiritually, connecting link by link, but now the time has come to go to work - and we, voluntarily or unwittingly, open the chain. At work, we allow ourselves to behave internally in ways that we would not allow at other times. We split into two: I’m at work - this is one thing, I’m in church - completely different. The split leads to hypocrisy, which, in fact, is a false link in that very open chain of our spiritual life. A person seems to say to himself: well, I can be this and that. And where there is duality, Satan will certainly irritate that side, that half of a person that is accessible to him. And this half will absorb, eat up the other, the one that we are trying to leave, to preserve spiritual. And sooner or later our weakness will deplete the strength that we have managed to accumulate. Because you cannot serve two masters (see: Matt. 6
, 24).
- I’m afraid that in my life there was a period of such duality - although not in the worst way compared to other options: as a journalist, at least I never sold myself, did not write lies for money, this is already good. But I remember what difficult moments those were - when after a working day you find yourself in front of your home icons... And you understand that there, at work, it’s one thing, here, before the eyes of the Savior and the Mother of God, it’s another, but where am I? Where do I live - both there and there? This is constant embarrassment, reaching the point of feeling some kind of absurdity, the absurdity of one’s own life.
“It’s a constant shame.” Do you know why sometimes people who meet every day at work try not to meet in church? They even change the parish - only because someone else from their work goes to this church. Because there, at work, they are different! And the fact that they go to church is subconsciously perceived by them at work as some kind of shameful action. But here, in church, you are ashamed, because a person has come who knows you differently. Anyone who tries to serve two masters is ashamed before both!
- What needs to be done so that working time is not dead and so that there is no duality, hypocrisy?
— Here it is important to realize what is important and what is not important, to set priorities. As the Lord said: Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
(Matthew
6:21
). Where is our treasure, what is the goal of our whole life? If a person sees his goal in the Kingdom of God, then he knows where to go. And he begins to slowly, like a sculptor, cut off what is unnecessary. Extra fuss, extra concern, stress, fear of not being able to do it in time and not being able to cope, etc. This does not mean at all that you don’t need to be diligent at work, on the contrary. Diligence in daily activities, even small ones, can and should be mixed with a spiritual understanding of benefit. And there can be benefit to the soul only when you sacrificially serve your neighbor and through him, God. Our working time can be spiritualized, first of all, through sacrifice.
— Fatigue, exhaustion from work—it doesn’t talk about sacrifice, does it?
“Sometimes it happens that a person cannot realize whether he is acting sacrificially or not, he is so exhausted by the vanity. Then work turns into a complete burden. And he no longer sees any meaning in it. But when a person is faithful, a believer, a member of the church, when he has some kind of spiritual experience, some kind of prayer practice - then there is no question about the meaning of work, about whether there is sacrifice in it, whether it represents service to others. arises. And if it arises, the believer can always find the answer in his personal spiritual life. And in the lives of others who have already walked this path. And the saints, whose experience will be reflected, will find some response in his personal experience, and he will understand: thoughts of meaninglessness are a temptation; work is not meaningless exhaustion, but a feat to which God called him.
— But is there “a place for heroic deeds” in any job?
“There is a place of sacrifice, a place of serving God, wherever a person works, even if he sits in a closed office and does not see people at all, only documents - for obtaining loans, for example. A clear understanding that people’s destinies depend on these loans, awareness of one’s responsibility—this is feat and sacrificial service.
— I believe that a Christian in any job should be conscientious, responsible, honest, and comply with the agreements between him and the employer. This should be a moral, spiritual necessity. So?
— There is a saying: not for fear, but for conscience. In Russia, the relationship between owner and employee has long been built not only on a contractual basis, but also on the basis of conscience. One of the signs that you serve sacrificially, with forgiveness and conscience, with an awareness of duty, even if your work is tedious, hard, uncreative, is that you develop personal relationships with your employer and your fellow workers. We see this in the lives of Russian saints: the holy righteous John of Russia, being in slavery, in cruel captivity, with his conscientious and diligent work forces the owner to change his attitude towards him, to see in him a person, and not just a slave, to be imbued with respect for yesterday’s slave.
In Rus', it was customary for the owner or, say, the boss to devote his name day to his subordinates: he set the table for them, gave them gifts - not they to him, mind you, but he to them. It was a kind of family, traditional, characteristic of the Russian consciousness, going beyond the walls of the house and spreading to the entire state: the Tsar is the father, we are all his children, his name day (name day) is a national holiday. And nepotism is one of the highest manifestations of the sacrifice that we are talking about: in a family a person cannot live only for himself. A family, by definition, is a community of people living for each other.
It is enough to recall such a famous philanthropist and philanthropist as Savva Morozov: his attitude towards the workers was truly Christian and fatherly. After all, he organized for them an insurance system, preferential lending, and all that we now call social guarantees. He made no profit from it. But, oddly enough, this is the Christian way of doing things - it is beneficial in the end.
Today they are trying to replace this with surrogates - corporate parties, instilling the so-called corporate spirit, attracting all kinds of psychologists with trainings and role-playing games to create this spirit... But behind all this there is no sacrifice or service. All this is not built on love, but on an artificial overstrain of certain human qualities and abilities: for example, the ability to communicate kindly. And it is not built with spiritual goals, but with material ones: everyone’s income depends on the company’s income, the company’s income depends on everyone’s income, so let’s support each other.
But man is not as simple as today's business would like him to be. He's not a machine. He is a spiritual being who is actually called to a great work: approaching God, deification, salvation for eternal life. Being in conditions of commercialization, a person still remains a spiritual being. Sooner or later this contradiction will intensify and manifest itself. Violence against him as a spiritual being will bring bitter and sometimes terrible fruits. Why do people today often commit the most brutal crimes in groups, where they worked or studied? Why do they kill those who worked next to them, those with whom they exchanged glasses at corporate events, with whom they greeted each other in an emphatically friendly manner in the morning? First it was in the West, then it came to us. Moreover, mind you, until our official relations were built on profit, on commerce, this did not happen. As soon as we began to switch to the worst version of capitalist relations, it began. This means that there is a system, and the result of this system is a spiritless overstrain that leads to breakdowns. Spiritless overexertion means activity completely divorced from the life of the spirit. Our work must be spiritual.
“For some reason I thought now about the cashier in a self-service store.” From a worldly point of view, this is not the most interesting or prestigious job. And spiritually - what opportunities! Every day there are thousands of people, and with each of you you can be either sincerely friendly and warm, or like the cashier in one store I know: she was obliged to say to every customer “Thank you for your purchase,” but she says it through clenched teeth, like that. that buyers are scared.
— A person’s emotionality cannot be separated from the spiritual component of his life. If a cashier, salesman, hairdresser, bank employee are friendly involuntarily, only because their superiors obliged them to utter polite words, this is clearly different from sincere friendliness and goodwill towards people. When a person’s soul is empty, and they demand from him that he take something warm and heartfelt from there... as my beloved seminarians say, you can’t take it where you didn’t put it.
- So, work is our Christian feat, a continuation of our spiritual life. But can it be mentally harmful, even destructive for the inner person? Does it happen that a priest advises a parishioner to change jobs?
- Happens. How to determine this? What is harmful to a person is that which is harmful to his soul, that which opposes its salvation. Let us turn to the experience of Christian states, including pre-revolutionary Russia: laws, albeit imperfect, must take into account Christian commandments. Although everyone understands that it is impossible to convey the heavenly law by earthly means, one can only somehow approach it. But nevertheless, the laws were in effect, and this meant that serving the state allowed a person to remain a Christian. The state seemed to guarantee that he would not have to act in a non-Christian manner, that this would not be demanded of him. And today many laws contradict the commandments. And from laws come social norms, social customs, and interpersonal relationships. Therefore, the corporate spirit that has developed in the team may turn out to be not Christian at all. And then we must remember the words of the Savior: what good is it to a man if he gains the whole world, but loses his soul?
(Matt.
16
, 26).
But here, too, a mistake awaits us: we begin to explain and justify our own weaknesses with work. And we don’t see that we don’t need to change our jobs, but try to change ourselves. For example, a person says: “My job is harmful to my soul, because I am depressed all the time.” But the reason for despondency is not work, but ourselves. Or: “I can’t work there because they don’t allow me to fast, there’s always a corporate party on New Year’s Eve, and my boss has a birthday during Lent. Therefore, this is unchristian work.” But this is not a non-Christian job, and a person himself is not very good with Christianity if he is unable to refuse a corporate event during Lent; if man-pleasing, or perhaps cowardice, does not allow him to calmly explain to his boss his refusal of the feast.
And it’s a completely different matter if the employee is required to remove the cross - due to some “norms of tolerance”. Here we simply do not have the right to submit and remain at work in this way.
If a person leads an attentive and constant spiritual life, there is no problem for him to determine where the Christian norms are and where the non-Christian norms are and whether his work actually requires him to violate the Gospel commandments. Let me emphasize that this life should be constant and stable. This stability begins with daily morning and evening prayer, with regular visits to church and participation in the Sacraments. All this gives rise to the constancy of our relationship with God.
As for advice to change jobs, I only advised once (I advised, because freedom of choice should remain with the person) - this was to one parishioner. I could see the stress building in her about her work. And she worked as a cleaner in a sauna. Everyone knows that our saunas are not at all good for health... While she was just cleaning there, it was nothing, but then they began to demand from her, in fact, complicity in all the lawlessness that was happening there: she had to serve something, make an offering ... and she immediately felt the incompatibility of this work with spiritual life. As an honest person, she could not be a hypocrite. She tried, but even a bit of this poison of hypocrisy drove her into despair. It was a real spiritual illness. But when she changed jobs, everything got better.
/p>
— Father Sergius, what to do if an employee is forced to commit minor or major dishonesty, deception, or lies? There are a lot of examples that can be given - from school life, from university life, from the life of various government structures, etc. What to do if the authorities once again demand that you write a beautiful report, ensure a high indicator, make sure that that girl over there gets a medal , and that boy over there certainly got into university, even if he makes two mistakes in the word “mother”? Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, that is, follow the instructions and not take responsibility, or still try to refuse?
— A single categorical answer cannot be given here. Each person has his own life situation, his own ability to endure trials, in a word, his own measure. Let's start with the fact that participation in dishonest deeds, lies, even small and seemingly excusable ones, must be discussed in confession. Why? Because a lie in any case is an infection, like the flu: if it settles in a person, he will get sick. If you let the disease take its course, it will progress. What does confession give? In the light of God's grace, sin is highlighted. We see him. We gain spiritual experience, including bitter ones - the experience of living with sin. Forgiving oneself for sin (“Well, what can I do if the authorities demand it?”) means depriving oneself of God’s forgiveness. And then Satan will get his share in us. This is his area - “dark yati”, that is, the area where he takes. If we confessed our own - our own, and not the boss! - sin, it means we see the problem and can solve it. The first step in solving the problem is not to perceive the situation of one’s own sin as the norm, which is very typical for us: “What is my sin, now they do it everywhere, it’s normal now.” Numerous conversations with people who find themselves in such situations show that a way out of them is found by those people who do not look for excuses for themselves, do not accept their participation in sin as the norm, and confess it precisely as their personal sin. God Himself helps such people, suggesting a solution, and at one time removing a person “from the work of Egypt,” giving him another field of activity.
— Ideally, work is also the realization of a person’s creative abilities. How to live if your job doesn’t match your creative potential? What if education, knowledge, and talent remain unclaimed? In late Soviet times, many talented people swept yards, dug graves in cemeteries, worked in firehouses, etc. Someone endured this and later became a big man. And someone jumped from a balcony or choked on vodka there, in these cemeteries, because this is really a tragedy. Now the situation is different, but the problem has not gone away, it turns out.
“Talent as the ability to create is given to man by the Creator, and it is really a disaster if a person with his talents is not in demand and all he can do is bury them in the ground. The entire history of mankind shows that this problem has always existed. A person realizes that he is capable of more, but, for objective reasons, he is forced to “know his heart.” However, there are also a lot of pitfalls here. This “I am capable of more” may be true, but it may also be a temptation. For example, a person, out of vanity and pride, can exaggerate his abilities. It seems to him that a brilliant writer is dying within him, but in fact this writer has never lived within him. Or - a person simply does not realize that he is not ready for the “leading parties”, does not understand that he still needs to be patient, sit where he is sitting, grow up.
Nothing in our lives happens without the will of God. And if we suddenly find ourselves deprived of the opportunity to create, we need to remember the story of John of Damascus, who was a wonderful spiritual poet - the Church enjoys the fruits of his inspiration to this day - and who was forbidden by his confessor in the Lavra of Saint Sava in the Holy Land to write poetry. But then this ban was lifted and his talent shone even brighter - after John, firstly, with humility accepted a very painful deprivation for him, and secondly, when, having violated the ban solely for the sake of his neighbor, he suffered with the same humility and the punishment for it. Deprivation of the opportunity to create is sometimes a sharp cutter of humility, cutting off the excess pride that clings to our talent.
But the main thing is to ask yourself the question in time: what exactly do I want? And try to answer it honestly. If vanity or love of money is at the forefront, then the person is clearly mistaken. No matter how much he changes his “sixes,” he will always be missing something. Because vanity and greed are chasms that will never be filled. And it’s a completely different matter if a person is looking for a better way to serve God and his neighbors. Then the Lord Himself will, over time, bring him out into the open and give him all the necessary opportunities.
Journal "Orthodoxy and Modernity" No. 30 (46)
Why does a person hate to work so much?
IF YOU ARE “THE IMAGE AND SIMILARITY OF GOD,” THEN WORK IS A COMPLETELY NATURAL STATE, WHERE THE CONCEPT OF “JOY OF WORK” IS NOT PATHOS WORDS.
Just as a woman who has endured the pain of giving birth to a new life forgets about her suffering in her joy, so the one who achieves his goal with his work is no less joyful. And this joy is amazing. It unites two hypostases in a person: physical and spiritual, that is, that symphony is achieved that we always dream of and which is so difficult to achieve. We always have disagreements between our internal state and external behavior or actions.
Of course, situations are not so rare when you have to do something you don’t like. In the morning, it’s even impossible to ask yourself “what the coming day has in store for me,” since you know in advance that routine, monotonous work awaits you, in which there are only two pleasures a month: an advance and a salary. If a person does something that is not interesting and boring to him, he quickly gets tired. There is no progress, no creative development in his work, and this is the beginning of your degradation as a person.
Here we need to look for a way out: change our profession, place of work, social circle... Without the creative component, the image of God in us is lost, just as the concept of “joy of work” becomes an unattainable fantasy.
Commentary on Genesis 3:19
comparison links strong comments
Interpretation on Genesis 3:19 / Gen 3:19
Genesis 3 verse 19 - synodal text:
By the sweat of your face you will eat bread until you return to the ground from which you were taken; for dust you are, and to dust you will return.
John Chrysostom (~347−407)
By the sweat of your face you will eat bread until you return to the ground from which you were taken, for dust you are and to dust you will return.
You will endure this until the end of your life comes, when you are released into the earth from which you were formed. Although I gave you a bodily nature, out of My love for mankind, this body (came) from the earth and will again be earth: “You are earth and you will go back to earth . To prevent this from happening, I commanded you not to touch that tree, adding: “If you destroy it one day, you will die.” I didn’t want this, but since everything was done on My part, and you arranged it for yourself, then don’t blame anyone else, but attribute everything to your carelessness. Here another question arises for us, which, if you wish, we will solve briefly, and then finish the word. “Speech,” it is said, “God: if you take away a day from him, you will die”; but it turns out that after disobeying and eating, they lived for many more years. This seems puzzling only to those who take a superficial view of the words cited. But whoever listens with good reflection, what is said clearly does not present any confusion to those who are attentive. Although they (Adam and Eve) lived for many years, from the very minute they heard: “you are earth, and you will go back to earth ,” they received a death sentence, became mortal and, one might say, died. Pointing to this, Scripture said: “If you take the day, you will die” - instead of saying: you will receive a sentence - to be already mortal. Just as in human courts, a person sentenced to beheading, being then put in prison, even if he stayed there for a long time, will lead his life no better than the dead, since he has already been sentenced to death - so in the same way the ancestors from that very day, on which they heard the death sentence, although they lived for a long time, they already died according to the sentence.
Source: Discourses on the book of Genesis. Conversation 17.
Ambrose of Milan (~339−397)
By the sweat of your face you will eat bread until you return to the ground from which you were taken, for dust you are and to dust you will return.
The question arises: what caused the death of Adam - the nature of the tree or God? If we attribute the cause of death to a tree, then, apparently, the fruit of this tree will be stronger than the life-giving breath of God, for it is capable of killing the one whom God’s breath has revived. If we consider God to be the culprit of death, then we will be accused of similar wickedness: after all, if God could forgive and did not forgive, He is merciless, and if He could not forgive, He is powerless.
Let's see how this difficulty should be resolved. If I’m not mistaken, the cause of death was disobedience, and therefore man himself became the cause of death, and not God was the culprit. After all, if a doctor orders a patient to beware of what he considers harmful to him, and he does not want to abstain from the forbidden and dies, then it is not the doctor, but rather he himself who will be to blame for his own death. So God, like a good doctor, forbade Adam to eat anything that would be harmful to him.
Source: About Paradise.
Filaret (Drozdov) (1782−1867)
By the sweat of your face you will eat bread until you return to the ground from which you were taken, for dust you are and to dust you will return.
By the sweat of your brow you will eat bread . Sweat is a sign of exhausting labor. Man is condemned to such work instead of heavenly work that strengthens and delights. Of the many types of labor, God points to agricultural labor, not as an inevitable duty for everyone, but as a natural and necessary need for everyone. But may the word of God’s judgment come true - those who do not work to earn bodily food, subject themselves to exhausting exertion in order to give food to their desires and passions, and in the very evasion of work they find new work. However, God Himself sometimes either aggravates or eases this condemnation, according to His special Providence (Ps. 126:2).
You are dust and to dust you will return . This conclusion of condemnation apparently shows that bodily death is inevitable for a person, regardless of condemnation, by his nature. But, according to the word of God (Gen. 2:17), all death is punishment, and, according to the ancient teaching of the Church, God created man in incorruption (Wis. 2:23). Man and the earth were in a state of purity by their origin; but this earth was closed and protected from corruption by the image of God and the power of the tree of life; after the removal of the image of God, it is exposed and, as it moves away from the tree of life, it is given over to natural destruction. It is worthy of note that all the punishments with which God strikes people here are temporary and end in bodily death. This shows that he had already found a way and predestined to save man from eternal condemnation, just as he actually discovered the serpent in condemnation. So, those who will be subject to eternal condemnation are irresponsible before God and have no right to complain about their ancestors.
Source: Commentary on the Book of Genesis.
Isaac the Syrian (~640−700)
By the sweat of your brow eat your bread . And how long will this last? - ... Until you return to the land from which you were taken , and which will grow for you thorns and thistles. These are the secrets of doing this life while you live! But from that night on which the Lord shed sweat, He exchanged the sweat that brought forth thorns and thistles for sweat shed in prayer and together in doing righteousness. For five thousand and five hundred-odd years God left Adam to work on earth, because until then the way had not been revealed to the saints, as the divine Apostle says (Heb. 9:8). In the last days he came and commanded freedom to replace one sweat with another, and allowed not a rest from everything, but a change of everything; because, for the duration of our suffering on earth, He showed us His love for mankind. Therefore, if we stop shedding sweat on the earth, then of necessity we will reap thorns. For by the same necessity, abandoning prayer means planting the earth, which naturally produces thorns. Indeed, passions are thorns, and they grow in us from being sown into the body (see: Gal.6:8). While we carry the image of Adam, we must also carry Adam’s passions within us. For it is impossible for the earth not to grow the vegetation inherent in its nature. The origin of her nature is the earth of our bodies, as God’s testimony says: the earth from which you were taken . That land produces thorns, and this intelligent land produces passions.
Source: Word 19.
He seemed to say to him like this: I told you to repent in order to remain in your previous state, but because you are hard-hearted and unrepentant, you are far away from Me. This separation of you from Me will be enough for your punishment: you are earth, and to earth you will go. Have you now understood that Adam, because he did not repent and did not say: I have sinned, was expelled from paradise, condemned to spend my life in labor and sweat and go back to the ground from which I was taken?
Source: Words (Word 66th).
Justin (Popovich) (1894−1978)
Economic problem = ethical problem. The Savior showed that this is an ethical problem. The All-Good Lord solves it completely - not at the will of the devil (“command this stone to become bread”), but according to His immeasurable love - he multiplies five loaves and two fish: the Sinless One rules over this, allows it. This means that the more sin, the less bread. The Sinless One copes with this problem easily. Likewise, people, if they remained without sin, would solve this problem with Christ, the Word. And hence God’s saying after the fall of the first people: By the sweat of your brow you will eat bread , and the ground will produce thorns and thistles for you. Physical hunger is the twin of spiritual hunger; physical torment is the twin of spiritual; physical illness is the twin of spiritual illness.
Community of the Holy Apostles and All Saints: the solution to the economic problem stems from the solution to the spiritual, moral problem and is served through the recovery of the soul. Only healthy souls can decide this. For the pure, everything is pure: pure and in relation to knowledge, there are no insoluble problems.
Source: Ascetic and theological chapters.
John of Kronstadt (1829−1908)
By the sweat of your face you will eat bread until you return to the ground from which you were taken, for dust you are and to dust you will return.
Here is your punishment, ungrateful creature, for the fact that you did not know how to support yourself in your dignity with the forces given to you by God. Look at your beginning: from earth, from dirt, from soulless matter, God created what a wondrous creature, consisting of a beautiful body and an even more beautiful soul, endowed with reason and freedom. Instead of living and blessing and thanking God and obeying Him for his own good - eternal perfection, man forgot in his beauty and in his greatness, the creature itself wanted to be Divinity. She saw well with her bright mind how perfect and great the Lord God is; her lips did not utter blessings and gratitude to the Creator, she went directly against Him: she did what was forbidden to do under fear of death, and - alas! - a beautiful creation - the soul, was almost doomed to eternal torment, and the vessel of the soul, made by the hands of the Wise Artist, lost forever that amazing beauty and that strength that it had during the innocence of the first people, so that over time it is certainly destroyed, becoming again what it is made of, decomposing into those constituent principles of which it consists. Every person even now, having lived on earth for as long as God sends him to live, will certainly finally return to the land from which he was taken. What would have happened to us if the Lord our God had not raised us from our fall?
Source: Diary. Volume I. 1856.
Oh, if only you could exhaust the full depth of these words, comprehend their whole truth and what kindness together with justice, what wise purposefulness with the condition of the sinner was expressed in them! In these words, God, like a wise doctor, pointed out to sinful people the best, most effective medicine against the disease of sin, a strong antidote to the poison of sin; in them mercy and truth meet [Russian: will meet] (Ps. 84:11). Labor by the sweat of the brow is the first cross for sin. And look what experience says: aren’t hardworking Christian people the best people and the best Christians? Just as tears cleanse the impurities of our hearts, so the sweat of labor also cleanses the impurities of the soul. But what pure souls you will meet among well-meaning free workers! So, rejoice, Christian, and thank God when you have to endure special labors or other hardships of the flesh. Drive away from your heart the sinful reluctance to take up any task whatsoever. Go against your lazy flesh, against your heart that does not love work; Always try to overcome yourself, force yourself, do things reluctantly, convince, beg yourself - and finally you will do them willingly. If you get used to it, you will fall in love.
Source: Diary. Volume IV. 1860−1861.
Theodoret of Cyrus (386/93−~457)
By the sweat of your face you will eat bread until you return to the ground from which you were taken, for dust you are and to dust you will return.
The evil one committed this kind of most subtle deception, [using] devilish envy and feminine frivolity; but first, the destroyer of our nature, to be more convincing, himself tempted Adam. And he was expelled from paradise and sent to his native land, receiving sweat, exhausting labor and misfortune as his inheritance; As if by some kind of bridle, he was devoted to earthly labors, suffering and other hardships of life. Since he could not prudently endure that [paradise] life without worries and sorrows, he found himself inseparably connected with misfortune, so that, due to illnesses suffered from labor, he would be removed from prosperity. By death, the Lawgiver [Savior] stopped the fight against sin, showing his love for mankind with his punishment. After all, when the Establisher of the Laws [the Lord] connected crime with death, it turned out that he stopped this punishment, directing it towards salvation. Death overtakes every living being, stops the effects of illness, relieves from hardships, frees from sweat, expels sorrows and worries, and ends bodily suffering. Thanks to this kind of philanthropy, the Judge abolished the punishment.
Source: On the incarnation of the Word.
Vissarion (Nechaev) (1822−1905)
By the sweat of your brow you have carried away your bread, until you have returned to the land from which you were taken: as you are the earth, you have returned to the earth.
And before the Fall, living in paradise, Adam had to work, but then, due to the fertility of the soil and the strength of his bodily strength, the work was easy and grateful. To acquire food, Adam is now condemned to exhausting, sweat-inducing and less fruitful labor. One death will free him from the exhausting struggle with nature that is disobedient to him: “until you return to the land from which you were taken: as you are the earth and you will return to the earth . What a blow to human pride! He who dreamed of rising to the level of equality with God must turn to the dust from which he was created. The Lord threatened death for disobedience to His will, and this threat will certainly be fulfilled. With eating the fruit, man not only became mortal, but actually began to die in the body itself: the seed of death has already penetrated into the bodily composition, and what we call death is only the end of the work of death that began long ago. And if this end did not suddenly and not soon come for the first people, it is because the long-suffering Lord expected repentance and its fruits from them.
Both the curse of the earth and death are actions not only of God’s justice, but together with God’s goodness towards the sinner; for they serve as a cure against pride, teach humility, and put a barrier to immoderate sensual pleasures.
Source: Interpretation based on proverbs from the book of Genesis.
Origen (~185−~254)
By the sweat of your face you will eat bread until you return to the ground from which you were taken, for dust you are and to dust you will return.
Death is not what the mob thinks of it; it corresponds to the unchangeable foundation of faith and truth. The ignorant and unbelievers believe that after death our flesh decays so much that almost nothing remains of its essence. We, who believe in the resurrection of the flesh, understand that in death it only undergoes a change, but its essence remains constant and, by the will of the Creator, will one day be brought back to life and changed a second time. And if at first it was taken from the dust of the earth, and then dissolved by death, now, having been created a second time from dust and ashes ( for you are dust , it is said, and to dust you will return ), it will rise from the dust and after that, in accordance with through the merits of the soul that dwelt in it, will pass into the glory of the “spiritual body.”
Source: About the beginnings.
The sacred linen tunic, says the Lord, he must wear (Lev. 16:4). Flax comes from the earth; This means that the sacred linen tunic must be worn by the true High Priest - Christ, who accepts the nature of the earthly body; It is said about the body that dust and to dust it will return. So, my Lord and Savior, wanting to resurrect what had turned to dust , took on the body in order to raise it from the earth and ascend it to heaven. And the image of this sacrament is shown by the words of the law that the high priest must put on a linen tunic. But the word sacred was not added in vain: after all, the tunic of Christ’s flesh is sacred, for it was not conceived from the seed of a man, but begotten from the Holy Spirit.
Source: Homilies on the Book of Leviticus.
