The hit TV series “Dirty Jobs” (2003-2012) featuring Mike Rowe has reformed into a new spinoff miniseries “Dirty Jobs: Rowe’d Trip.” The spinoff features Mike Rowe traveling through America and sampling various jobs that require getting your hands dirty: fishing jellyfish off the coast of Georgia, cleaning escalators in Arizona, fixing manholes in Tennessee, processing hot pepper seeds in South Carolina…to name a few. The popularity of the “Dirty Jobs” series and this new spinoff is a testimony to the American public’s fascination with the unglamorous side of work.
Modern Americans might love “Dirty Jobs,” but the show would have found little traction in the Ancient World. (Forget for a moment that there is no such thing as a TV to watch such a show.) Bereft of modern conveniences (to say nothing of indoor plumbing) the average person in the Egyptian or Greek or Roman Empire had plenty of dirty jobs of their own. Within the course of the day they would walk on dirty streets, slaughter their own meat, build fires to cook, and struggle to keep some modicum of cleanliness. In other words, there was nothing special about getting one’s hands dirty. “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” might gain some ratings—but “Dirty Jobs” wouldn’t make it past the first season.
“Who ever heard of a God planting anything…much less a garden? This God of the Bible was not only a veritable dynamo of work—He was also willing to get his hands dirty.”
We would find the same “consumer trend” when it came to religion in the ancient world. The gods of the Ancient Near East were noted for their lives of luxury. Indeed, far from getting their hands dirty, gods in the ancient world were experts at celestial loafing. Yes, they might occasionally occupy themselves with an amorous affair or counsel to decide what the humans should do, but for the most part, the gods of the ancient world spent their days luxuriating.
In stark contrast to these gods is the God of the Bible. The first chapter of the Bible details God’s 6-day work week. Genesis 1 is filled with a rich assortment of verbs describing God’s various activities: God separates, makes, calls, sets, forms, and plants. Among these various activities, it is planting that would have struck those in the ancient world as odd. Who ever heard of a God planting anything…much less a garden? This God of the Bible was not only a veritable dynamo of work—He was also willing to get his hands dirty. The God of the Bible did dirty jobs.
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As I write this I’m sitting near our fireplace. The stockings are hanging from the mantle. Adjacent to the fireplace is our newly decorated Christmas tree. Its lights and ornaments and lit-up star display the soft romanticism that we’ve come to associate with Christmas. Christmas is a time we’ve come to associate with “tender and mild” infants, “A star, a star, dancing in the night,” and “children laughing, people passing, meeting smile after smile.” This is a season of family gatherings around cozy fireplaces, eggnog and apple cider, silver bells and chestnuts roasting. In other words, Christmas is as far away from Mike Rowe’s “Dirty Jobs” as it can get.
But is it?
“God gets his hands dirty in creation, but in Christmas, God does the ultimate dirty job. ”
In Philippians 2 the Apostle Paul portrays the coming of Christ. And it is much closer to “Dirty Jobs” than we would expect. Paul speaks of Christ leaving the glories of heaven, stripping himself of his glory, humbling himself, and descending into the sinful muck and mire of this world. As Paul reminds the Philippians, Christ came as a servant to deal with our muck and mire. It was our filth, our decay, our sinfulness that he endured “to the point of death, even death on a cross.” God gets his hands dirty in creation, but in Christmas, God does the ultimate dirty job.
C.S. Lewis understood the dirty side of Christmas when he wrote,
“The central miracle asserted by Christians is the Incarnation. […] One may think of a diver, first reducing himself to nakedness, then glancing in mid-air, then gone with a splash, vanished, rushing down through green and warm water into black and cold water, down through increasing pressure into the death-like region of ooze and slime and old decay; then up again, back to color and light, his lungs almost bursting, till suddenly he breaks surface again, holding in his hand the dripping, precious thing that he went down to recover.”
Christ is that diver. And Christmas is the story of how he dove down into the ooze and slime and decay of this dark world to rescue us. Christmas was a dirty job. But there was no other way to rescue us, clean us up, and give us new life.
What is the dirty part of your work this holiday season? What part of your job is the most unpleasant? If Paul and Lewis have it right, it is precisely these uncomfortable parts of our work, these difficult bits—the dirty jobs—that tell us the true meaning of Christmas.
Thanks be to God!
Robert Covolo is a Cultural Theologian and Author of Fashion Theology. He is also on staff here at the Center for Faith + Work Los Angeles, serving as our Director of Vocational Discipleship.