For about 15 years, I had the pleasure of teaching theology courses with the legendary Dan Harrington, S.J., at Boston College. We team-taught a series on the New Testament and ethics, including courses on virtue ethics in tandem with the synoptic Gospels, the letters of Paul and the Gospel of John.
Dan was the best-read theologian I ever met. For the journal New Testament Abstracts that provides pithy evaluative summaries of essays on the Scriptures, Dan wrote over 30,000 such reviews. In team teaching, he was an angel of mercy. As we would prepare class each week, he would regularly tell me not to bother reading most of his assignments in toto. Instead, he’d say to read the opening paragraph on that one, or the last page of this.
He surprised me one day by handing me a copy of The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries by Rodney Stark. “Read this,” he said to me. “What pages?” I asked. “The whole thing.”
In that text, Stark highlighted that “Christianity was an urban movement” and that these urban areas were, in a word, dreadful. Population density and inadequate social structures were just some of the problems. At the end of the first century, Antioch’s population was 150,000 within the city walls, or 117 persons per acre. (New York City has a density of 37 persons per acre today.) And in Antioch, like the rest of the Roman empire, there was no indoor plumbing.
Nor were Greco-Roman cities settled places whose inhabitants descended from previous generations. With high infant mortality and short life expectancy, these cities required “a constant and substantial stream of newcomers” in order to maintain their population levels.
Christians treated these newcomers in ways that they never expected. Inasmuch as Christians came from all economic classes, they also all participated in the works of mercy, each providing what they could. Stark writes:
Christianity revitalized life in Greco-Roman cities by providing new norms and new kinds of social relationships able to cope with many urgent urban problems. To cities filled with the homeless and impoverished, Christianity offered charity as well as hope. To cities filled with newcomers and strangers, Christianity offered an immediate basis for attachments. To cities filled with orphans and widows, Christianity provided a new and expanded sense of family.
The works of mercy that I wrote about last month were, in effect, those programs that provided relief. But as distinctive as their ministry was, Stark notes, another issue caught the newcomers’ attention: the God of the Christians.
While some pagan Romans were generous, their generosity was not motivated in any way by their gods, but rather by their own individual inclinations. Christians, however, confessed that they were doing what their God commanded—to love the neighbor, visit the prisoner, provide shelter for the homeless and food for the hungry. Moreover, Christians also confessed that they were mercifully treated by the God of Jesus Christ and that they understood, from Jesus, that they were to be, in turn, merciful.
Stark’s words are worth repeating:
This was the moral climate in which Christianity taught that mercy is one of the primary virtues—that a merciful God requires humans to be merciful. Moreover, the corollary that because God loves humanity, Christians may not please God unless they love one another was entirely new. Perhaps even more revolutionary was the principle that Christian love and charity must extend beyond the boundaries of family and tribe, that it must extend to all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ (1 Cor. 1:2). This was revolutionary stuff. Indeed, it was the cultural basis for the revitalization of a Roman world groaning under a host of miseries.
Aside from performing the works of mercy, Christians also were attentive to incorporating newcomers into their other practice, celebrating the Christian Eucharist. The early Christians did not practice sabbath; they celebrated the Eucharist on Sunday, the day that Christ rose from the dead, probably at the end of day. Indeed, the Redemptorist scholar Louis Vereecke, C.Ss.R., noted that in the first three centuries there was no church law banning work on Sundays.
The first ban from working on Sunday came not from a pope, bishop or council, but from the emperor. In 321, Emperor Constantine (272-337 C.E.) prescribed Sunday as a day of rest for soldiers. Eusebius (260-341) translates the edict as giving Christian soldiers time off to worship; it also freed them to belong to the ever-expanding Christian community.
Later, at the end of the fourth century, apocryphal texts from Syria and Alexandria contain “orders of the Lord” to give rest to slaves and to those oppressed by work so that they too could participate in the Eucharist. The law was liberative, then, and not burdensome. Slaves and serfs were not paid; that they were freed from labor did not negatively affect the serfs or slaves, but instead those who owned or controlled them.
At the Eucharist, slaves and serfs could encounter Christ in word and sacrament. But they would also encounter the rest of their community. Here they became brothers and sisters in the Lord, a title that did not belong to those who could never participate in the Eucharist in the first place. Here they were not objects of mercy; rather, they became fellow laborers in the vineyard of the Lord.
At the Council of Orleans (538) the first ban on Sunday work appeared: It was a ban on any hard labor that would keep the masses from participating in Eucharistic celebration. In effect, the poor, like the soldiers and slaves earlier, were freed to worship and the weight of the law was borne by the masters of the poor who had to release them from this labor. Later, Martin of Braga (d. 580) used for the first time the term “servile work” to designate the work of serfs as prohibited by the Sunday observance.
Finally, Charles the Great (d. 814) in his General Admonitions (789) ruled that, with the exception of produce providers, soldiers in active war and those burying the dead, no worker could labor on Sunday. From then on, freedom from servile work meant not rest as in relaxation, but a communal participation in the vineyard of the Lord as his brothers and sisters.
We see throughout the early history of the church that the works of mercy were not simply attending to another’s needs. Rather they were always aimed at first recognizing the poor as siblings in the Lord and therefore to be incorporated into the community. In Through the Eye of a Needle, Peter Brown helped us to see that the practice of hospitality produced an appreciation for the poor as one’s very own sibling. Brown studied Ambrose (d. 397) and found that the bishop of Milan insisted “that giving to the poor should be based upon a strong sense of solidarity.”
Ambrose “did not wish the poor to be seen only as charged outsiders, sent by God to haunt the conscience of the rich.” The poor could no longer be spoken of only as others—as beggars to whom Christians should reach out across the chasm that divided the rich and the poor. They were also brothers—as Brown notes, "members of the Christian community who could also claim justice and protection.”
Thus, even as early as Paul, we should see the agency of these poor in the universal call for contributions to collections: collections and hospitable practices were not provided only by the wealthy. As Paul instructs: “On the first day of each week let each of you set something aside privately, storing up what each one can, if he has prospered” (1 Cor 16:2). The raising of funds for the missionaries were for all those with any income. Later the works of mercy would be provided by whoever could provide the labor, that is, by effectively by the entire community. These practices became then institutionalized: Christians were prepared for the newly arrived, hosted them in the bishop’s name, and recognized them as siblings. Moreover, unlike others whose religious practices always were confined to sacred occasions and rituals, the Christian practices were ordinary, constant and integral to their own self-identity.
In his landmark work, The Origins of Christian Morality: The First Two Centuries, Wayne Meeks made an extraordinarily broad claim about the aim of the New Testament in its relationship to moral truth: “Almost without exception, the documents that eventually became the New Testament and most of the other surviving documents from the same period of Christian beginnings are concerned with the way converts to the movement ought to behave.” These documents are “addressed not to individuals but to communities, and they have among their primary aims the maintenance and growth of those communities.” They were teaching newcomers how to find their place in the community of faith. In short, the formation of a Christian moral order would lead to the up-building of community. Meeks added a phrase that has been repeated by ethicists, time and again: “Making morals means making community.”
The teaching on servile work is another indicator of how the church constantly sought ways not only to extend its evangelization but to challenge itself to recognize fully the others for whom Christ died. The more it recognized their siblings, the more the community figured out ways to liberate those who were not free enough to enter the Eucharistic community. For them to be moral they needed to expand their community, whence Meeks’ insight. In time their moral lives were clearly at the service of others whom they were fortunate enough to identify as siblings. With that discovery, they worked to free them so as to join in the breaking of the bread in memory of Him who helped them to see the breadth of His mercy.
More columns from James F. Keenan, S.J.:
“What the disciples learned while grieving in ‘The Upper Room’”
“The great religious failure: not recognizing a person in need”
“Vulnerability isn’t weakness. It’s what makes us human—and able to love.”
