How valued are people once they’re outside paid employment? It is generally believed that those who work have higher self-esteem than those who don’t. Being made redundant is either pitied or frowned upon. Claiming unemployment benefit is increasingly being seen as unacceptable for any length of time. The disabled, sick, or otherwise incapacitated are expected to be tested to a high degree to prove their status beyond any doubt. And the value we place on the elderly is clearly seen in disturbing stories about hospital care and poorly run nursing homes. Even children’s education is seen as preparation for the world of work. High value is placed on those who work; lower on those who don’t.

But I could make a second and contradictory point about the sense that many who are in work don’t feel valued either. In particular, there is sense that while a team is valued the individual within it is not. Take the factory system, as an example. There the individual is only one small cog in a far greater wheel. In fact, are not all paid workers small cogs in the larger wheel that is the economy? So being in work means that you are devalued as an individual within the machine; and being out of work means that you are devalued even further.

In many other areas the value placed on human life seems low. Girls suffer from low self-esteem if they’re not the right shape; boys are told to man-up; abortion rates are scarily high; with the advent of long-range missiles, war is a far easier option; white Europeans look down on Africans and Asians; women are treated as second class within most forms of fundamentalist religions. Being human, it seems, carries little dignity these days.

Which is why the message about Jesus becoming one with us is so essential to the church today. The incarnation is not a secondary doctrine; it is central. For it says that God values humanity so much, he became human himself. And he became human not so that our spirit could escape its fleshy body, but so that our very humanity could be renewed and restored. And God still says that his creation is ‘very good’.


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