I had the pleasure of spending time with my children in the family home recently after a broken pipe flooded floorboards and impacted ceilings and walls. I did a lot of restoration, which led me to renovate other parts of the house. Although I put in exhausting eight-hour days during my vacation, I was restored by the work. I grew up with a father who was always building. Over the years, I have loved being in my workshop making furniture, repairing plumbing and wiring or re-erecting fences and more. 

In an early novel, I dedicated a chapter to my father’s proclivity for building and expanding our rickety family home. His default quote was, “measure twice, cut once.” We were relatively poor, and my father’s old hardware store was precariously perched on the precipice of bankruptcy. To survive, we needed to expand the building so we could diversify what we sold, but we couldn’t afford the permits or navigate the regulations for what could be done to an existing building. 

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My dad would wait until the weekend when the inspectors weren’t working and we would build as much as humanly possible, always ensuring whatever extension we began was “finished” for all intents and purposes. The rules were that if an expansion was “complete,” it couldn’t be removed or fined.

In my novel, the scene unfolds comically. When the inspector corners my father for building one extension, he simply calls it a courtyard. “Very fashionable. We’ll have plants out here.” A month later, we threw a roof over the addition. The inspector ranted. My father smiled patiently. “It’s a covered courtyard. Very European.” The inspector fumed about the permit. My father, rather logically, responded, “Why do I need a permit? The building is finished.” The inspector always left exhausted. 

The small square of a store that initially doubled as our home grew tentacles and limbs, swelling upward and downward, a basement here, an apartment there. Once, when we ran out of timber, my father ripped out the second-story balcony. He forgot to tell my mother. She went out to hang the laundry, and her foot went through the roof, requiring a quick repair. 

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“It’s a skylight,” my father explained to the disconsolate inspector. “For the plants.”

Perhaps because of this quirky upbringing, I always took delight in Jesus being a carpenter. There is debate about the specificity of the term. The Greek word to describe his profession is tekton, which can be translated as artisan or general builder. Some suggest Jesus might have been a stone mason or labourer. Commentators have pointed out that trees were in short supply near Nazareth so stonework was a more likely craft. 

Use of “carpenter” pertaining to Jesus only occurs twice, once in Matthew (13: 55) — “Is not this the carpenter’s son?” — and once in Mark (6: 3): “Is this not the carpenter?” The crowd poses the question in order to dismiss Him as a prophet. 

Still, Jesus was clearly a labourer. Together with Joseph, He would most likely have been part of building projects, familiar with tools, stone and construction. That provides context for one of His most quoted lines: “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone (Matthew, 21:42),” which speaks of His familiarity with the craft and also the way He was dismissed by His own community. 

Whatever the definition of Jesus’ trade, what comforted me in early readings was the value the Bible places on honest and humble work: on the worth of the labourer, the worker in the field, the ordinary citizen. In both Old and New Testaments, manual labour is defined as noble. Honouring it is akin to celebrating the dignity of the human person. 

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Deuteronomy insists all workers must be paid fairly (24: 14-15). Leviticus condemns the practice of withholding wages (19:13). This is repeated in 1 Timothy (5:18): “The laborer deserves to be paid.” Many of Jesus’s parables centre on workers — the fishermen, the workers in the vineyard, the farmer and more.

As a young man and even today, what has always been powerful for me about the story of Jesus is His care for the dignity of every human being. That one so undeniably majestic should be so uncompromisingly humble is a lesson in grace for which there is no equal. It is a joyous foundation for all of us to build upon.