The story of the Shepherds at Christmas has a lot to teach us. We hear of them only in Luke’s Gospel and only in the second chapter. They come into the narrative and then are never heard from again. The shepherds are the first people to hear the Good News. This is who God decided would be the people who first saw the coming of the Kingdom of God.
Something remarkable is happening here.
The first point is that it all looks unremarkable. Looking after flocks by night is hard and often tedious word (Luke 2:4). Registering the people for a census (2:1-3) is dreary and repetitive work. Trying to find a room in a town that is booked out is really frustrating and tedious!
There is nothing at all glorious happening here in today’s reading. Forget the Renaissance paintings and Christmas cards – there is nothing at all romantic or sentimental in having a feed trough for a cradle (2:7), amid donkey and cattle droppings.
Suddenly, not only one angel but an entire heavenly chorus electrifies the night sky before a handful of shepherds who would have known nothing of any Archangel’s message to a young woman in Nazareth nine months or so earlier. The difference between before the angels came, and after, is like the difference between a candle and all the blazing lights of the Gabba.
God has decided to invade our tired, repetitive lives with a vision and message so spectacular as to be unbelievable. Unless, like the unlikely audience of shepherds we seize it and believe it (2:15-20).
Secondly, the alarm rings because none of this makes logical sense. The heavenly host did not appear outside the Emperor, Caesar’s, palace, or Governor Quirinius’s mansion (Luke 2:1-2). The news is delivered to a bunch of nobodies like the shepherds; like us. “I am bringing you good news of great joy” (2:10) the angels said to the shepherds. You. “To you is born this day” (2:11). “This will be a sign for you: You will find” (2:12). This message comes to us. The angels are saying “this is amazing and miraculous news!”
What is the message? That this is the day of the birth of “a Saviour, who is the Messiah, the Lord.” All of the self-ascribed claims and titles of the Roman Emperor, and all who would think they rule the world from this time onward are bogus. More than that; every single attribute of God himself such as ‘Saviour’ (Isaiah 43:3; Hosea 13:4), “the Lord” (Psalm 30:4; 135:1) — are now, by God’s own decree, concentrated in a single newborn, whose only power at this moment is to nurse at his mother’s breast, cry, pee, and burp.
Mary and Joseph make no claims of their child. They say nothing at all. The shepherds reveal to the parents, and to anyone else whose paths they cross, just what God revealed to them (Luke 2:16-18). If we think about this it is preposterous, yet indescribably beautiful.
The third point is that this this news from God is so incomprehensibly good: “great joy for all the people” (Luke 2:10). On this day there is not one shred of judgment, wrath, anger, or punishment — for us or anyone else. Do we want freedom from that which binds us? This day, and all the days to come, it is ours for the asking.
Do we really want peace? This day, and all the days that follow, God’s peace — whole, sound, irrepressible, permanent — is available “on earth to those whom he favours” or “who know God’s good pleasure” (2:14). That promise has huge implications.
God has chosen those with the capacity to embrace his goodness to receive it. The Shepherds embraced it because they had nothing in their lives that created a barrier to hearing it. We truly need to ponder these things.
And fourthly, God does not force us to embrace his goodness. God does not force us to yield and break on the Rock of Ages. God grants us freedom to respond. In these few verses from today’s reading we witness a remarkable variety of responses:
Terror when standing before God’s sheer radiance (Luke 2:9). An angel calms the fear (2:10), but getting rid of it is hard. When the curtain is pulled back to reveal a platoon of angels in front of us, the sight is unnerving. Who knew that God lives so close to us? Until this little baby returns as the Lion of Judah, there is but the thinnest veil between us and the reality of God’s kingdom
Another response is the response of the angels themselves - a spontaneous outburst of praise: “Glory to God in the highest heaven” (Luke 2:14). The book of Revelation (4:8) reminds us that the angels sing God’s praise and majesty nonstop day and night. The shepherds in Luke 2:20 have learned the music and continue to sing it.
We are invited to respond with our own witness to what we know. These beautiful Shepherds say, “Let’s go and see” (Luke 2:15). They went and then “they made it known” (2:17).
The response is, of course, also one of amazement (Luke 2:18). This is an understandable yet complex reaction. As Luke reminds us all through his gospel that amazement is a common reaction to the person of Jesus. Some are amazed and horrified (Luke 11:38), some are amazed and baffled (Luke 5:26). Still others are amazed and turn violent (9:43)
People are always amazed at this wonderful Jesus. This person, this God.
His mother, Mary’s, response is acceptance with deep pondering: “Mary stored up all these things in her heart and treasured them.” This, perhaps, is the most intriguing response. Of all this story’s figures, Mary has received more inside information (1:26-45) and has burst into song at the wonder of it (1:46-55).
No human will know this little baby, boy, youth, and man, like Mary. Yet even she cannot take it all in.
The thread interweaving everything is God’s mystery. We don’t try and solve this mystery. What we do is proclaim it, live it, trust it, give everything we are and have to it. This is what Christmas is. It is nothing less than the birth of a brand-new Kingdom announced with a siren call; loud noise of singing angels and clashing cymbals. It announces to our souls. ‘nothing will ever be the same again.’
So today let’s be like the Shepherds and go and see this little baby – this literally awesome baby who was already Lord at his birth. He came for us, for you and for me. If no one else was on earth he still would have come for you. This Jesus, this brother, this lifelong true and loyal friend; our brother, Lord, King, and God himself, born of a woman, in a stable, lying in a feed trough. “O Lord, how wonderful are your ways in all the earth!” Let me pray …