“Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing which has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us”.
So say the shepherds who were keeping watch over the flock in fields close to the town, as St Luke tells us in the Gospel reading (Luke 2:15-21).
Luke’s is the only Gospel to tell us about the shepherds who visited Mary and Joseph and their new-born son Jesus. His beautiful story, so familiar to us, still resonates today. So let’s try to imagine ourselves in the shoes of the shepherds that night 2000 years ago.
Some of you I’m sure know much more than I do about sheep. Perhaps you’ve kept and tended them. But I doubt if any of you would call yourselves shepherds. Shepherds are few and far between in Ireland these days, but they would have been very familiar to Luke’s readers. The rugged Judean uplands were a pastoral country. Flocks of sheep represented wealth. A shepherd was paid to stay out night and day in all weathers to guard the sheep against wild animals and robbers. It was a hard, dangerous job, but very responsible. Jesus likens himself to the Good Shepherd, who would lay down his life for the sheep.
Luke’s shepherds are ordinary people, much like you and me. They are not self-important rulers or highly educated opinion formers, as Herod and the Wise Men were, in Matthew’s alternative Christmas story. Luke chooses to tell us about how ordinary people responded to the miracle of Christmas, not the great and mighty. And I believe we have much to learn from them.
The shepherds had just experienced a miraculous vision, a vision of angels.
‘The glory of the Lord shone around them’ – I imagine shimmering light, like the Aurora, the Northern lights. An angel announces ‘to you is born this day in the city of David’ – that is Bethlehem – ‘a Saviour, who is the Messiah, the Lord.’ They are given a sign; they ‘will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger’. Then the angel is joined by ‘a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favours”’
Wow! What an experience! What an exhilarating joy the shepherds must have felt!
Have you ever heard the heavenly host? I have, I think, and you may have too. I can remember my joy and exhilaration after the births of my children. I can remember literally dancing down the wet deserted streets of Guildford at 4am in mid December, on the way back home from the hospital. It was as if the whole universe was laughing and crying and singing with me. And I shared my joy with everyone I met over the following days. Angel voices – a memory to treasure!
Surely it is an experience of this same kind that Isaiah speaks of in today’s OT reading (Isaiah 61:10-62:3), when he says:
I will greatly rejoice in the Lord,
my whole being shall exult in my God;
for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation,
he has covered me with the robe of righteousness,
as a bridegroom decks himself with a garland,
and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels.
Most if not all of us, ordinary people, experience once in a while that sudden sense of exhilarating joy, as both Isaiah and the shepherds did. It is not just poets and the mad who experience visions of angels. We should not be afraid of them, I think. Rather we should see it as God granting us a glimpse, just a fleeting glimpse, of his loving power and majesty. We should treasure such experiences when we return to the world of normality, and ponder them in our hearts, as Mary did.
The shepherds ‘went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in a manger’.
These shepherds are straight-forward, practical people. They don’t stand around debating and philosophising about what their extraordinary experience means. They go with haste to look with their own eyes. And what they find confirms their experience – it is just as the angel had told them. This little child is special, very special - a Saviour, a Messiah, the Lord. And they can’t stop talking about it! Just as I couldn’t stop telling everyone about the birth of my children.
The real miracle of Christmas is that through his grace our loving-Father God makes the first move towards us, to you and to me, to all human beings. He reveals himself to us as Mary and Joseph’s beautiful, helpless baby, their first-born son. This baby grows up to be our Lord Jesus Christ – in John’s mystic vision, the Word of God, the true light that enlightens everyone – through whose life and teaching, and death and resurrection, we are shown the way to God. This is what St Paul is telling us in today’s Epistle reading (Galatians 4:4-7).
But God’s grace is of no use to us unless we respond to it. We should learn from the shepherds how to respond to the miracle of Christmas. They went with haste to find Jesus, and we must too. Like them, we will not be disappointed.
‘The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen.’
They don’t hang about. Once they have seen the child Jesus lying in the manger – the Saviour, the Messiah, the Lord – and once they have told their story - they just go back to work, to tend their flocks.
But something has changed - they are changed. They go back ‘glorifying and praising God for all that they had heard and seen.’
And this surely is what we must do too. We are not meant to remain for ever in our visions, no matter how exhilarating they may be. We must come back to earth. Our job is to bring our experience of the love of God back into the everyday world. Let us pray that we too may go about the world as changed people, glorifying and praising God for all we have heard and seen.
So to summarise, we have indeed a great deal to learn from Luke’s shepherds:
- We should treasure the glimpses we are granted of the love and majesty of our loving Father God.
- We should go with haste to find God’s grace in the Christmas miracle of the birth of Jesus.
- And we should return glorifying and praising God as changed people, to bring God’s loving Spirit back with us into the world.
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