“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 (Luke2:15-21).
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 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 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, indeed – 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.
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 rush 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 me, to
all people. 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
St 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 surely what St Paul is telling us in today’s
Epistle reading (Galatians 4:4-7) – ‘God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts,
crying, “Abba! Father!”’
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.’
The shepherds don’t hang about. Once they have seen
the child Jesus lying in the manger – the Saviour, the Messiah, the Lord – and
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 we really do have 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 as changed people to bring God’s
loving Spirit out into the world.
Let me finish in prayer with a collect
Saving
God,
whose
Son Jesus was presented in the temple
and was
acclaimed the glory of Israel
and the
light to the nations:
grant
that in him we may be presented to you
and in
the world may reflect his glory;
who
lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one
God, now and for ever. Amen
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