The Bible is full of beginnings. The beginning of creation, the beginning of sin, the beginning of man after the flood, the beginning of the Israelites; on and on it goes, beginning after beginning. Even the end of the Bible is a beginning. And at this time of year, it is hard to ignore the greatest beginning the world has seen to date; the beginning of the life of Jesus on earth. And haven’t we all, at some time, questioned the birth announcement to the shepherds? Not that I have ever thought it invalid or out of character for God, but there is a reason for all He does, and so the proclamation to the shepherds has to mean something. And maybe I am trying to make more of this event than was intended, but I was pressed into a connection that I never saw before.
Shepherds, all throughout biblical history, have held a lowly place in society. They were the veritable dredges of society, the unpolished, the crude, the crass, the uneducated. There was no glamour found among them. And even though the role they filled was vital, it was without merit. It becomes easy to assume that God’s first declaration of the birth of Christ was to these lowly men because it was men such as these that Christ had come to redeem. The Saviour of the every-man, not just the educated and wealthy man. Christ was to share in all the poverty and scorn that these men faced on a daily basis. And this is a valid and worthy argument. I propose, only, that there is more that can be added to it. Maybe it wasn’t just that Jesus was God as an every-man, but that Jesus was God coming in and to the same people that He had always claimed as his own: not just Jews, but shepherds. In fact, the entire Israelite history reaches back to a shepherd. So isn’t it fitting that Christ’s birth was proclaimed to the same profession that was originally chosen, to foretell the role that Emmanuel would play for all eternity; the greatest Shepherd the world has ever known. Is it just me, or is this a little bigger than mere coincidence?
I think that us modern Christians like to claim the shepherd place, the lowly place, the ordinary place. And, by and large, we are just that. We are a rag tag collection of normal people. But there is a special history that the Israelite people have: they were the first chosen, the first promised, the first to whom salvation was extended. And it is only fitting that God unraveled the glory of the moment to the very people he chose from the first. To remind us that only He can take someone from so humble a place and make astronomical promises and fulfill them to such accuracy and completeness that the culmination of thousands of prophesies arrived and was shining-ly announced to men of the same humble situation as the one He first chose as the recipient of those first promises. To me, the heavenly hosts arriving at the field of the shepherds makes more sense than if they had arrived to a priest or synagogue official. There really was no one else, no other group, that would have been a more fitting audience. The history of herdsmen in the story of salvation, from creation to culmination, is so intricately woven. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the twelve sons, Moses, David. These giants of the Old Testament story. And from this line of shepherds came Christ. Not elevated by the kingly line, but in humility and a position of disgraced necessity.
God opening a bit of heavenly glory in the sky where the shepherds were watching their sheep is so in character. There is no hint of history that would have it any other way. And those shepherds became proclaimers, became changers, became witnesses. They, like the shepherds that were first appointed and annointed, changed the way the world worshiped. Maybe not in a huge way, but it was the first stirrings of the promise arrived. Just as Abraham was the first stirrings of a nation that would shape history and bring forth a Messiah. The greatest Shepherd announced to humanity by shepherds. God arriving and announcing his plan in a mirror to his choice in Abraham. These shepherds found favour with God, they were part of the plan from the foundations of creation. It is too great a correlation to be a coincidence.
faith from the stove 