Outside Bethlehem an angel of the Lord appears to the shepherds along with a choir to announce the birth of Jesus.
Sometime during Mary and Joseph’s stay in Bethlehem a group of wise men turn up guided not by an angel but by a star this time. Somehow in a dream they are warned about Herod’s false intentions, which may or may not have been an angel, we’re not told. Joseph then gets another angelic visit to go to Egypt and when Herod dies, you guessed it, an angel of the Lord tells him it’s time to go back to Nazareth. The next time angels would appear to human beings is when they announce the resurrection and ascension of Jesus.
The point is that kings saw angels, prophets saw angels, heroes like Daniel saw angels, but carpenters and shepherds?
The Angelic Message
Good news of great joy to all people
The extraordinary thing is that God chooses to send a message of history changing importance via the angel to ordinary people. And these ordinary shepherds did not go onto become celebrities, to host their own chat shows or star in reality TV. They didn’t judge the strictly come shepherding competitions, or bequeath their staffs to the Bethlehem museum of sacred artefacts. We don’t even know their names, something that is also true of the wise men who would visit Jesus.
Numbers don’t matter.
Responding to God’s revelation is what matters most.
How do you respond to good news?
You can usually tell when someone has received good news. Take the presenter on Radio 5 this morning, Phil Williams. He’s an Aston Villa supporter and yesterday they beat Wets Ham to go third in the Premiership. Now that might not be very important or significant to you, but to him it certainly put a spring in his step and he was bright and clearly very happy this morning.
Responding to the Message
When the shepherds got the good news message from the angel they decided to do a number of things.
First they decided to go and see for themselves: Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing…
They made a personal journey of discovery. You may hear the good news via someone else, but you must experience it for yourself.
Second they couldn’t contain the message: When they had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child.
I doubt that they had had much theological education or philosophical tutoring. They simply shared what they knew. I’d guess that if someone had asked them, “How can this happen?” there response would most likely have been, “We don’t know. We just know that God sent us a messenger and what the messenger told us turned out to be true.”
Thirdly they could not contain their worship: The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told.
God does not lie or cheat or deceive us. He does not tell shepherds on a hillside something that isn’t true and he doesn’t do that to us either. You can trust him. When he says a Saviour has been born, he means a Saviour has been born. And if this is true, everything else he has to say is also true.
Shepherding the good news
How can we be more like the shepherds when it comes to how we handle to good news of Jesus Christ?
First we can share the simple truth of what we’ve heard and experienced for ourselves. People may not believe you, people may thing you’re a little crazy, but if you’ve experienced the good news, you know it’s true.
Second, we can let it show. The shepherds teach us that one way we can let it show is through our heartfelt worship. They returned praising and glorifying God, we can too. This praise was rooted in the truth of what they had seen and heard, what they had witnessed first hand. It came out of their personal experience. You and I not only have our personal experience of God’s truthfulness but we have a written record of it through centuries of Biblical and later church history.
Letting it show through our worship is only part of our story. From Luke’s account we have no further information about how this encounter with God and his purposes affected these shepherds. We don’t know what happened to them.
What we do know is that we are changed by our encounter with Jesus. Paul says that when we become Christians we die to old ways of living and begin to live a new life.
I am crucified with Christ, and I no longer live but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God…
Conclusion
If you’re still waiting for an angel to pop in to see you and tell you what’s happening and what to do, you might just have to wait a while. It might look common place in the nativity story, but it’s not as common as you might think.
God has entrusted his message of good news to a different group of messengers.
In the days of Jesus’ birth, God sent an angel to a group of shepherds who in turn became the first messengers to other people. And now It’s our turn. You and I are God’s messengers to the world. To our communities, to our neighbours and colleagues and friends and families.
The local church has become the carriers of the message that is the hope of the world and you and I are the local church.
