Christmas for Shepherds
What could be stranger? God in a manger...
Some shepherds riding herd on an Israeli hillside one night two thousand years ago saw light flood the sky.
Born to you this day is a Savior: Christ the Lord.
These men living close to nature, spending their days and nights watching livestock, were alerted by the armies of Heaven to the arrival of God.
You can see the glory filling a dark night sky and disappearing again, extinguished in a moment, the lonely Judean hillsides silent again.
You can feel the cold night, the chill and shock settling in for these Judean shepherds whose lives are constant in the monotony of their low-wage work.
You can hear the sheep bleating. Maybe these were Temple lambs, raised for sacrifice. But the final, the true Lamb of God is here, the angels were saying. Go and see Him.
“The manger is no place for a king, but a Lamb.” Francis Bonhoeffer
The word used for “inn” could be “guest room.” Maybe the pregnant, unmarried woman and her fiancé were not turned away from a booked hotel as is the traditional impression, but were rejected and shamed by family members in Bethlehem, relegated to the barn with the animals.
And so in some barn or cave or stable in Bethlehem, God entered time. Many babies have become kings but only once did a King become a baby. Coarse and cold, in damp and mold, no picturesque warm lighted place, but dark and rank, perhaps a flickering candle lighting the face of infant Messiah. Rejected by His family, visited by shepherds.
What could be stranger? God in a manger.
The birth of Jesus was no populist triumph. God does not see the poor as less well off than the rich, our metrics of poverty and wealth are graspingly small compared to the glory of Heaven from which we are as far removed as it is possible to measure. The wretched state of His birth underlines the demotion of God to earth. He announced His presence to peasant shepherds and educated rulers alike because all men suffer the same fatal condition. We are all beggars in a state of need. He left Heaven to enter the camp of the rebellion. The canyon between Earth and Heaven is too wide for any man to forge.
Shepherds came to see the Lamb of God: The perfect sacrifice. So even here, the specter of the cross falls over the manger.
And this is Christmas: God took on our condition. Born to this life full of trouble, He lived to die for us, because that was the sentence for our sin. He took it Himself.
Born that man no more may die.
Christmas splits history in two. This is the anniversary of the great armistice between Earth and Heaven. Because here, God made peace.
