Christmas Dawn Mass 2023
Isaiah 62:11-12; Titus 3:4-7; Luke 2:15-20
Why shepherds? Why are shepherds the first people to be given news of the Saviour’s birth? The theologians have probably considered this question carefully and delivered deep and convincing answers. I am simply going to put in my own three penn’orth.
My first answer, I suppose, would be “because they were there”. It is clear from the Scriptures that shepherds were very much part of the landscape. They are mentioned frequently, whether as themselves or as metaphors, and they would have featured highly in people’s consciousness. Seemingly, there were a lot of them about.
Secondly, they were there at night. It may seem trivial—indeed, it may be so—but the angel and the angel choir had a ready made audience in people who were already awake, and who were separated from the life of the city. If you were looking for a group of alert people to whom to make an announcement, who were better placed than these characters who were sitting on a hilltop, happy to look into the sky?
Is there more to it than that? Well, in the writings of the prophets, and in the psalms, shepherds were often exalted, even to the extent of being a metaphor for God. How often is God identified as a shepherd? “Oh shepherd of Israel hear us; shine forth from your cherubim throne” prays Psalm 79 (80), while Sunday by Sunday at Sext we recite Psalm 22(23): “The Lord is my shepherd; there is nothing I shall want”.
The prophet Ezekiel, in chapter 34, has a lengthy diatribe against worthless shepherds, concluding with God’s promise to take on Himself the shepherding of His people, a promise fulfilled when, in the New Testament, Jesus identified Himself as the Good Shepherd, and when, in St. Matthew’s Gospel (25:31ff) He used the example of a shepherd’s work in His parable of the Last Judgement. In both Old and New Testaments we find references to God’s loving care for His people, frequently expressed as the concern of a loving shepherd for His flock.
Thus, at one level, shepherds occupied a high place in popular consciousness, as being worthy of comparison with God. It therefore seems appropriate that they should be chosen as the first witnesses of God’s ultimate descent into the world as One who would become the epitome of shepherding for all God’s people.
Yet in spite of their exalted scriptural status, shepherds were nonetheless ordinary working men (and women?) Indeed, they were shift workers, a role which we normally associate with what we might call a working class identity. Although their work was essential, it did not put them among the ranks of those to whom St. Paul refers as “influential people”.
This is, in itself, consistent with Jesus’ insistence that He has come to bring the Good News to the poor. He will thank His Father for hiding the mysteries of the Kingdom from “the learned and the clever and revealing them to mere children”. The shepherds were not children, though there may have been shepherd boys among them, nor were they likely to be ranked among “the learned and the clever”.
Both their scriptural dignity and their everyday ordinariness qualify the shepherds to be the first recipients of the Good News, the first witnesses of the Incarnation. Yet they are more even than that: they are the first proclaimers of the Good News, the first apostles. They astonish everyone, we are told, by passing on the angel’s message: then they go back, “glorifying and praising God for all that they had heard and seen”. Among the crowds thronging Bethlehem that night, they must have made a profound impression, probably triggering a rush to the stable by hoi polloi, the revellers and the gawpers, who would no doubt pass on the Good News in their turn.
Thus we arrive at the perennial question (the Pink question, as I call it) “What about us?” What have we seen and heard? What impression has it made on us? Can we take away something from Mass this morning which we can share with others? Have you and I encountered the God who was born for us, who took upon Himself everything human except sin (which is, in any case, a distortion of humanity)? Have you allowed Him to enter deeply into you, to become part of you, so that you too can go back “glorifying and praising God” who is always newborn into the world?
