Why them?

I was having lunch recently with a fellow church leader; as we were chatting, he asked me, “What do you do to allow yourself to experience Christmas?”  In other words, in the midst of all the activity of the season, preparing for and leading all the special services etc., how do I take time to allow myself opportunity to be personally impacted afresh by the wonder of the Christmas story?  What a great question, and one which I’ve been pondering ever since!

One of the issues with Christmas is that for those of us who are very familiar with the Christmas story, perhaps having heard it repeated over many years, we can fall into the trap (consciously or not) of merely paying lip-service to the Christmas message.  And unless we take time to dig deeper into the story, we can also miss important elements.

Let’s take one example: we are familiar with the account of an angel appeared to shepherds out in the field and telling them: ‘I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people.  Today in the town of David a Saviour has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord’ (Luke 2.10&11).

Maybe in our minds eye we imagine the shepherds with their nice cuddly sheep.  But travel back in time to 1st Century Palestine; someone hearing what had happened would be shocked – why are shepherds included in the story? 

At the time, shepherds were on the bottom rung of society’s social ladder.  They lived a nomadic, rough and lonely life, never owning much, with no place to call home.  They were considered to be ‘unclean’, and as such were excluded from worship at the Temple.  The shepherds were poorly paid and despised by most of the community. In fact, shepherds couldn’t be witnesses in court because they were seen as untrustworthy!

So it may seem very strange that it was the shepherds to whom the news of the birth of God’s promised Messiah was first given.  Why them?  Why not the religious leaders, or the royal palace, or the rich and powerful?  Because the good news of Christmas is for EVERYONE!  Remember the angelic message: ‘I bring you good news that will cause great joy for ALL THE PEOPLE.’ No-one need be excluded.

‘God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that WHOEVER believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life’ (John 3.16).  That’s the amazing good news of Christmas; it should make our hearts rejoice, however many times we may have heard it before!