Advent with Luke #10 – Shepherds Quake
You may have heard shepherds were poor, at the bottom of the economic/respect ladder. Maybe. Some were humble laborers – but so were most people living in Palestine back then. Some were a bit wealthier, owning flocks and hiring shepherd underlings. Some were women! The Psalmist saw (or was!) a shepherd and thought “The Lord is my shepherd.” Did the shepherds in Luke 2 know and love Psalm 23?
David and the great kings of Israel were called Shepherds of their people. Jesus made sure shepherds would forever occupy an elevated place in our ranking of things, partly because they were the first to hear that choir of angels announcing his birth, and also that he spoke of himself and became “the Good Shepherd.”
We sing “Shepherds quake at the sight.” We don’t quake at much nowadays, unless we shiver upon hearing more bad news. We have shrunk the universe down to our size, so we don’t know how to quake over what exceeds our managing, over what is mysterious and holy, the divine showing up unexpectedly. But God made us to quake, to marvel, to be moved spiritually. Maybe that’s really why we love raising candles on Christmas Eve as we sing about them quaking. It’s not just pretty. We are caught up into the beauty that is the heart of God, even if we’ve forgotten how to get there most days.
In my little book about Christmas carols, Why This Jubilee? (a last minute gift for the person who has everything! The publisher told me it fits in a stocking…), I wrote about “What Child is This?” I find myself intrigued by the phrase “whom shepherds guard and angels sing.” Shepherds don’t sound like very good guards, do they? Lacking armor, with no swords, they had never been drilled in formations or in how to deal with vile attackers. They lacked smart uniforms and dignified precision, like those guards at the Vatican or Buckingham Palace. Chasing dumb sheep around in the dark doesn’t qualify you to guard a king like Jesus. Somebody should have hired some serious security.
Theirs was a guarding of awe, the way you crowd around a crib with oohs and ahhhs over a sleeping child. Theirs was a guarding of faith, belief, hope, love. Jesus asked for no protection. When real armed guys showed up, he asked God to forgive them even as they nailed his perfect, beautiful body to a shaft of olive wood. Pilate was shrewd enough to hire a guarding detail to hover around Jesus’ tomb. But they did not believe, they did not hold Jesus in awe like the shepherds did, and their guarding was futile – for God raised Jesus from the dead for the sake of shepherds and children and poor folks and even you and me who worry a lot about security but can never finally make ourselves safe and can only trust God with our future, which is a glorious one, if we can trust what the angels are singing.
I love it that, when the angels looked down and saw Jesus emerge from Mary’s womb, and cry out I the dark, they sang. They couldn’t not sing! And they swooped down and offered their anthem to the guys who work the night shift, who could not have been more stunned, or delighted. They could have sat back and thought Wow, what a great concert that was! But the concert moved them to move, to hustle to the place, to crowd around the baby, to guard with their awe.
Rembrandt’s “Adoration of the Shepherds” portrays the infant Jesus as luminous, glowing like a lantern, illuminating the faces of everyone gathered around. The real baby Jesus probably didn’t glow. But then again, don’t all newborns have a kind of shining about them?
After who knows how long, they went back to their sheep, back to work – but nothing was ever the same. They must have glowed a little, and a quaking lingered in their hearts.