Luke 2:5-20

The following are text excerpts from Volume I, chapters 6: “From Nazareth to Bethlehem,” pp. 111-115.

Click here if you would like to download the actual page excerpts from Volume I in a .pdf format.

LUKE 2:5–20 The Birth of Jesus

5[Joseph] went to be registered with Mary, to whom he was engaged and who was expecting a child. 6While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child. 7And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.

8In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. 9Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. 10But the angel said to them,

“Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: 11to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. 12This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.”

13And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying,

14“Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!”

15When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another,

“Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us.”

16So they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger. 17When they saw this, they made known what had been told them about this child; 18and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds told them. 19But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. 20The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.
Let us first ponder the following:

  1. These words are so familiar. We read them each Christmas and hear them recited in children’s pageants. Consider rereading them, and see if anything new comes to mind.
  2. The shepherds were terrified. Why?
  3. The first words of the angel are, “Do not be afraid.” In Scripture, angels speak words such as these time and again. What message remains for us, 2,000 years later?

An Old Story

There once was a child named David keeping the family sheep around Bethlehem of Judea. While he was away in the fields, a man named Samuel visited David’s father, Jesse. Samuel was not just any man; he was a prophet, and judge over the Israelites. Samuel did not visit Jesse to pass the time of day with idle talk. He was there for a solemn, wonderful, and secretive purpose. He had come to anoint a future king who would replace the one that had fallen out of favor with Yahweh, the God of his people.

Samuel insisted on meeting each of Jesse’s sons. Guided by the Spirit, he passed by the strong and tall older brothers. Finally, he settled on young David, handsome, ruddy and bright eyed—David, who had so little hope of being tapped by the prophet that he had been left in the fields near Bethlehem, tending the sheep, while his brothers were presented to Samuel. In the end, David was summoned. And it was young David that Samuel anointed. He became the shepherd who God raised up to lead his sheep, the people of Israel, to glory.

One shepherd was regarded in this manner 1,000 years before Jesus was born. If we leap over that span, and two more millennia as well, we arrive in our modern culture. We now regard shepherds (romantically, perhaps) as simple, humble, appealing folk with good, solid, salt-of-the-earth values. It is a favorable impression, albeit a different one than David left.

But if we focus on either the Davidic or the modern picture, it would lead us in the wrong direction when trying to understand this section of Luke’s gospel. To Luke’s contemporaries, living 1,000 years after David and nearly 2,000 years before us, the shepherds would not have enjoyed any sort of favorable reputation.

The God of the Lowly

In Luke’s time, Israelite shepherds were virtual outcasts. They were ceremonially unclean because their job did not allow them to observe those standards of ritual purity which the power structure considered central to Jewish religious observance in the first century c.e.1 For instance, if a sheep strayed on the Sabbath, might the shepherd be compelled to follow it, and so breach the regulations prohibiting work on that day? If a sheep came in contact with something “unclean,” might the shepherd be defiled in retrieving it? Moreover, the ethics of the shepherds’ vocation were questioned. They were frequently suspected of grazing their sheep on others’ land. They were considered low-class, no-count scoundrels. We might compare them, at best, to day laborers on the fringes of American cities, working when they must in order to get by. At worst, they were more like petty criminals.

What is Luke telling us by having the birth of the Messiah announced to people such as these? As so often occurs in Luke, God identifies with, and reveals himself to, the simple, the outcast, the poor, the downtrodden. It is not the respectable people who receive the first news of the birth of the Messiah, but the reviled.

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A New Story

In my own church, we are challenged by a mission involving society’s “unclean”—like shepherds of our day. We provide worship space for a homeless congregation, charging nominal rent, which is set in order to make our participation in that ministry more than simply a “handout.” The worshiping community that gathers there is called the Church of the Advocate. Another parish pays the lion’s share of compensation for the clergy who serve it. The Church of the Advocate is ultimately part of the greater Diocesan community and ministry.2

With some exceptions, our congregation does not know exactly how to approach these differently and difficultly situated people. It is much easier to minister to them, by providing dollars, than with them, by providing more personal contact and including them as ministers in our own mission. Yet, we take little steps in the direction of relationship. How will the faith community called the Church of the Advocate affect its members? How will it affect the broader community of Episcopalians and other Christians in Western North Carolina?

To Luke, it is clear that people such as these, people who were “living in the fields” (in the words of chapter 2, verse 8), are central participants in the gospel story. The shepherds are entrusted with the message of the coming of the Messiah. They proclaim it to others, and are the first evangelists.

When telling of the announcement to the shepherds, Luke makes some subtle points. There will be a “sign,” the angel proclaims. We might expect that the promised sign of the Messiah would be the appearance of the heavenly host in the sky. Yet, these angels do not claim that role, instead saying that the sign the shepherds will “find [is] a child wrapped in bands of cloth”—“swaddling clothes” according to the King James Version—and “lying in a manger.” Unlike receiving angelic visitations, the act of clothing an infant in this sort of garb was utterly unremarkable; it was the way most mothers of the time and place wrapped their newborns. In this “sign” we see humility on the occasion of the Savior’s entry into the world. And it is that humility, not the choir of angels, toward which the shepherds must look for a sign. If we wish to find the presence of God in the world, we need to seek the small, the weak, the unremarkable, the ordinary.
And finally, there is the “where” of Jesus’ birth to consider. Scholars are uncertain about the intended use of the word “inn” in this context. The place where there was no room may have been an area of someone’s personal home, which was typically rented to travelers. The place may have been one where peasants could seek shelter while in transit, but happened to be occupied on this particular night. Either way, there is no room in the inn.

We are left with a phrase that has borne a powerful image throughout Church history: the closing of our hearts and lives to God. Instead of finding rest in the best—or even the most ordinary—of places, the Messiah finds it in the lowest: a trough, located in some crude stable or cave, where animals feed. His parents are strangers in the land. His attendants, marginalized characters that the culture considers unclean. His country, a place at a shabby fringe of the mighty Roman Empire.

  1. If you envision the birth of the Messiah being announced first to the outcasts of society, do you gain a new perspective on Luke’s nativity? On how God regards those we look down upon? Are there ways we can live our lives that help us overcome our prejudices?
  2. Mary is said to treasure the words spoken to her and to ponder these matters in her heart. Is this an abiding image of Mary? We will later see her questioning the way Jesus lives out his mission. How does that later image fit with this early one?
  3. The shepherds are explicitly depicted as following the angel’s directive, and in proclaiming the good news they have been told. What on earth is God doing, selecting such poor role models as evangelists? Doesn’t he know that he can’t entrust the “good news of great joy” to people who wouldn’t be invited even to a reception honoring a local luminary, much less a universal one? Doesn’t God know he can’t rely on people who would not be caught dead sporting some first-century equivalent of the bumper sticker: “Morals Matter, Character Counts”? And what does all this mean to you?
  1. We will study this purity system throughout this series and examine its sharp contrast to the early Jesus movement. The gospel of Jesus Christ is not a purity system, with first, second, and lower-class tiers of citizens. It is good news of inclusion, where filthy Gentiles and other sinners are radically deemed acceptable to God despite their “sins” of genetics, environment, and behavior. They are recipients of a grace that abolishes religious ideas of virtue and vice, and embraces them in God’s reconciling forgiveness and love. [↩]
  2. I will also allow a footnote to brag on Judith Whelchel, who was ordained in my parish and later became the first vicar of the Church of the Advocate. Her vision and energy led to the formal founding of this worshiping community, which continues to be a vibrant ministry, even after she moved on to other callings. [↩]