The Shepherds

Luke 2.1-20

Here is where the story really unfolds.  Mary and Joseph are forced to go to Bethlehem.  When they get there Mary goes into labour and has the baby. Shepherds in the field see angels who tell them to go and find the child.  Then there's the idyllic manger image where they all gather.

There's that last little line to the shepherds: "You will find the baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger." That says so much.

I guess they were expecting a baby.  That's how people, whether they be common or kings, begin. Someone might even be designated a king at birth, if he was the son of the present king.  Clearly that was not the case here.

He was wrapped in strips of cloth. Rags.  There was no homemade baby blanket to wrap him in; they used whatever rags they could find to keep him warm.  And lying in a feeding trough. Born in a barn. With the sounds and smells of animals, hay and weather and dirt and dark.

This was no birthplace for a king. He was born in poverty to scandalous parents who ran from home and had no place to go. You could say that this was the most ordinary of Jewish births, but it was even poorer than ordinary. It was nothing

No one would look here and surmise that this was a future king.  Joseph might have had David's blood in him, but it certainly didn't show itself. This was no king it would seem. It couldn't be.  Impossible.

Yet it was. This is how it all began.  It started here. Here in a stable, strips of cloth scared parents, and shepherds coming to see.  Later there would be a star and wise men and presents (and then more obscurity in Egypt and then Nazareth), but for now it was nothing but the birth of a king.

Perhaps we shouldn't have been surprised. Long before Jesus said, "Blessed are the meek" and "the first shall be last" God still worked this way. David himself was from the village of Bethlehem, the youngest of his family. When the prophet came and told Jesse to call his boys together so he could anoint one as king he didn't even think to call David. Gideon was upfront with God: "I am the least of my family, which is the least of all the tribes." Moses told God he wasn't capable, a poor speaker who was a refugee and a criminal. God always chose someone out of obscurity.

And now here was the climactic anticlimax. It was God coming to his people. Not just to Jewish people but to everyone. Not as a prophet or angel or avatar, but God in full as a person. All of God, coming.

In the form of a baby of poverty, scandal, obscurity and transience.