These Guys Who Go Crazy Over A Baby

It’s almost Christmas! I love the Christmas lights, the carols, the family gatherings. This year we are reading through The Jesus Bible by Sally Loyd Jones with our family for Advent. If you start in Genesis, with the short kid-friendly stories, you are at the birth of Christ Dec 22-25.

And once again, just like I do every year, I start thinking about the shepherds – and smiling. I LOVE this part of the Christmas story. It’s just the craziest side-note-of-a-story to the main focus of the baby Jesus. But then you realize it’s NOT a side note! It’s a major part of the gospel. Because just like God came first to the women at the tomb in the Resurrection story, He comes first to the shepherds in the Christmas story. He didn’t go to the powerful or the educated. The fact that women are recorded as the first to see the Risen Jesus is actually corroboration of the reliability of the resurrection. Women were considered unreliable witnesses in the first century and couldn’t be used to “prove” anything in court. The fact that the gospel writers included them anyway shows their commitment to accuracy and adds credibility to their stories.

Same with the shepherds. I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t have been considered authorities on anything except sheep. So they wouldn’t have added credibility to the story by their social or academic standing. BUT it does seem like they would have been an unlikely group to go running into town to see a new baby. The fact that a whole group of hardscrabble, manual labor outdoorsmen dropped everything to find a newborn and tell everyone about him and about these angels who had filled the sky with radiant light and singing DOES add credibility. In a stereotypical story, a group of women might possibly be expected to be excited about the birth of a baby. But a gang of guys? It said they were “glorifying and praising God for the things they had heard and seen.” Luke 2:20

And how did the townspeople receive it? The story says, “All who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them.” I’m sure they were amazed! It says the shepherds returned, I presume to their work, but they were changed people. Let’s be like the shepherds this year, and glorify and praise God for what we have seen and heard.