The Shepherds: God's Radical Choice of First Witnesses a Christmas Story

There is a delightful absurdity in the Christmas story that we have spent two thousand years trying to domesticate, and chief among these absurdities is the matter of the shepherds. For when God decided to announce the most important birth in human history, He did not send His angels to the emperor in Rome, or to the high priest in Jerusalem, or even to the scholars who had spent their lives studying prophecies about this very moment. Instead, He sent them to a group of men who smelled of sheep and were about as far from the centers of power and prestige as one could get without falling off the edge of the civilized world entirely.

This is the sort of thing that would have ruined any sensible religion. If we were founding a new faith and wanted to give it credibility, we would arrange for impressive witnesses philosophers, perhaps, or at least respectable merchants. We certainly would not choose social outcasts who spent their nights alone with livestock. But God, it seems, has never been particularly interested in our notions of good public relations.

The shepherds were not merely poor, though they were certainly that. They were ritually unclean by the standards of their day, rendered so by constant contact with animals and by their inability to observe all the meticulous requirements of the religious law while living in fields. They were, in a word, unsuitable. Which is precisely what made them perfect.

Consider the radical democracy of this choice. The angels might have appeared to anyone in Israel that night to the powerful in their palaces or the pious in their prayers. But they chose to appear to those whom the world had forgotten, those who would not even have been permitted to testify in a court of law. It is as if God looked at all the impressive people in the world and decided that what His son's birth needed was not impressive witnesses but honest ones, not people of high status but people with eyes to see.

And what eyes they had! For the shepherds, unlike the scholars with their prophecies and the priests with their rituals, were not hindered by knowing too well what they were supposed to find. They had the tremendous advantage of being able to be surprised. When an army of angels appears in your field singing about glory to God in the highest, you do not stop to question whether this matches your theological expectations. You either run away in terror or run toward Bethlehem in wonder. The shepherds chose wonder.

This is worth dwelling on, for it reveals something profound about how God works. The people who were most prepared for the Messiah who had spent their lives studying the prophecies, who could recite the lineage of David, who knew precisely what signs to look for these people missed Him entirely. Meanwhile, men who probably could not read and certainly had no time for theological speculation recognized Him at once. It is one of history's great ironies, though perhaps we should stop calling it irony and start calling it pattern, for God seems to specialize in this sort of thing.

The modern world, which has an almost perfect talent for missing the point, likes to romanticize the shepherds. We put them in Christmas pageants wearing clean bathrobes and carrying well-groomed stuffed lambs. We sing about them as simple, noble figures keeping watch over their flocks by night. But this sentimentality misses the scandal of what actually happened. These were not the shepherds you would want your daughter to marry or your son to emulate. They were rough men doing a rough job that no one else wanted to do.

And yet and here is where the story becomes too beautiful to be anything but true these rough men became the first evangelists, the first missionaries, the first to carry the good news of Christ's birth to the world. Scripture tells us that after seeing the baby, they "made known abroad" what they had been told about this child. Can you imagine it? Men who were barred from polite society became God's chosen messengers. Men whose testimony would not be accepted in court became the first to testify to the incarnation.

This tells us something essential about the kingdom of God, which operates according to an entirely different economy than the kingdoms of earth. In our world, status flows from power, credibility from position, authority from achievement. But in God's kingdom, the last are first, the least are greatest, and shepherds become apostles because God has always had a habit of choosing the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and the weak things to shame the strong.

There is also this to consider: shepherds know something about watching and waiting that the rest of us have largely forgotten. They spend long hours in darkness, scanning the horizon, attuned to the slightest sound or movement that might signal danger to their flock. They are, by the very nature of their work, people who have learned to pay attention in the dark. Perhaps this is precisely the qualification God was looking for not learning or status or respectability, but the simple ability to notice when something extraordinary breaks into the ordinary darkness of the world.

And break in it did. The angels came not with whispers but with shouts, not with suggestions but with announcements, not with dim hints but with blazing glory. This was not a message that could be missed, not by anyone who was actually watching. But watching really watching, the kind of attention that can perceive the unusual in the midst of the usual this is a rare gift, and the shepherds possessed it.

After the angels departed, the shepherds did something that I find even more remarkable than their initial response. They could have simply marveled at what they had seen and heard, told each other stories about it, and gone back to watching their sheep. The vision alone would have been enough to dine out on for the rest of their lives. But instead, they went "with haste" to Bethlehem. They treated the angelic announcement not as a interesting experience to be savored but as a summons to be obeyed.

This haste is significant. These were men who knew that leaving their flocks exposed was a serious matter, that they were abandoning their duty and risking their livelihood. But they went anyway, because they understood something that we often miss in our careful, calculated modern lives: that when God calls, the proper response is not to weigh the options and consider the implications and plan the logistics. The proper response is to run.

And what did they find when they arrived? Not a king in a palace, not a messiah with armies at his command, but a baby in a feeding trough. The same God who had just organized an angelic choir to announce His son's arrival was now lying in straw, helpless and small. The contrast would be comic if it were not so profound. It is as if God were saying: "You think you understand power? Let me show you power. You think you know what victory looks like? Let me redefine victory. You think you can predict how I will save the world? Watch this."

The shepherds got it. They understood in their bones what all the theologians and scholars would spend centuries trying to explain that God's way of doing things is not our way, that His strength is made perfect in weakness, that the last really do become first, and that a baby in a manger might actually be the salvation of the world. They understood it not because they were smart but because they were simple, not because they were learned but because they were looking.

And when they left Bethlehem, they did not keep what they had seen to themselves. They "made known abroad" the saying which was told them concerning this child. Think about that. Men who were not supposed to speak in public, whose testimony would not be accepted as evidence, became the first publishers of the gospel. God had turned the social order so completely on its head that it would take two thousand years for us to even begin to appreciate the joke.

This is why we still need the shepherds in our Christmas celebrations, though we should probably stop dressing them in clean bathrobes. We need them because they remind us that God's first choice of witnesses says something important about whose kingdom this really is. We need them because in a world that constantly tells us that what matters is status and credibility and having the right credentials, the shepherds stand as a permanent rebuke to all such nonsense. We need them because they prove that the only qualification necessary to recognize Christ is a willingness to look for Him, and the only preparation required is a readiness to be surprised.

Most of all, we need the shepherds because they remind us that Christmas is not primarily about pretty pageants and sentimental carols. It is about a God who so loved the world that He was willing to be born in a stable and announced by angels to outcasts. It is about divine glory choosing to manifest itself in the most humble circumstances imaginable. It is about a kingdom where shepherds become evangelists and babies become kings and everything we thought we knew about power and prestige gets turned beautifully, gloriously, scandalously upside down.

So when you light your Advent candles this year, or arrange your nativity scene, or sing about shepherds watching their flocks by night, remember what an astonishing thing you are celebrating. You are celebrating a God who could have chosen anyone to be His first witnesses and deliberately chose the least impressive people available. You are celebrating a story so strange that no one would have invented it, so unlikely that it must be true. You are celebrating the magnificent absurdity of Christmas which is really just another way of saying you are celebrating grace.

And if that seems too wonderful to be believed, well, ask the shepherds. They saw the whole thing. And unlike most witnesses to miraculous events, they did not spend the rest of their lives trying to make sense of it or fit it into comfortable categories. They simply went and told everyone what they had seen, and then returned to their sheep, "glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen."

That is, when you think about it, a perfect response. For what else can one do when confronted with such glory but praise it? And what else can one do after meeting God in a manger but return to one's ordinary life and find that it has somehow become extraordinary? The shepherds did not need to become different people or take up new professions. They simply became shepherds who had seen the Light of the World, and that made all the difference.

Which means, perhaps, that we are all meant to be shepherds of a sort watching in the darkness, willing to be surprised, ready to run toward glory when it breaks into our ordinary nights. The question is not whether we are impressive enough or credentialed enough or respectable enough to be God's witnesses. The shepherds have already answered that question. The only question is whether we are watching, whether we are willing to be interrupted, whether we have the courage to run toward a stable when every sensible calculation says we should stay with our sheep.

The shepherds teach us that the Christmas story belongs not to the qualified but to the willing, not to the prepared but to the present, not to those who expect to meet God but to those who recognize Him when He arrives. And He will arrive He is always arriving in the most unexpected places and among the most unlikely people. Our job, like the shepherds, is simply to keep watching, to stay ready for glory, and when it comes, to run toward it with all the haste we can muster.

For in the end, the greatest gift the shepherds give us is not their example of humility or their willingness to witness. It is their testimony that the thing we are waiting for the glory we are hoping for, the salvation we are seeking is not far off in some distant future or locked away in some inaccessible heaven. It is here, now, lying in a manger, crying like any baby, needing to be fed and held and loved. And the only thing preventing us from seeing it is our conviction that it must be somewhere else, among more important people, in more impressive circumstances.

The shepherds knew better. And so, two thousand years later, we still remember their names or rather, we don't remember their names at all, and that might be the most appropriate thing of all. For they came and saw and testified not to make names for themselves but to glorify the Name above all names. They decreased so that He might increase. They were willing to be anonymous so that He might be famous. And in doing so, these unsuitable, unqualified, unlikely witnesses became exactly what God needed them to be: the first to see, the first to believe, the first to tell the world that the Light had come into the darkness, and the darkness could not overcome it.

That is the gift of the shepherds. That is their witness. And that, ultimately, is the heart of Christmas itself.

-The Seeker's Quill