On the very first Christmas, the one when Jesus was born, God chose to give a birth announcement to, of all people, a bunch of shepherds “keeping watch over their flocks at night” on a nearby hillside. I have always found the story in Luke 2:8-14 so fascinating, so incongruous.
The Master of the Universe announces the birth of His son to the most common, ordinary, stinky, lowly, uneducated and uncultured people around. Shepherds. They weren’t bad guys, these shepherds. Actually nothing is said of their character good or bad. In fact, nothing is said of them at all, except that they were shepherds. No names. No history. Nothing. Even the quality of their character doesn’t factor in. What’s one sinner compared with another, God seems to be saying. And we never hear from this band of shepherds again.
First one angel and then what Luke describes in 2:13 as “a great company of the heavenly host” announced the birth of the Messiah to … a flock of nameless shepherds. Such extravagance. Why on earth did God not just go ahead while He was at it and announce the birth to the whole world, or at least to all of Judea? Not for a lack of angels, that’s for sure.
No I think it was God’s way of showing right from the start that He spares no expense to speak of his love and his salvation even to the “least of these.” God, who was sending His one and only to die for the most common of sinners, was going to go all out to declare the good news to these same sinners.
This is the God who numbers the hairs on our heads, who is concerned about one lost lamb when the other 99 are all safe and sound. This is the God who is not willing that any one person be lost.
In the rush of life, we can feel like we get lost in the shuffle, like just another Christmas package under the tree of life. Or a lonely parcel tossed aside on the conveyer belt at the post office. But God, in the midst of the most singular event in human history, shows that He cares for every one.
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