Message.

It seems as if I’ve was wrong about the shepherds. Perhaps you were, too. You see, I’d always thought of them as poor, unkempt, grubby and smelly – not the sort of people you’d want to have at your posh dinner party. And I’ve had good reason for thinking as I have: many scholars, over many decades, have said that shepherds in ancient Palestine were despised and dishonest people, ritually unclean according to Jewish religious law, outcasts from society who weren’t allowed to testify in a court trial. I’ve read that shepherds stood on the bottom rung of the social ladder, sharing the same lowly status as tax collectors and dung sweepers (that’s an interesting pairing!).

I’ve now discovered that not everyone agrees. For some academics are now saying that the picture of shepherds we’ve built up comes from two sources, both of them wrong. One of those is the philosopher Aristotle who declared that shepherds were “the laziest people, who lead an idle life, and get their subsistence without trouble from tame animals; their flocks wandering from place to place in search of pasture”. However Aristotle was Greek, not Jewish; furthermore he lived in Greece, not Palestine and a full 300 years before the time of Christ! I think you’ll agree that his comment can be safely ignored.

The other sources for our opinions about shepherds are at least Jewish: the Mishnah and the Talmud, which are the fruits of rabbinic debate and scholarship on the Old Testament. But these were written several centuries after Christ and so have little relevance to his time. After all, we wouldn’t look at the ways in which people spoke and thought in Shakespeare’s time and assume that things are the same today!

Perhaps the Bible itself can offer us a more positive view. For instance, three of its most respected characters – Abraham, Moses and David – were all connected to herding, as was Amos the prophet. We have God being called a shepherd in the famous 23^rd psalm; we know that early church leaders were called to be shepherds of their human flocks; and of course Jesus described himself as the good shepherd, willing to lay down his life for his sheep. So perhaps we need to read Luke’s Gospel more carefully when it speaks about those Bethlehem shepherds: for it says that everyone who heard their news was amazed. In other words, it was the news itself that people found astounding, not the fact that it had been brought to them by shepherds. Perhaps we should notch them up the social scale – and give thanks for their chattiness!

So no; those shepherds may not have been despised outcasts – which means we may have made too much of God choosing the lowliest of the low as witnesses to Jesus’ birth. But the shepherds weren’t elite members of society either. What might be most important for us to realise is that they were ordinary people, men (I presume!) who had seen an amazing event which they just couldn’t keep to themselves. I wonder therefore if we ought to regard those shepherds as what used to be called “the common man”, as representatives of the entire human race telling us that Jesus came to be the Saviour of every person who lives on our planet, without exception. All are equal before God.

We all know that there are voices today proclaiming a different message: a message of division, of anger, of privileging some groups of people while rubbishing others, of saying to some “come and join us” but to others “you have no place here”. And we also know that this message sometimes spills over into the most appalling acts of terror and hate, as we saw last Sunday at Bondi Beach. The message of Christmas – even though Christianity is just one religion among many in today’s world – is one which should draw people together rather than push them apart, whatever their race, language, colour or culture.

You may have seen that the Church of England has been running a poster campaign, designed to combat the absurd notion that Christmas is only for white British people – after all, Jesus himself was Middle Eastern and Christianity itself was a foreigner which took root in our country. The campaign’s two posters display the same nativity scene but with different words. One says, “Outsiders welcome; whatever your story, Christmas starts with Christ (#JoyForAll)”; the other simply has, “Christmas started with love”.

So no: those shepherds may not have been outsiders in the way I once thought. But I’m sure the welcome they received at the stable would have been offered to anyone who happened to have come in that night. I believe that Jesus still welcomes anyone; old or young; Jew or Gentile; rich or poor; black, white or brown; male, female or in-between; educated or unable to read; however abled – all have the same status kneeling by the manger or at the foot of the Cross. The question is not whether Jesus welcomes us; there’s no doubt about that. It’s whether we are willing to welcome and commit ourselves to him, not just at Christmas time but every day of our lives.