Angels and shepherds. It’s hard to escape them at this time of year. You’ll find them on Christmas cards, in shop windows and at the school nativity play; not to mention the carols we hear as we turn on our radios and TVs, or make our way through shopping centres and major railway stations.
‘Hark the herald angels sing’; ‘While shepherds watched their flocks by night’; ‘Angels from the realms of glory’; ‘Silent night! holy night! Shepherds quake at the sight’. At first glance, such a theme appears worlds away from 21st century Britain.
Sightings of shepherds are not everyday occurrences for most of us, and few, if any, of us would claim to have encountered an angel, still less witnessed a whole choir of them singing in the night sky.
Unique baby
In the fields surrounding first century Bethlehem, the sight of shepherds tending their sheep was nothing unusual, but the appearance of angels was as strange to them as it would be to us. These strong, hardy men had never seen anything like it before — and they were certainly not given to flights of fancy! If anything, they would have been sceptical about heavenly apparitions.
So the first thing the angel did was to reassure them: ‘Do not be afraid!’ The message the angels came to bring concerned the birth of a child. Nothing unusual about that, you might think. Around three-quarters of a million babies are born in the United Kingdom each year. And not an angel in sight!
But this baby was different, completely different; unique. There had never been another baby quite like him before, and there has never been one quite like him since.
In three simple words, one of the messengers from heaven explained the immense significance of the birth of this child: ‘I bring you good tidings of great joy which will be to all people. For there is born to you this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is Christ, the Lord’(Luke 2:10-11).
