_THE ADORATION OF THE SHEPHERDS._
LUKE ii. 8-21.
The Gospel of St. Mark omits entirely the Nativity, passing at once to
the words and miracles of His public ministry. St. John, too, dismisses
the Advent and the earlier years of the Divine Life with one solitary
phrase, how the Word, which in the beginning was with God and was God,
"became flesh and dwelt among us" (i. 14). St. Luke, however, whose
Gospel is the Gospel of the Humanity, lingers reverently over the
Nativity, throwing a variety of side-lights upon the cradle of the Holy
Child. Already has he shown how the Roman State prepared the cradle of
the Infancy, and how Cæsar Augustus unconsciously wrought out the
purpose of God, the breath of his imperial decree being but part of a
higher inspiration; and now he proceeds to show how the shepherds of
Judæa bring the greetings of the Hebrew world, the wave-sheaf of the
ripening harvests of homage which yet will be laid, by Jew and Gentile
alike, at the feet of Him who was Son of David and Son of man.
It is generally supposed that these anonymous shepherds were residents
of Bethlehem, and tradition has fixed the exact spot where they were
favoured with this Advent apocalypse, about a thousand paces from the
modern village. It is a historic fact that there was a tower near that
site, called Eder, or "the Tower of the Flock," around which were
pastured the flocks destined for the Temple sacrifice; but the
topography of ver. 8 is purposely vague. The expression "in that same
country," written by one who both in years and in distance was far
removed from the events recorded, would describe any circle within the
radius of a few miles from Bethlehem as its centre, and the very
vagueness of the expression seems to push back the scene of the Advent
music to a farther distance than a thousand paces. And this view is
confirmed by the language of the shepherds themselves, who, when the
vision has faded, say one to another, "Let us now go even unto
Bethlehem, and see this thing that is come to pass;" for they scarcely
would have needed, or used, the adverbial "even" were they keeping their
flocks so close up to the walls of the city. We may therefore infer,
with some amount of probability, that whether the shepherds were
residents of Bethlehem or not, when they kept watch over their flocks,
it was not on the traditional site, but farther away over the hills.
Indeed, it is difficult, and very often impossible, for us to fix the
precise locality of these sacred scenes, these bright points of
intersection, where Heaven's glories flash out against the dull
carbon-points of earth; and the voices of tradition are at best but
doubtful guesses. It would almost seem as if God Himself had wiped out
these memories, hiding them away, as He hid the sepulchre of Moses, lest
the world should pay them too great a homage, and lest we might think
that one place lay nearer to heaven than another, when all places are
equally distant, or rather equally near. It is enough to know that
somewhere on these lonely hills came the vision of the angels, perhaps
on the very spot where David was minding his sheep when Heaven summoned
him to a higher task, passing him up among the kings.
While the shepherds were "watching the watches of the night over their
flock," as the Evangelist expresses it, referring to the pastoral custom
of dividing the night into watches, and keeping watch by turns, suddenly
"an angel of the Lord stood by them, and the glory of the Lord shone
round about them." When the angel appeared to Zacharias, and when
Gabriel brought to Mary her evangel, we do not read of any supernatural
portent, any celestial glory, attending them. Possibly because their
appearances were in the broad daylight, when the glory would be masked,
invisible; but now, in the dead of night, the angelic form is bright and
luminous, throwing all around them a sort of heavenly halo, in which
even the lustrous Syrian stars grow dim. Dazzled by the sudden burst of
glory, the shepherds were awed by the vision, and stricken with a great
fear, until the angel, borrowing the tones and accents of their own
speech, addressed to them his message, the message he had been
commissioned to bring: "Be not afraid; for behold, I bring you good
tidings of great joy which shall be to all the people: for there is born
to you this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the
Lord." And then he gave them a sign by which they might recognize the
Saviour Lord: "Ye shall find a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, and
lying in a manger."
From the indefinite wording of the narrative we should infer that the
angel who brought the message to the shepherds was not Gabriel, who had
before brought the good tidings to Mary. But whether or not the
messenger was the same, the two messages are almost identical in
structure and in thought, the only difference being the personal element
of the equation, and the shifting of the time from the future to the
present tense. Both strike the same key-note, the "Fear not" with which
they seek to still the vibrations of the heart, that the Virgin and the
shepherds may not have their vision blurred and tremulous through the
agitation of the mind. Both make mention of the name of David, which
name was the key-word which unlocked all Messianic hopes. Both speak of
the Child as a Saviour--though Gabriel wraps up the title within the
name, "Thou shalt call His name Jesus;" for, as St. Matthew explains it,
"it is He that shall save His people from their sins." Both, too, speak
of Him as the Messiah; for when the angel now calls Him the "Christ" it
was the same "Anointed" one who, as Gabriel had said, "should reign over
the house of Jacob for ever;" while in the last august title now given
by the angel, "Lord," we may recognize the higher Divinity--that He is,
in some unique, and to us incomprehensible sense, "the Son of the Most
High" (i. 32). Such, then, is the triple crown the angel now bears to
the cradle of the Holy Child. What He will be to the world is still but
a prophecy; but as He, the Firstborn, is now brought into the world, God
commands all the angels to worship Him (Heb. i. 6); and with united
voice--though the antiphon sings back over a nine months silence--they
salute the Child of Bethlehem as Saviour, Messiah, Lord. The one title
sets up His throne facing the lower world, commanding the powers of
darkness, and looking at the moral conditions of men; the second throws
the shadow of His throne over the political relations of men, making it
dominate all thrones; while the third title sets up His throne facing
the heavens themselves, vesting Him with a supreme, a Divine authority.
No sooner was the message ended than suddenly there was with the angel a
multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying--
"Glory to God in the highest,
And on earth peace among men in whom He is well pleased."
The Revised Version lacks the rhythmic qualities of the Authorized
Version; and the wordy clause "among men in whom He is well pleased"
seems but a poor substitute for the terse and clear "good-will toward
men," which is an expression easy of utterance, and which seemed to have
earned a prescriptive right to a place in our Advent music. The revised
rendering, however, is certainly more in accord with the grammatical
construction of the original, whose idiomatic form can scarcely be put
into English, except in a way somewhat circuitous and involved. In both
expressions the underlying thought is the same, representing man as the
object of the Divine good-pleasure, that Divine "benevolence"--using the
word in its etymological sense--which enfolds, in the germ, the Divine
favour, compassion, mercy, and love. There is thus a triple parallelism
running through the song, the "Glory to God in the highest" finding its
corresponding terms in the "peace among (or to) men in whom He is well
pleased on earth;" while altogether it forms one complete circle of
praise, the "good-pleasure to man," the "peace on earth," the "glory to
God" marking off its three segments. And so the song harmonizes with the
message; indeed, it is that message in an altered shape; no longer
walking in common prosaic ways, but winged now, it moves in its higher
circles with measured beat, leaving a path from the cradle of the
Infancy to the highest heavens all strewn with _Glorias_. And what is
the triplicity of the song but another rendering of the three august
titles of the message--Saviour, Messiah, Lord? the "Saviour" being the
expression of the Divine good-pleasure; the "Messiah" telling of His
reign upon earth who is Himself the Prince of peace; while the "Lord,"
which, as we have seen, corresponds with "the Son of the Most High,"
leads us up directly to the "heavenlies," to Him who commands and who
deserves all doxologies.
But is this song only a song in some far-distant sky--a sweet memory
indeed, but no experience? Is it not rather the original from which
copies may be struck for our individual lives? There is for each of us
an advent, if we will accept it; for what is regeneration but the
beginning of the Divine life within our life, the advent of the Christ
Himself? And let but that supreme hour come to us when place and room
are made for Him who is at once the expression of the Divine favour and
the incarnation of the Divine love, and the new era dawns, the reign of
peace, the "peace _of_ God," because the "peace _with_ God, through our
Lord Jesus Christ." Then will the heart throw off its _Glorias_, not in
one burst of song, which subsides quickly into silence, but in one
perpetual anthem, which ever becomes more loud and sweet as the day of
its perfected redemption draweth nigh; for when the Divine displeasure
is turned away, and a Divine peace or comfort takes its place, who can
but say, "O Lord, I will praise Thee"?
Directly the angel-song had ceased, and the singers had disappeared in
the deep silence whence they came, the shepherds, garnering up their
scattered thoughts, said one to another (as if their hearts were
speaking all at once and all in unison), "Let us now go even unto
Bethlehem, and see this thing that is come to pass which the Lord hath
made known unto us." The response was immediate. They do not shut out
this heavenly truth by doubt and vain questioning; they do not keep it
at a distance from them, as if it only indirectly and distantly
concerned themselves, but yield themselves up to it entirely; and as
they go hastily to Bethlehem, in the quick step and in the rapid beating
of their heart, we can trace the vibrations of the angel-song. And why
is this? Why is it that the message does not come upon them as a
surprise? Why are these men ready with such a perfect acquiescence,
their hearts leaping forward to meet and embrace this Gospel of the
angels? We shall probably find our answer in the character of the men
themselves. They pass into history unnamed; and after playing their
brief part, they disappear, lost in the incense-cloud of their own
praises. But evidently these shepherds were no mean, no common men. They
were Hebrews, possibly of the royal line; at any rate they were Davids
in their loftiness of thought, of hope and aspiration. They were devout,
God-fearing men. Like their father Jacob, they too were citizens of two
worlds; they could lead their flocks into green pastures, and mend the
fold; or they could turn aside from flock and fold to wrestle with God's
angels, and prevail. Heaven's revelations come to noble minds, as the
loftiest peaks are always the first to hail the dawn. And can we suppose
that Heaven would so honour them, lighting up the sky with an aureole of
glory for their sole benefit, sending this multitude to sing to them a
sweet chorale, if the men themselves had nothing heavenly about them, if
their selfish, sordid mind could soar no higher than their flocks, and
have no wider range than the markets for their wool?
"Let but a flute
Play 'neath the fine-mixed metal,
Then shall the huge bell tremble, then the mass
With myriad waves concurrent shall respond
In low, soft unison."
But there must be the music hidden within, or there is no unison. And we
may be sure of this, that the angel-song had passed by them as a cold
night-wind, had not their hearts been tuned up by intense desire, until
they struck responsive to the angel-voice. Though they knew it not, they
had led their flock to the mount of God; and up the steps of sacred
hopes and lofty aspirations they had climbed, until their lives had got
within the circle of heavenly harmonies, and they were worthy to be the
first apostles of the New Dispensation.
In our earthly modes of thinking we push the sacred and the secular far
apart, as if they were two different worlds, or, at any rate, as
opposite hemispheres of the same world, with but few points of contact
between them. It is not so. The secular is the sacred on its under, its
earthward side. It is a part of that great whole we call duty, and in
our earthly callings, if they are but pure and honest, we may hear the
echoes of a heavenly call. The temple of Worship and the temple of Work
are not separated by indefinable spaces; they are contiguous, leaning
upon each other, while they both front the same Divine purpose. Nor can
it be simply a coincidence that Heaven's revelations should nearly
always come to man in the moments of earthly toil, rather than in the
hours of leisure or of so-called worship. It was from his shepherding
the burning bush beckoned Moses aside; while Heaven's messenger found
Gideon on the threshing-floor, and Elisha in the furrow. In the New
Testament, too, in all the cases whose circumstances are recorded, the
Divine call reached the disciples when engaged in their every-day task,
sitting at the receipt of custom, and casting or mending their nets. The
fact is significant. In the estimate of Heaven, instead of a discount
being put upon the common tasks of life, those tasks are dignified and
ennobled. They look towards heaven, and if the heart be only set in that
direction they lead too up towards heaven. Our weeks are not unlike the
sheet of Peter's vision; we take care to tie up the two ends, attaching
them to heaven, and then we leave what we call the "week-days" bulging
down earthward in purely secular fashion. But would not our weeks, and
our whole life, swing on a higher and holier level, could we but
recognize the fact that all days are the Lord's days, and did we but
attach each day and each deed to heaven? Such is the truest, noblest
life, that takes the "trivial rounds" as a part of its sacred duties,
doing them all as unto the Lord. So, as we sanctify life's common
things, they cease to be common, and the earthly becomes less earthly as
we learn to see more of heaven in it. In the weaving of our life some of
its threads stretch earthward, and some heavenward; but they cross and
interlace, and together they form the warp and woof of one fabric, which
should be, like the garment of the Master, without seam, woven from the
top throughout. Happy is that life which, keeping an open eye over the
flock, keeps too a heart open towards heaven, ready to listen to the
angelic music, and ready to transfer its rhythm to their own hastening
feet or their praising lips.
Our Evangelist tells us that they "came in haste" in search of the young
Child, and we may almost detect that haste in the very accents of their
speech. It is, "Let us now go across even to Bethlehem," allowing the
prefix its proper meaning; as if their eager hearts could not stay to go
round by the ordinary road, but like bees scenting a held of clover,
they too must make their cross-country way to Bethlehem. Though the
angel had not given explicit directions, the city of David was not so
large but that they could easily discover the object of their
search--the Child, as had been told them, wrapped in swaddling clothes
and lying in a manager. It has been thought by some that the "inn" is a
mistranslation, and that it really was the "guest-chamber" of some
friend. It is true the word is rendered "guest-chamber" on the other two
occasions of its use (Mark xiv. 14; Luke xxii. 11), but it also
signified a public guest-house, as well as a private guest-chamber; and
such evidently is its meaning here, for private hospitality, even had
its "guest-chamber" been preoccupied, would certainly, under the
circumstances, have offered something more human than a stable. That
would not have been its only alternative.
It is an interesting coincidence, and one serving to link together the
Old and the New Testament, that Jeremiah speaks of a certain _geruth_,
or inn, as it may read, "which is by Beth-lehem" (Jer. xli. 17). How it
came into the possession of Chimham, who was a Gileadite, we are not
told; but we are told that because of the kindness shown to David in his
exile by Barzillai, his son Chimham received special marks of the royal
favour, and was, in fact, treated almost as an adopted son (1 Kings ii.
7). What is certain is that the _khan_ of Bethlehem bore, for successive
generations, the name of Chimham; which fact is in itself evidence that
Chimham was its builder, as the well of Jacob retained, through all the
changes of inheritance, the name of the patriarch whose thought and gift
it was. In all probability, therefore, the "inn" was built by Chimham,
on that part of the paternal estate which David inherited; and as the
_khans_ of the East cling with remarkable tenacity to their original
sites, it is probable, to say the least, that the "inn of Chimham" and
the inn of Bethlehem, in which there was no room for the two late-comers
from Nazareth, were, if not identical, at any rate related
structures--so strangely does the cycle of history complete itself, and
the Old merge into the New. And so, while Prophecy sings audibly and
sweetly of the place which yet shall give birth to the Governor who
shall rule over Israel, History puts up her silent hand, and salutes
Beth-lehem Ephratah as by no means the least among the cities of Judah.
But not in the inn do the shepherds find the happy parents--the
spring-tide of the unusual immigration had completely flooded that,
leaving no standing-place for the son and daughter of David--but they
find them in a stable, probably in some adjoining cave, the swaddled
Child, as the angels had foretold, lying in the manger. Art has lingered
reverently and long over this stable scene, hiding with exquisite
draperies its baldness and meanness, and lighting up its darkness with
wreaths of golden glory; but these splendours are apocryphal, existing
only in the mind of the beholder; they are the luminous mist of an
adoring love. What the shepherds do find is an extemporized apartment,
mean in the extreme; two strangers fresh from Nazareth, both young and
both poor; and a new-born infant asleep in the manger, with a group of
sympathizing spectators, who have brought, in the emergency, all kinds
of proffered helps. It seems a strange ending for an angel-song, a far
drop from the superhuman to the subhuman. Will it shake the faith of
these apostle-shepherds? Will it shatter their bright hope? And
chagrined that their auroral dream should have so poor a realization,
will they return to their flocks with heavy hearts and sad? Not they.
They prostrate themselves before the Infant Presence, repeating over and
over the heavenly words the angels had spoken unto them concerning the
Child, and while Mary announces the name as "Jesus," they salute Him, as
the angels had greeted Him before, as Saviour, Messiah, Lord; thus
putting on the head of the Child Jesus that triple crown, symbol of a
supremacy which knows no limit either in space or time. It was the _Te
Deum_ of a redeemed humanity, which succeeding years have only made more
deep, more full, and which in ever-rising tones will yet grow into the
Alleluias of the heavens. Saviour, Messiah, Lord! these titles struck
upon Mary's ear not with surprise, for she has grown accustomed to
surprises now, but with a thrill of wonder. She could not yet spell out
all their deep meaning, and so she pondered "them in her heart," hiding
them away in her maternal soul, that their deep secrets might ripen and
blossom in the summer of the after-years.
The shepherds appear no more in the Gospel story. We see them returning
to their task "glorifying and praising God for all the things that they
had heard and seen," and then the mantle of a deep silence falls upon
them. As a lark, rising heavenward, loses itself from our sight,
becoming a sweet song in the sky, so these anonymous shepherds, these
first disciples of the Lord, having laid their tribute at His feet--in
the name of humanity saluting the Christ who was to be--now pass out of
our sight, leaving for us the example of their heavenward look and their
simple faith, and leaving, too, their _Glorias_, which in multiplied
reverberations fill all lands and all times, the earthly prelude of the
New, the eternal Song.