Advent 4: The Shepherds

 

Ah, the Shepherds.  Perhaps my favourite characters.  The light beckoned them to hurry down to Bethlehem, even with the song of the angels ringing in their ears as they made their way.  Grown men, maybe rough men who found themselves kneeling before a new-born, and doing so with new understanding.

But why make shepherds the first visitors in the narrative?  Well, maybe there is something radically subversive in this pastoral scene?

In Jeremiah God says the nation’s kings should rule like good shepherds.  A shepherd king is devoted to the flock, the nation.  A shepherd king cares for every sheep and in looking out for the one that is lost shows devotion to the minority as well as the majority.  Jeremiah is under no delusion; kings are rarely as good and faithful as shepherds. 

Perhaps we should recommend a reading from Jeremiah at next year’s Coronation?  And in that letter, that I will never send to the organising committee, perhaps I should suggest that instead of a mighty, diamond encrusted sceptre, our new Sovereign might do well to be invested with a simple shepherd’s crook.

I don’t think the authorities in Jesus’ day much cared for Jeremiah and his notion of a Shepherd King.  Like countless power conscious leaders since, they clung to the trappings and privilege of their office and by their actions and decisions showed they no longer went out looking for the lost sheep or personally lay across the entrance of the pen at night as the sheep’s faithful protector.

So, this part of the Nativity might be far more subversive than it first appears.  The shepherds are back!  And in his life Jesus will model what it means to be a Good Shepherd, and that will challenge a lot of people in palaces and in power.

And then, secondly, in looking at these shepherds I rejoice in their thoughtful and deliberate inclusion.  Because they were often side-lined.  Their work was hands on and those hands became dirty.  It meant that on occasions they were even excluded from temple worship.  Yet here they are given ringside seats at the Incarnation.  How ironic.  How wonderful!

Once again we shout: The shepherds are back!

The late Queen said she found Nelson Mandela the most inspiring leader she’d ever met because of his complete lack of rancour.  He knew what it was to live as the outsider, so after his release from prison he spent the rest of his life making people, all people, sense they belonged to a Rainbow Nation.

Yet, amazingly, that sense, that principled ethic of inclusivity, was part of his life even under arrest.

Mandela loved the Sunday Morning Communion Service in the prison chapel.  Whenever he attended and heard the prayers, he said he felt the warmth of millions of people as if they were smiling at him.

One Sunday, he noticed the guard Christo Brand had taken off his cap during the first part of the service.  Mandela asked if he was a Christian, he said he was.  And then Mandela did something wonderful, he insisted that Brand joined him at the altar and together they received bread and wine.  Father Alan Hughes who took that service at Pollsmoor said it had never crossed his mind to ask the guards to join in.  Yet it took this prisoner, Nelson Mandela, to offer out a hand of reconciliation to his guard and say we are both welcome at the Table of the Lord.  And what light must have shone into the chapel as he did so.

The shepherds are back – reminding us of faithful service and hospitable inclusivity.