The Shepherds And The Birth Of Jesus. Series

2) Second, already from the moment Jesus entered the world the ultimate reason for his arrival was alluded to. These were the shepherds who took care of the sheep and cattle offered in the Temple – in particular the Passover sacrifices. And it was they who were confronted with the announcement that the ultimate sacrifice, which would carry away not only the sins of Israel but of the whole world, was born. Just thirty three years later, no further sacrifice was to be needed, as all those who believe in him have been “sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all” (Hebrews 10:10).

3) The angelic announcement gave these priest/ shepherds a profound revelation of who this Messiah would be. He was proclaimed to be both King (born in the city of David) and Priest. That he was both Christ and Lord, the son of man but also the son of God. He would be the saviour of humanity but also the shepherd of all those who would follow his voice.

It was truly good news which the angels proclaimed that night long ago. But as with the shepherds, the mere knowledge of this news is not enough. They needed to act upon it and they did. They went personally to see that child and then proclaimed his birth wherever they could.

Two matters we must concentrate on:

(a) How did the shepherds know where the "manger" was when there was no specific directions to get there.

(b) How did the baby wrapped in " swaddling cloths and lying in the manger" become a "sign" to them.

The image of the shepherds in Luke 2 as society’s “marginalized outcasts” might make for good preaching, but is it based on solid interpretation? Alfred Edersheim, a nineteenth-century Jewish scholar and convert to Christianity, wrote his monumental book, The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, in 1883. He offered a provocative observation on the identity of the shepherds.

" As we pass from the sacred gloom of the cave out into the night, its sky all aglow with starry brightness, its loneliness is peopled, and its silence made vocal from heaven. There is nothing now to conceal, but much to reveal, though the manner of it would seem strangely incongruous to Jewish thinking. And yet Jewish tradition may here prove both illustrative and helpful. That the Messiah was to be born in Bethlehem was a settled conviction - Mic. 5:2. Equally so was the belief, that He was to be revealed from Migdal Eder, “the tower of the flock” Mic. 4:8 .

This Migdal Eder was not the watchtower for the ordinary flocks which pastured on the barren sheep ground beyond Bethlehem, but lay close to the town, on the road to Jerusalem. A passage in the Mishnah leads to the conclusion, that the flocks which pastured there were destined for Temple sacrifices and, accordingly, that the shepherds who watched over them were not ordinary shepherds. . The same Mishnaic passage also leads us to infer that these flocks lay out all the year round, since they are spoken of as in the fields thirty days before the Passover—that is, in the month of February, when in Palestine the average rainfall is nearly greatest. Thus Jewish tradition in some dim manner apprehended the first revelation of the Messiah from that Migdal Eder, where shepherds watched the Temple flocks all the year round " (Alfred Edersheim -The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, Book 2 chapter 6 - 186–87) -( Mishnah - The Mishnah was the first recording of the oral law and Rabbinic Judaism. The word in Hebrew means “repetition,” which means that it was memorized material. It is the major source of the rabbinic teachings of Judaism. After the Scriptures, the Mishnah is regarded as the basic textbook of Jewish life and thought and is traditionally considered to be an integral part of the Torah, as revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai.)