The Gospel that’s in the lectionary for January 1st this year is from St. Luke, and is about the shepherds who go to the manger to find Jesus. It is a story of faith, response, and mission. The reaction of the shepherds provides a powerful blueprint for how we, as modern believers, should respond to the “Good News” in our own lives.
In today’s world that is often saturated with information—our phones ding with notifications so much that I prefer to have mine on silent a good deal of the time—we can become overwhelmed. We can hear an inspiring sermon, or read a good book, or hear an interesting podcast, but we rarely feel the need to act on them immediately. We think about them for a minute, then something else comes along, and we get distracted by whatever the new obsession is.
The shepherds from the nativity narrative remind us that faith often requires a radical “Go!”—a willingness to move quickly from passive reception to active investigation. They “hurried off” and found the scene just as the angels had described. The message of the angels was confirmed by the reality of finding Jesus. This experience validates the divine message and roots their faith in reality. When we actively seek out and engage with the central reality of our faith—whether through worship, prayer, or serving others—we often find the reality confirming what we were told, transforming knowledge into conviction. Finding Jesus in the manger caused any doubts to dissolve.
For us, seeking this means moving past intellectual understanding of the Gospel to demanding genuine experience: seeing God’s love enacted at the food bank, finding peace in prayer during a crisis, or witnessing the power of reconciliation in a broken relationship.
The shepherds then go out into the world again, because you cannot stay there in that moment. When we look at our nativity scenes, it’s all frozen in time, and the shepherds just lounge around for weeks. In reality, we read that they “returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told.” They are the first witnesses, and were able to go back to their lives to share what they had seen and now believed.
The shepherds didn’t over-complicate the experience that they’d had, but simply glorified God. For modern Christians, this means that our professional and home lives—the equivalent of the shepherd’s fields—become the stage for continued worship. We must take the message that we receive at Christmas from the Church and take it out into the world. The world is watching to see if our faith makes a discernible, joyful difference in how we handle stress, loss, and success. In Luke’s Gospel, we are given a powerful example of how to be witnesses to the coming of Jesus into our broken world.
The shepherds show us that an encounter with the divine needs to be an active thing, and not a static moment, frozen in time. We cannot just look at the calm of the manger in Bethlehem: we need to take the message of Jesus Christ back to our daily lives. If we can learn to turn off the background noise of today’s messy world, we can follow in their humble footsteps and show that the presence of the Messiah has truly changed everything, and continues to influence the world today, and how we live in it.
