A Surprising Saviour
Luke 2:1-20

You can’t always identify significant events when they’re actually happening.

Some are easy. The first moonwalk. The attack on the World Trade Centre. Some aren’t so easy to identify.

[September 1989 - Been in Pakistan for a month – dangerous time – guys with guns – bombs going off – “normal” – so much so that when … - thought nothing of it – “just another bomb” – not even a big one

That bomb assassinated the moderate leader of the “jihadi” network – foreign fighters who fought the Russians in Afghanistan – person who took over the network was Osama bin Laden – built it into al Qaeda – the rest is history ]

You can’t always identify significant events when they’re actually happening.

Just another bomb on a street in Pakistan

A bunch of colonists dumping tea into Boston harbour

The birth of a baby boy in an obscure town at the Eastern edge of the Roman Empire

Luke is telling the story of the most significant event in history. He has given some family background with Elizabeth and Mary. Now, briefly, he zooms out and gives us a wide angle shot of what was happening in the rest of the world at that time. He takes us two and a half thousand kilometres away, to the heart of the Roman Empire, where an emperor wants to know just how big his empire is.

1In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. 2 (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.)

Over the last few weeks, as we’ve been moving towards Christmas, we’ve seen that one of the major themes of the Bible is God’s choice of unexpected people to carry out his will. In the Old Testament Jacob was a whiner who stole his brother’s birthright. Joseph and David were both “the kid brother” that the older boys had no time for. Moses was a fugitive from Egypt. In the New Testament Jesus’ disciples were a pretty rough lot, and Paul can remind the Corinthians that “Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth.”

So it’s significant that Luke starts off the story of Jesus’ birth with the rich and famous. He’s not just giving us an external point that we can use to date Jesus’ birth, although that is no doubt part of his intention. He’s setting up another contrast. On the one hand you have a man who is called a god in inscriptions found around the Eastern Mediterranean, a man so powerful that when he decides that he wants to know how many peoples’ lives he controls the entire population of the empire is up and moving. On the other hand you have a poor carpenter who, because of that decree, has to take his pregnant wife and go to Bethlehem to be counted.

Our natural assumption is that it is the Caesar Augustuses and the George Bushes of this world who make all the significant decisions; that our decisions and our choices are insignificant in the grand scheme of things. But while Augustus was making his plans and running his empire an event was taking place in an obscure corner of his realm that would change the shape of history in a way that he, as Caesar, could only dream of.

It’s often only in hindsight that we know the true significance of an event. And so we zoom back in on one small event in Palestine that would affect the whole world, in much the same way as Jesus would later describe a tiny amount of yeast affecting the whole of a lump of dough.

4 So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David. 5 He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child. 6 While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, 7 and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.

There’s a wonderful, natural simplicity about this story; just a matter of fact description of a young woman giving birth to a son. Because I worked so long in the Muslim world, I can’t help but compare this with the Qur’anic version of the story. There’s been some talk on the radio and elsewhere recently about how the Qur’an and Bible agree on the birth of Jesus. Well, they both agree that Jesus was born to Mary, but that’s about as far as it goes. The Qur’an confuses Mary with Miriam the sister of Moses and Aaron who lived over a thousand years earlier (it’s the same name in Arabic.) The Qur’anic story is also a bit bizarre. It has Jesus giving Mary advice on how to minimize her labour pains (while he is being born!) and speaking to her family to defend her honour from the cradle at one day old.

I think Luke’s version is more likely.

When we started the Advent season with Zechariah’s story, it was clear that John the Baptist was to be born from a priestly family. Although John and Jesus were cousins, Luke has already told us in 1:27 that Joseph was a descendant of David, the greatest king in Israel’s history. Now Luke makes it even more explicit. 4 So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David.

[Why is that significant? Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan, is usually referred to as being a businessman before he became president. What most people in the west don’t know is that he is also from the same tribe as all the former kings, the Durranis. The first republican president was also a Duranni. In fact, except for a couple of years here and there, Afghanistan has only ever been ruled by members of the Durrani tribe. Political loyalties come and go. It’s the family name that’s important.]

Jesus was be born into a family that belongs to the royal line. Perhaps it was a small, obscure branch of that family but still royal. That’s significant. 

But look at where he’s born! Luke uses an event in the emperor’s palace in Rome to date Jesus’ birth, but the event itself takes place in a humble peasant’s house in Palestine.

[People have assumed that, because Jesus was laid in a manger, he was born in a stable. It doesn’t say that. First century peasants shared their living space with their animals. It’s much more likely that a peasant family took in Joseph and Mary and that Jesus was born in a one room house with animals at one end and people at the other.]

When Jesus was born in a one room shack there was no great announcement. If he were to be born today it wouldn’t make the front pages of the papers, not even the tabloids at the supermarket checkouts that track the birth of celebrity babies. The world of politics and economics simply didn’t recognise how significant Jesus’ birth was; but the spiritual world did.

Angels stood on tiptoe to see this wonderful sight, the coming into the world of God’s own son.

Can you imagine being one of those angels, standing on tiptoe with expectation to witness the most significant event in history? Bursting at the seams to tell somebody?  That’s what angels do. They’re messengers who deliver news. Here was the greatest news of all time. But who should you tell? Heaven could already see what was happening. You didn’t have to tell them. You wouldn’t want to reveal the details to the other side. They would find out soon enough. When they did, Matthew tells us that Herod tried to kill all the boys in the area under the age of 2 in an attempt to get rid of Jesus.

Who should you tell?

You couldn’t tell anybody in the town. It would cause too much of a stir. Excited angels tend to light up the sky and frighten people. Ahhh…

8 And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night.

They’ll do! They’re far enough out of town that it won’t cause a riot but near enough to make it in to see the baby. So…

9 An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. (See what I mean about excited angels lighting up the sky and frightening people?) 10 But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. 11 Today in the town of David a Saviour has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord. 12 This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.”

Then all his angel buddies turned up and:

13 Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying, 14 “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom his favour rests.”

It’s almost as if at Jesus’ birth the veil between heaven and earth was drawn aside for a few moments, and some of the wonder and glory and splendour and joy and rejoicing that goes on all the time in God’s presence “leaked” over into our world, and these humble shepherds got to see it. It was quite an honour. For the next 30 years Jesus would be a “sleeper” agent, not attracting any attention to himself until it was time for him to carry out his mission or, as John says in chapter 2 of his gospel, until “his glory was revealed.” But, for this one night of his birth, heaven simply couldn’t contain itself.

15 When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about.”

(That was probably after they had picked themselves up off the ground and stopped going “Wow! Did you see that? Wasn’t that amazing?”)

16 So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger.

How do you think they found them? It doesn’t say the angels led them there. It simply says they found Mary and Joseph and the baby.

Now, Bethlehem wasn’t a big place, but it was still probably about 5000 people. And the only clue the shepherds had was that the child was lying in a manger. That meant they could ignore the wealthy end of town. Jesus was not born in the equivalent of Ancaster or along North Shore Boulevard in Burlington. But that was only a small part of town anyway, so the shepherds would have ended up going door-to-door through at least 6 or 700 houses asking if a baby had been born there that night.

Add to that the fact that shepherds weren’t really thought very highly of. Actually they were despised by townsfolk. They lived out on the hills watching sheep. They moved around looking for pasture. They weren’t rooted in the family structures of the town. The chorus of a song from the 60s sums up the how the townspeople viewed shepherds, “Gypsies, tramps, and thieves, We’d hear it from the people of the town, They’d call us gypsies, tramps, and thieves…”

And, on top of that, they smelled bad! It wasn’t their fault. It’s just part of being a shepherd. Sheep smell, and one of the side effects of sheep smelling is that shepherds also smell. It gets into their clothes and their hair and their skin. A shepherd sits down next to you and you can tell what he does for a living. It’s hard to shake the smell of sheep.

So these smelly, “shady” shepherds are going house-to-house looking for a new born baby. I can imagine that they weren’t received very well at most houses. It’s the middle of the night after all! They were probably yelled at, told to get lost, threatened with dogs, all kinds of stuff. But they kept on looking until they found Jesus. They were convinced that, if this child was important enough to have a bunch of angels turn up and announce his birth, it was worth taking some abuse to find him. And so they went from door to door, asking if the Promised one, the Messiah, the Christ, the answer to all their hopes and longings and questions, was lying in a manger in that house.

[I remember being at a wedding in Peshawar, Pakistan. I had arrived a bit late and I was sitting on the ground among people I didn’t know. In the middle of the programme the young Afghan sitting next to me leaned over and said in my ear, “Can you get me a Bible?” Actually what he asked for was an “Injil”, a New Testament.

By doing that he was putting both of us at risk. If his family found out he was asking for a New Testament they would probably ostracise him, if not kill him. If he was a “plant” he would report me to the authorities and I could get kicked out of the country.

But he had had a dream in which he had encountered Isa Ibnu Mariam, the Qur’anic name for Jesus. That dream had spurred him to try and find out more about this person. He had asked a UN worker (after all, aren’t all Westerners Christians?) and she had freaked out and told him he shouldn’t ask such questions. Not only wasn’t she a believer; she was thinking of her visa too!

But he kept looking for more information on this Jesus he had met in his dream, until he sat next to me at the wedding. We arranged to meet and begin studying the gospel together.]

Like the shepherds and their angelic message, Azam was convinced that this person that he had learned about in a dream was worth finding, even if there were risks involved.

There are still, generally, few risks involved in finding and following Jesus in Canada. We heard a few weeks ago of Pat Currie’s experience of being kept away from church by her husband’s threats of violence. Most of us don’t have to deal with that kind of thing. There are still obstacles to overcome, things like family opposition or the fear of ridicule, but the experience of meeting Jesus is worth it. It radically changes your life.

That was true for the shepherds, even though Jesus was just a new born baby it says,

17 When they had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child, 18 and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them... 20 [and] The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told.

For those of you who are still seeking; knocking on doors – doors of different philosophies, doors of different lifestyles, doors of education or career or success – and asking, “Is this where the answer lies?” I pray that this Christmas you will knock on the door the shepherds found and that you too will find Jesus, the answer to all your hopes and longings and questions. No longer lying in a manger, but crucified and risen again and ascended to heaven. He invites you to come and find him this Christmas.