They were promised a savior. Which also implies they needed saving. Because Christmas isn’t about metaphorical saving.
Halfway through the Christmas season and all the merriment is gone. Sirius XM got through the 26th before they cut the Christmas station. We’re all about New Year’s now. Resolutions. Best-of lists and plans for next year.
And yet it remains Christmas. Albeit far less obviously so.
This dynamic is illustrative of the true challenge of Christmas: that our turn toward joy, hope, and love might last beyond the day of.
Don’t hear these words as pessimistic. This is not defeat or annoyance. It is simply how things are. And more importantly, it is proof that we need the very thing that Jesus’s birth offers.
What the shepherds sought
They were promised a savior.
Which also implies they needed saving.
Most of the time, when we hear this stuff, we jump forward two thousand years, bringing a history of systematic theology with us. Savior becomes a religious concept about belief, adherence, and self-betterment.
They didn’t leave their sheep in the field for that junk.
Our obsession with the end hides from us the vibrancy of the setting. We focus on how God has solved a problem without acknowledging what the problem was.
The shepherds needed saving. They felt trapped.
In essence, God came to the prisoners and promised them freedom. Not the selfish freedom of unrestrained liberty and no responsibility. But freedom from indentured servitude, slavery.
Change
It is easy for us to see the promise of saving abstractly or spiritually. To make following Jesus into a part of a self-help regime because that may be where we feel trapped. But we mustn’t mistake the genuine freedom promised by the birth of Jesus.
That God hates slavery and loves the enslaved. And here comes one who will break those chains.
This is good news of great joy for all the peoples.
These people didn’t race to Bethlehem in the middle of the night to live their best life. #blessed
They came to see proof the world is changing. And they’ve been recruited to make that truth known.
And in hearing them, we’re being recruited, too.