Back To Work, People!

And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, as it was told unto them.

Our devotion on the birth of Jesus ends with this, the twentieth verse of the second chapter of the Gospel of Luke. We have gone from the center of the Roman world that Judea was then a part of with the announcement of Caesar Augustus taxing that world and requiring the heads of all families to travel to their birth or ancestral cities to be registered to the travels and travails of one family, Joseph with a very pregnant Mary, from Nazareth to Bethlehem. Then Mary "brought forth her first-born son" Jesus the "Savior, which is Christ the Lord". Then some shepherds abiding in a field watching their flock had their worldview exploded by being told, first by one angel, then by a multitude praising God, of this blessed event.

The shepherds were so excited by this news that they left their flocks -- though you have to imagine they left someone in charge and they had to tell him what happened later! -- and went to Bethlehem to visit this baby in a manger. And they told the story of the baby in the manger and Who He Is to everybody they could, and people "wondered at those things". Having shepherds who by and large were untutored and unlettered in any scholarship tell about Jesus (first, who can't smile at the news of a baby being born and second, this is the Savior we have been waiting for ... well, for centuries!) rather than the religious establishment of the day (read: scribes and Pharisees, whom Jesus will have some choice words for, but that's WAY later) gave more people the impression this was true.

AND THEY WERE THERE. But now back to work! The shepherds still had their own job to do, tending the sheep, keeping watch over their flocks day and night. The call of God (mostly) does not and is not meant to drag you out of what you already do and where you already are. We are not told what happened to the shepherds after they returned to their field where they had left their sheep and whoever was watching them in their stead (and possibly all the shepherds had gone and God Himself was watching the sheep, we have no way of knowing this side of heaven!) but it is hard to not imagine this event changed their lives. Certainly it did those of Joseph and Mary and whoever else they came in contact with. And is changing ours.