For Every Action ...

And when they had seen, they made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child.

It is a safe bet that every Nativity scene you see is a still life of Luke chapter two verse sixteen, where the shepherds have arrived at the manger and seen Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus in the manger. Where they are wrong is when they also have the wise men alongside them there; they appear in the account beginning Matthew chapter two, where the family is in a house in Bethlehem -- a telling detail that perhaps there was no rush for Joseph, Mary, and Jesus (who would be just under two years old then) to get back to Nazareth. But back to verse seventeen, neither the shepherds nor Joseph nor Mary -- surely the "they" could also refer to Jesus' earthly parents -- heard or experienced this Good News and kept it, nay, could keep it, to themselves could they?

You know how news travels. In the days of the Roman Empire, it traveled by a system akin to the Pony Express of 19th century America, but you could also assemble at the village well or the local market and share ... well, much as we do now anything that is important or stands out in our minds. For this certainly was not your typical child being born. (But who is?) But this child being announced to shepherds by the angels of God as the fulfillment of prophecies first written down centuries ago and told and retold so no matter what your educational level you had this abiding hope that you and your people (in the shepherds' and Jesus' earthly parents' case, the Jewish people) that all life threw at you was not for nothing.

We almost do not need the remaining three verses of this passage of the gospel of Luke for the purposes of this study, for verses eighteen, nineteen, and twenty will reiterate that, to use a modern analogy, the ball was now in the shepherds' court. Almost. For someone had to tell others what had happened, or this would not even be a recorded story -- or perhaps it would anyway, but the fact that shepherds (people who deal with animals who have to stay out of town and are probably uncomfortable IN town) were the first ones to see Jesus after He was born on Earth keeps -- or should keep -- critics from pooh-poohing this as an "official" story. All the extras of haloes and relics and mixed Nativity scenes comes later, much later. Right now, there is just this story to be told.