A
few days ago I was looking at the Christmas cards we’ve received this year.
They are all very nice cards, of course, and thank you to those who have sent
us your Christmas wishes. But when I looked at them I noticed something odd.
A
lot of the cards we’ve received have religious themes – it comes with the
territory – but the thing that intrigued me was which elements of the Nativity
story they showed. There were a few pictures of Mary and Jesus, but the biggest
subject by far was the wise men, offering their gifts or travelling on their
camels. And there were just two that
depicted the story we’ve just heard, the story of the shepherds. That may just
be chance, but it set me wondering. The people who make Christmas cards
presumably know what sells, and it seems that kings are the sure fire winner. I
wondered whether this was a recent thing, so I started doing a little research
into the way the Nativity has been depicted in history, and sure enough, I
discovered that across the centuries, it has been the wise men who get the
lion’s share of the artwork.
The
earliest depictions of the birth of Christ, from the fourth century or so, are
almost always of the wise men. It was around that time that Christians stopped
being persecuted and Christianity became the official religion of the Roman
Empire. Suddenly wealthy and influential people wanted to be associated with
this new faith. They had their coffins carved with Biblical scenes, and they
built grand churches, adorned with glittering mosaics – the shinier the better.
One of their favourite scenes was the procession of
the wise men – who gradually turned into kings - bringing their gifts to the
infant Jesus as he sits on Mary’s lap.
It
was no accident that they were so popular. After all, they had built-in bling.
You could sprinkle them with glitter, give them crowns and brightly coloured
clothing; all the fun stuff. You could add exotic touches of oriental grandeur.
These were people from far away, symbols of international prestige. They would
lend you a bit of reflected glory as they shimmered on your church walls. Why
would anybody want poor shepherds, dressed in browns and beiges when you could
have these glamourous figures?
There’s
another reason why the wise men featured so strongly in early art, especially
the art that featured on coffins,
and that was the fact that they came bearing gifts. The wealthy people buried
in them wanted to remind people – and perhaps God – of their generosity.
Sometimes their reminders were pretty blunt. Some of the gifts carried by the
Magi have numbers inscribed on them, representing the sums of money the donors
had given… *
There
are pictures of Jesus as the Good Shepherd in this early artwork but the real
shepherds of Luke’s Gospel story don’t get a look in. It’s only much later, in
the Middle Ages, that they appear in art, at a time when there was a spiritual
movement to emphasize far more the human emotions, the down-to-earthness of
Christ’s birth. But if my Christmas cards are anything to go by, they’ve never
really achieved the status of the wise men. They’re just not photogenic enough.
The
shepherds were popular in Medieval drama though, in the great cycles of Mystery
plays, which were based on Bible stories. These were a form of community
theatre, each scene being acted out by amateur actors from different trade
guilds, played in the open air from the back of carts. But though they were
popular, the shepherd plays don’t given their subjects much dignity or
reverence. In a typical cycle of plays from Wakefield we first meet the shepherds
out on the cold hillside, complaining about the weather and their wives and the
stinginess of their employers. We expect the angels to arrive any minute, but
no, their first visitor is Mac
the Sheep-stealer, a notorious local rogue. After a bit of banter he
manages to put some sort of spell on them so that they fall asleep, and when
they wake up they find that Mac has gone, and so has one of their lambs. Mac
takes the lamb home to his wife Gill, who lambasts him for his stupidity; the
shepherds are bound to know who the thief is, she says. Just at that moment,
sure enough, they see the shepherds heading towards the house. Gill has an
idea. She picks up the lamb and stuffs it in an empty cradle standing by the
fire and covers it with a blanket, then sits down on a chair nearby and begins
to moan and groan loudly to cover the sound of the lamb bleating. The shepherds
burst in, full of accusations. “No, no” she says “We haven’t got your
sheep. All there is in the house besides us is this newborn baby in the cradle,
one of twins, and I am about to deliver the other baby. I swear it’s true, and
if I am lying I will eat the child in the cradle”, which is exactly what
she plans to do, of course.
And
the shepherds fall for it.
They
beat a hasty retreat, and Mac and Gill think they’ve got away with it and start
taking the lamb out of the cradle. But just at that minute the shepherds return;
they’d forgotten to give the new baby a gift and have come back with a sixpence
for him. The trick is discovered, and Mac gets a beating. The shepherds retrieve
their lamb and go back to the hillside, at which point, of course, the angels
appear.
The
message of the Mystery play is clear. These shepherds aren’t just poor, they
are thick as well, so thick that they can’t tell the difference between a lamb
and a baby. They stumble through life more by luck than judgement. I’m quite sure that shepherding is actually a
highly skilled job, but that’s not how shepherds were seen in the Middle Ages,
nor was it in the time of Jesus, when they also had a reputation for
dishonesty, grazing their sheep on other people’s land. And yet in the Gospel story the angels come to them
with the news of Christ’s birth. These are the ones who are chosen. They
haven’t done anything to deserve it, but they are chosen anyway.
“If
I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb”
it says in the carol we’ve just sung, but actually in the Gospel story, the shepherds take nothing with them at all, nothing
but themselves. Maybe they didn’t think
of taking a gift. Maybe they had nothing to take. But it doesn’t matter. All
they need to do is turn up and be there in that stable. God will do the rest,
showing them something that will fill them with joy and wonder, showing them
that he is with them, in the reality of their ordinary lives. It is a theme
that is picked up through the rest of Luke’s Gospel as fishermen and
tax-collectors, prostitutes and outcasts are called to follow Jesus, and are
given new dignity and hope as they do so.
I’m
not surprised that the Kings make it onto the Christmas cards far more often
than the shepherds. They are the people our society values, just as much as it
did 2000 years ago – wise and powerful, in control, with gifts to give to
others. They’re probably the people we’d like to be, deep down. But if we’re
honest, I suspect that most of us, most of the time, feel more like the
shepherds. We are just muddling through. We might try to look as if we know
what we are doing. We might do our best not to fall flat on our faces. But
sooner or later it happens. However wealthy and well-put-together we look, inside
most people are all too aware of their insecurities, weighed down by dreams that have crashed and died.
Even our sins are usually more cock up than conspiracy. Few people are serial
killers or multi million pound fraudsters. The things that louse up our lives
are usually not very exciting. We open our mouths before we engage our brains.
We get enmeshed in petty arguments that spin out of control. We don’t mean to
hurt others, but somehow we do anyway.
Most
lives are more farce than epic, if we’re honest. And yet, says this story of
the shepherds, God comes to people like us, in the midst of our ordinary messes,
in the midst of our awkwardness and embarrassment, and plants his kingdom
within us. He puts his work into our hands, just as he put the Christ child
into the hands of those shepherds. We may feel we have no more to give him than
they did, but that’s the point. All we have to do is turn up, with our eyes
open, our hearts open, our hands open, and he will do the rest.
The
shepherds go back to their flocks, says Luke, back to their families, back to
their lives, telling everyone who will listen this message they have heard,
that God is with them - even them - that God cares about them- even them - that
God wants them to be part of his kingdom, building a world where his peace rules.
And if God wants them and welcomes them, then surely he wants and welcomes each
one of us too, ridiculous, fallible, broken as we are.
Amen
*The Journey of the
Magi: Meanings
in History of a Christian Story
Richard
C Trexler p 24
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