The Shepherds and the Night Watch Above Bethlehem

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Picture a hill at night, a long way from any lamp. It is cold in the way that open country is cold, a dry, clean cold that gets in at the cuffs. A small fire is going, low and red. Round it sit a few men wrapped in coats that smell of sheep, which is a smell they stopped noticing years ago, and behind them in the dark there are a great many warm bodies breathing.

And one of the men has just said, in a whisper, that he thinks the sky has gone a bit bright.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Let us begin with a census.

Hello, and welcome to Saints by Candlelight, stories of saints, angels and patriarchs from the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, told for bedtime. These episodes are written by an AI and read by a synthetic voice, and they try very hard to be faithful. Tonight's story is from the Gospel according to Luke, chapter two, which Christians of both traditions read as Scripture, and we will tell it as it is told there. A few small things, the hill, the weather, the sheep, and the talk round the fire, are our own invention, told in the spirit of the original, and we will say at the end which parts those were. So get comfortable. Dim the lights. And let's begin.

Luke begins his account of this night the way a careful historian would begin, with a date and an emperor. In those days, he says, a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered.

Now, we should be honest about something at the start. Scholars have argued for a long time about exactly how Luke's census fits with the other records we have, especially the matter of the governor Quirinius, and good people read it in different ways. Nothing in tonight's story depends on settling that. What Luke wants us to see is plain enough. The most powerful man in the world has given an order, and the order is a piece of paperwork. Everybody must go to the town of their family and be counted. And the whole great machinery of the empire, its roads, its clerks, its soldiers, its tax rolls, is turning, quite unaware of what it is turning toward.

It is rather like a very large clock that does not know it is about to strike an hour that matters.

And so a carpenter named Joseph, from Nazareth in Galilee, goes up to Judea, to the town of David called Bethlehem, because he belongs to David's house and family. With him goes Mary, who is expecting a child. The Gospel tells us this very simply. It does not tell us how long the road took, or whether they had a donkey, or what the weather was. Songs and paintings have supplied a donkey, and we are fond of the donkey, but we will say that Luke does not mention one.

What Luke does tell us is that while they were there, the time came for her to give birth. And she gave birth to her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling cloths, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the guest room.

We will come back to that word, because it is a small, odd word, and a great deal rests on it.

But first, the hill.

Bethlehem sits on a ridge in the hill country south of Jerusalem. It is a small place, then and now. The prophet Micah, hundreds of years before, called it little among the clans of Judah, and then said that out of it would come one who is to rule. Matthew's Gospel, which tells the birth in a different way and which we will leave to its own night, points to that line. Luke does not quote it. Luke just lets us stand in the little town and look up at the dark slopes beyond it.

And on those slopes, in the fields, there were shepherds.

Let us think about what a shepherd was, in that country, in that time. A shepherd was a person who looked after somebody else's animals, or his own family's, out in the open, and who was therefore out in the open too. The work did not stop at sunset. Sheep do not know that it is evening. Wolves and thieves do not keep office hours. So somebody had to stay awake, and somebody always did, in turns, round a fire, with a stick, and a sling, and very strong views about the sheep.

It was not a grand job. If you had asked the people of Bethlehem who the important people in town were, the shepherds would not have come up, any more than the night shift at a bakery comes up when people list the leading citizens. They were busy, and tired, and a bit hard to be near. And, as the Gospel is about to make perfectly clear, they were the people to whom the news was brought first.

Luke does not say why. He does not tell us they were holy, or that they were waiting for anything, or that they had been praying. He just says that they were living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. And I find that rather wonderful. It means that the news of the greatest thing that ever happened did not come to people who were ready. It came to people who were at work.

Now, how many shepherds? Luke does not say. The paintings usually give us three, I suspect because of the three gifts in Matthew's telling, but that is a tidy habit of the painters and not a fact of the Gospel. There might have been two. There might have been seven. And there might have been a boy of twelve, put on the late watch because he was the one who could stay awake, who has been told that if he sees anything, anything at all, he should say so.

We shall give him no name. Luke names nobody here. But we will give the hill a few sheep, and the shepherds a fire, and a conversation that we have invented, and let us all agree to call it an invention.

It is the middle of the night, and the fire is down to a heap of orange.

One of the older shepherds is lying on his back with his hat over his face, saying that he is not asleep. Another is sitting up, whittling a bit of wood into something that will never be anything. A third is counting the flock, in his head, for the fourth time, and getting a different answer each time, which he finds personally insulting.

"Forty-one," says the third one.

"You said forty yesterday."

"Yesterday there were forty."

"Then where did the other one come from?"

"I don't know. I don't think a sheep has come from anywhere. I think I have miscounted. I do it all the time. I am very bad at it."

"You have been doing this for twenty years."

"And I am very bad at it for twenty years. It's a gift."

There is a quiet laugh around the fire, the kind that does not wake the sheep. It is a good fire. The stars are very thick, as they are in places with no lamps, so thick that they look rather like spilled flour. Somewhere down the slope a dog turns round three times and lies down with a sigh. And the youngest shepherd, the boy, who has been looking at the sky with the particular dreaminess of someone who is not allowed to sleep, says, in a small voice, "Is it getting lighter?"

"It's the middle of the night," says the man with the hat. "It doesn't get lighter. That's the whole idea of the middle of the night."

"I think it is, though."

"It's the moon."

"There isn't a moon."

And that is the sentence that makes the man with the hat sit up.

Because the Gospel says this, and it says it quietly. An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them.

Not a great many words, for such a moment. Luke does not describe the angel. He does not tell us what it looked like, or how tall it was, or whether it had wings. Painters have given angels wings for a long time, and that is a kind of picture-language, and a lovely one, and we will keep it. But the Gospel does not say it, and I think Luke is deliberate. What he gives us is the light. The glory of the Lord shone around them. The whole hillside, which had been black, is suddenly full of a brightness that is not from the fire, and not from the stars, and not from anything the shepherds know.

And the Gospel gives us exactly one reaction. They were terrified.

Of course they were. We should not let the pictures make us forget that. These are practical men, and the one thing they know about the dark is that if something is moving in it, it is a problem. Now the dark is full of light, and in the light there is a being that is plainly not of this world, and the sheep are all standing up at once, and the dog has stopped sighing. If any of us were there, we would have had our face in the dirt.

Let us not rush past it. It is part of the story. The first thing that angels in the Bible nearly always say, when they appear, is do not be afraid. They say it so often because the person they are speaking to is nearly always afraid. And the angel in this story says it too.

"Do not be afraid," says the angel.

"For behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people."

Good news of great joy. Luke uses a very particular word for it, the word from which we get the old word gospel. It is not just that something happened. It is that something happened and it is for you, and you, and you.

"For to you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord."

Three titles, one after another. A Saviour. Christ, which means the anointed one. Lord. A shepherd on that hill would have known the second word, for it was the word the people had been waiting for, in their own way, for generations. And the angel says it in one breath, as if it were a thing you might simply say on a hillside at night, to a few tired men with sticks. Today. In the city of David. Born. To you.

Now the angel gives them something very practical. It gives them a sign. And the sign is not a star in the east, or a chorus of trumpets, or a king in a palace. Let us listen to it carefully.

"And this will be a sign for you," says the angel. "You will find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger."

That is the whole sign.

I have always thought it is a very strange sign, and a very good one. Think how it would sound to those men. They are shepherds. They know what a manger is. It is a feeding trough. It is the thing the animals eat from. And the angel has just told them that the Saviour, the Christ, the Lord, is to be found lying in the place where the animals are fed.

Swaddling cloths are not strange. Every baby in that country was wrapped like that, tightly, in strips of cloth, and the Gospel mentions it twice so that we will notice that this baby was cared for as any baby was. But the manger is the sign. You will not find him where you would look for a king. You will find him where you would look for a lamb.

I do not want to make more of that than Luke does. Luke does not say what it means. He does not point at the manger and say, see, a symbol. He lets the shepherds hear it, and he lets us hear it, and he lets it sit there. A baby, in a feeding trough, in a town that has no room.

And it is a sign they can check. That, I think, is the other thing about it. The angel did not say, believe me. The angel said, go and find him. You will know the child because he is exactly where the angel said, in exactly the state the angel said. The shepherds are not asked to believe in the air. They are asked to take a short walk.

And then, says Luke, suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying,

"Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased."

Let us go slowly here, because there is a very old picture in the mind of most of us that does not quite match the page.

The picture is of a choir. A great chorus, singing. And that is a beautiful picture, and it is in a thousand carols, and nobody who has sung it needs to feel that they have done anything wrong. But Luke says that they were praising God and saying. The Gospel uses the word for speaking. It does not say singing. It may well be that it was song, and the Church has certainly sung it ever since, in the Gloria at the Mass and in the Great Doxology at Orthodox Matins. But what Luke gives us is the words, not the tune. And the words are what matter.

Glory to God in the highest. That is a statement about where all of this is going. The whole point of it is the glory of God, and the angels know it, and they say it first.

And on earth peace. Peace is a big word in that country. It is the word the people use when they meet one another, and it means more than quiet. It means everything being as it should be, wholeness, health, every part of life in its right place. The angels say that this is what is coming to earth.

And the last part, among those with whom he is pleased. Some old manuscripts and translations read it in slightly different ways, and you will find it rendered differently in different Bibles, and that is something that people who study the Greek have talked about for a long time. We will keep it as it is in Luke's text as our churches have received it, and we will note only that it speaks of God's good pleasure and goodwill, resting on people, on earth. It is a blessing on the whole hillside and everyone who is under it.

And a note for the narrator, who is being honest. I said a moment ago that angels are angels. They are not people who have died, and they do not earn wings. They are God's servants and messengers. The Gospel calls this crowd a host, which is the word for an army, a whole company drawn up in order, and which in the old books is used of the armies of heaven. It is a startling word for a night this small. A whole army of heaven, and it has come, not for the emperor, not for the governor, not for the temple, but for a hillside of shepherds. And what is it armed with? Praise. Glory to God, and peace.

I do not think Luke needed to say anything more about that. I think he knew we would see it.

Then the light goes. The Gospel says, when the angels went away from them into heaven, and it is as plain as that, they went away. There is a long moment where nobody on the hillside says anything. The fire is a heap of orange again. The stars are back, thick as flour. And the sheep, who in the way of sheep have been entirely unimpressed by the whole thing, begin to settle down.

And the man with the hat says, very quietly, "Did you see that?"

"I saw that," says the one with the stick.

"The boy was right."

"I was right," says the boy. He sounds as though he would like to say something clever, and cannot find it.

It is a very human moment. Nobody on that hill is making a speech. Nobody is declaring that history has just changed. What Luke tells us is that they said to one another, and I love this, because it is so brisk, "Let us go over to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has made known to us."

Let us go and see. They do not argue about it. They do not form a committee on whether it was really an angel. They do not say, we should wait until morning and ask someone sensible. A moment ago they were tired shepherds with a flock that needed minding, and the angels told them where to find a child, and they say, let us go.

And then there is the practical matter, which is not in the Gospel but which any person who has worked with animals would immediately ask. What about the sheep?

You cannot leave the sheep. Everybody knows that. A flock left alone on a hillside at night is a flock that is gone by morning. And so I am going to tell you something that is entirely my own invention, and which Luke does not say, and which I offer in the spirit of the original. Some of them went, and some of them stayed. The old one with the hat said he would stay, and the dog would stay, and the boy said that he was not staying, and that was that. Because the Gospel says that they went with haste. They did not stroll. They went quickly.

And I think that if we were being very honest, we would say that the angel's news was the kind of news that a person cannot simply sit near. Sheep are important. But there are times when a thing has been said to you so directly that you get up.

It is not far. A mile or two, perhaps, down the slope and into the town. Bethlehem is asleep, or nearly. A dog barks. A door is shut. A line of washing hangs across a lane, grey in the starlight. The shepherds, who have never in their lives been in a hurry in a town, find themselves half running, half stopping to listen, on the cobbles of a place where nothing is happening.

And then they find it. We can imagine they asked. We can imagine a householder, awake because of the census crowd, being asked by a few excited and rather smelly men where a newborn baby had been laid in a manger, and looking at them as though they were all quite mad, and then saying, well, now that you mention it, there's the lower room, round the back, where the animals are.

Luke gives us only the finding. And they went with haste, and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby lying in a manger.

That is the whole sentence. They found. Not they believed, not they worshipped, not they were converted. They found. It was a plain fact, a fact as plain as a feeding trough. There was a young woman, who was tired, and a man, who was standing a little back, and a baby, wrapped as babies are wrapped, lying in the very thing the angel had said.

The sign was true.

Can you imagine the room? It is small. It has the warm breath of animals in it, and a lamp, and straw. A few rough men are standing in the doorway with their caps in their hands, who have not the slightest idea what to say. And Mary is looking at them. And Joseph is looking at them. And we can imagine, though Luke does not say it, that for a moment nobody speaks at all.

Then they tell them. Luke says that when they had seen it, they made known the saying that had been told them concerning this child. They said what they had heard. They said that on a hillside, an angel had spoken, and had said a Saviour was born in the city of David, and had said that they would find him in a manger. And here he was.

It is an extraordinary thing to think of, a young mother who has given birth in a borrowed room, among the animals, far from her own house, and then a group of strangers come in off the hills and tell her that the angels have been talking about her son. We know from Luke that she had heard an angel herself, nine months before, in Nazareth. So she knows. But this is the first time she hears it from someone else. This is the first time the news comes to her from outside.

And the Gospel gives two reactions, side by side, and they are quite different from each other.

The first is the reaction of everyone else. And all who heard it wondered at what the shepherds told them. They marvelled. It is the ordinary human reaction to a surprising thing, and it is a good one. People who were there, or who came in, or who heard it afterwards, said, goodness, did you hear? And it was a nine days' wonder, no doubt, and then they went back to their washing.

The second is Mary. But Mary treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart.

It is one of my favourite sentences in the Gospels. She does not say a word. She does not make a speech. She keeps it. She takes each of the things that she has been told, the angel in Nazareth, the road to Bethlehem, the manger, the shepherds, and she puts them away carefully, the way you put away a thing that is precious and that you do not yet fully understand, and she turns them over, again and again, in the quiet of her heart.

Luke will tell us she does this again, twelve years on. She is a person who keeps things, and thinks about them, and waits for them to open. And it is rather a gentle thing to say about her, that in the middle of this great and public night she is the one who is quiet. She is the one who holds it.

And it is perhaps a good thing to do at bedtime. We could do it ourselves. Take the day, and put it away in the heart, and turn it over a little before we sleep.

And then the shepherds go back.

This is the end of the story and I find it the most moving part. There is no ending where they are made ministers or given a place at court. There is no ending where they stay in Bethlehem at the foot of the manger. Luke says, simply, the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.

They return. They go back up the hill, in the grey before dawn. They go back to the fire, and the flock, and the old man with the hat, who has been counting. They go back to the same hard, ordinary, unregarded work they were doing when the sky opened. Nothing about their job has changed. They will still be out in the cold. They will still smell like sheep.

But they are glorifying and praising God. They go back changed on the inside, in the one place where nothing shows. And notice what Luke says, one last time: for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them. It was exactly as they were told. The angel said, you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger, and they found it, just so. Every word held.

We do not hear of the shepherds again. Luke does not follow them. There is no sequel in the Gospel in which one of them is seen in Jerusalem thirty years later. They are given their one night, and then they are gone, back into the hills and the ordinary life of the world, and the Church has loved them for it ever since.

And I think that is a good thing to be loved for. They heard, they went, they saw, they told, and they went home glad.

And now the story slows, as the night does.

The man with the hat is awake when they come up the hill, and he looks at their faces, and does not ask what they saw. He knows from the look of them. He has the fire going again. There is, I think, a little warm bread, and the flock is all there, forty-one, or forty, or whatever the true number is. The boy sits down, wrapped in his coat, and looks up at the sky.

It is just a sky. Thick with stars, and cold and very quiet. The first grey is coming up behind the hills to the east. And down in the town, in a low room round the back of a crowded house, a young mother is sitting by a lamp, and a child is asleep.

Luke does not tell us what happened next on that hill. He only tells us that all of this took place, and that eight days later the child was circumcised and named Jesus, the name the angel had given before he was conceived. Then they take him to the temple in Jerusalem, where an old man named Simeon and an old woman named Anna will see him, and that is another night.

For now there is just this. A hill, a fire, a few tired men. A child in a manger. And a mother who treasures all these things and ponders them in her heart.

The Church has kept this night for sixteen hundred years and more, and in many places the shepherds are in the hymns. In the Catholic Church the Mass during the night has the Gospel of the shepherds read aloud, and in the Orthodox Church the hymns of the Nativity sing of them too, and the little carols we know on both sides of the sea are full of their fields and flocks. It is not a feast about being clever. It is a feast about being told, and going, and seeing.

If you are lying there in the dark, and if the day has been too long, and if there are a number of things you have been counting and have not quite got to add up, you might think of the third shepherd, who could never get the same number twice, and who was told the most important news of all on the one night he happened to be awake.

You do not have to be ready. You do not have to be good at counting. You just have to be there, doing your work, when the light comes.

Now, some notes for the curious, before we go.

Everything we have told you about the shepherds comes from just one place, the second chapter of Luke. Matthew tells the birth of Jesus too, but in a different way, with the visit of the wise men from the east, and he does not mention shepherds at all. The two accounts are two witnesses, and we have kept tonight to Luke.

What is Scripture, and told straight, is the census, the journey of Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem, the birth, the swaddling cloths, the manger, the angel of the Lord, the words of the angel, the host and its praise, the sign, the shepherds going with haste, finding the child, telling what they had heard, the wonder of the hearers, Mary pondering, and the shepherds returning glorifying God.

What we have not claimed as fact are the number of shepherds, which Luke does not give, the cave, which is a very old tradition about the place of the birth but which is not in Luke, the donkey, the particular place on the hills, and the idea that the shepherds were from any one family. A tradition, with some support in the book of Micah, connects Bethlehem with a tower of the flock, but that is a reading, and we leave it as one. We have also not tried to settle how the census of Luke fits the other records of the period. Nor have we named a month. The Church keeps the twenty-fifth of December, and what Luke tells us is the night, not the date.

What we invented are the hill, the fire, the conversation about counting sheep, the dog, the boy, the man with the hat, the clerks and the householder, and the guesses about who stayed and who went. None of them are in Luke, and none of them change a single thing that Luke says.

That's the story of the shepherds of Bethlehem for tonight. The Nativity of the Lord is kept by Catholics on the twenty-fifth of December, and by most Orthodox churches on the same day by their own calendar, which for some falls on the seventh of January. Thank you for listening to Saints by Candlelight. If you enjoyed it, share it with someone who could use a gentle story at the end of a long day. And may the Lord who was laid in a manger keep you through the night, may his angels guard your sleep, and may you wake to a morning of peace. Goodnight, and God bless.

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