Mary, Joseph, And The Shepherd's Obedience

Luke 2:1-20

Merry Christmas to all of our readers!  Today is when we celebrate the birth of our Savior, Jesus Christ.  Though there is no record as to what day He was actually born on, this is the day that much of the Church celebrates Jesus’s birthday.  Today let’s take a look at the Nativity story from the Gospel of Luke.

I would like to focus on the obedience of several characters from the Nativity story.  As our passage begins, we read how Joseph had to leave the village of Nazareth where he lived, to travel to Bethlehem to register with the occupying Roman government.  He took his new bride, Mary with him, even though she was due to give birth at any day. Only several months earlier Joseph had been engaged to be married to Mary, when he was told by her that she was expecting a child through the Holy Spirit (Matthew 1:18-24).  This was too preposterous for Joseph to accept. He knew he wasn’t the father. According to Jewish law, he could have had Mary stoned to death for unfaithfulness, but being a loving and caring person, he chose not to go that route. He settled for just breaking the engagement.  God stepped in and gave Joseph a dream, verifying what Mary had said, and told him to go ahead and marry her. Joseph immediately obeyed God, despite the fact that by doing so he was setting himself up to be ridiculed by the townsfolk for marrying a woman who became pregnant outside of marriage.  Joseph obeyed God.

Mary obeyed God by saying yes to God when He sent the angel Gabriel to tell her she had been chosen to bear the Messiah (Luke 1:26-38).  She could have said no, knowing that this could brand her as a promiscuous, immoral woman, which would have been dangerous for her in that day.  However, Mary obeyed God, and thus became the mother of the Savior of mankind.

Joseph obeyed God when he left Nazareth to journey to Bethlehem for the registration, taking Mary with him (vs. 1-7).  He could have left her at home where she would have had her baby with the safety of a midwife. That would have made more sense than traveling with a 9-month pregnant wife over 80 miles on a donkey.  However, the prophets had foretold that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem. Joseph obeyed God here, as well.

Next we read about the obedience of the shepherds.  At the time of Jesus’s birth, shepherds were basically an outcast group of people. General society looked down on them as uneducated, filthy, smelly people since they lived and worked with sheep out in the fields day and night.  It was to these scorned, outcast people that God, in His boundless love for all mankind, sent His angels to first announce the birth of the Messiah (vs. 8-12).

When the shepherds outside of Bethlehem heard the news from the angels they had a choice to make.  The angels had told them that they could find the newborn Messiah lying in a manger in the village. They had to decide whether to follow the angel’s instructions to find the baby, or whether to stay with the flocks.  If they left the sheep, who would protect them from marauding animals? Would the villagers want a group of shepherds roaming around seeking a newborn?  However they obeyed God and went in search of the baby Jesus. Their obedience was rewarded, and they were the very first to acknowledge the Messiah.

The shepherd also showed their obedience to God by spreading the Good News of the Messiah’s birth with everyone they met (vs. 17-18). They didn’t let the fact that they were generally not socially accepted by other people stop them from spreading the message. They had been given the most important message the world has ever known, and they were not going to keep it to themselves. We have been given that same message. Will we sit on it, keeping it to ourselves, or will we obey God like the shepherds did and spread the news, the real message of Christmas, to everyone we meet?