My father was a shepherd, as was his father before him.  I’m told that there have been shepherds in our family ever since the people of Israel returned from captivity in Babylon.

I love my sheep, and a life in the open air is as necessary to me as eating – although we often freeze at night and melt during the day!  But when I lie on the ground at night and look up at the stars it feels as though they might almost swallow me up with their beauty.  At times, I feel dizzy with the slow-moving panorama.

Yet it is not only the sky that satisfies my desire for beauty, and, after all, the beauty of the sky is a cold and silent sort of beauty, breathtaking though it is.  But the creation around me is close at hand, and its sounds and sights warm my heart daily as the years wax and wane.  Eager growth fills each spring, while summer and autumn consolidate the growth and maturity brings food for all from the hand of God.  Even the quiet death of winter has a beauty all of its own.

Every season and each new moon shows the handiwork of Yahweh our God, and I am blessed to have a job which allows me to be more a part of it than most.

Of course, we don’t always appreciate God’s work as we should, and frigid nights bring volleys of selfish complaints from me as much as from the next man.  Nevertheless, most earn their livelihood far from the trees and flowers, the breezes and stillness that fill my days with wonder.

I really don’t want to sound as if I am some sort of wise and holy man who sees everything clearly.  I am just a simple shepherd who job is to care for generations of loveable – but often foolish – sheep that provide wool and meat and leather for us all.  For me, they also provide noisy and often demanding companionship and teach me many lessons in life.

Much of the time, my life is leisurely, as I slowly lead the flocks from place to place to feed on the sparse pastures of Judea.  The lifespan of a sheep is short enough that I can watch generations come and go: the wise and the simple, the innocent and the crafty.  Some sheep learn from me as their shepherd, while others struggle against me at every step and will never believe that I really do have their best interests at heart.  Some try to hide their every action from me and stumble into trouble at every turn, while just a few seem to really like my company and appreciate it when they notice me doing something for them.

Being a shepherd has taught me a lot about how God must view people.  King David was the most famous of all shepherds, and God took him to be shepherd of his people.  I couldn’t cope with shepherding people – they are even more stubborn than sheep, and every bit as thoughtless!

Once I had a ewe who seemed to have no idea of how to be  a mother.  When she was young, she would give birth and then wander off, leaving her lamb or lambs uncared-for.  We found her first lamb wandering in all sorts of places – normally with its mother being nowhere in sight.  Over time, we managed to convince her to show at least a basic level of care for her young, but she always seemed to fight against it.  She was a very selfish and argumentative ewe, even into her old age.  But she did learn the most important lessons – otherwise, I would have needed to get rid of her earlier.

Some humans, however, never will learn.  Take Herod, for example.  Like that ewe, he has no natural care for his family.  To him, children are a nuisance, and once they reach adulthood they are likely to be competition.  Unfortunately, nobody has ever been able to teach him the basics of family love, so he just ignores them – unless he begins to fear that they are a threat to his position.  If that happens, he kills them.  Our ewe never did anything so cruel as that.

Some call Herod, “Herod the Great”, but it’s not because he is a great person.  If the name reflected his personality, it would be Herod the Brutal Paranoid.

Anyway, the tale that I want to tell you now involves shepherds and babies, and it has a very sad ending – brought about directly by Herod.

Judea is part of the Roman Empire, and the emperor in far-off Rome wanted to make sure that we were all paying our taxes, so he ordered everyone to return to their ancestral home to be counted.  For most people around here, including me, this wasn’t a problem, because most of us don’t move very far from the land inherited from our fathers.  Our laws of ownership and inheritance make it much easier to stay put than to move – unless one wants to live in a city, which I just can’t imagine!

I am from the tribe of Judah and my family’s land is near Bethlehem, the town famous as the city of King David.  We farm the land to produce most of our own food, but shepherd our sheep to earn extra money.  The sheep that we keep from year to year produce wool, but we also sell some sheep as meat or for sacrifices in the temple.

So we do some farming, but I would call myself a shepherd, not a farmer.  That is the work I love.

There was nothing to suggest that this night was anything special.  With night falling as usual, a few of us shepherds had gathered together at dusk at a sheepfold with our flocks.  Such folds are dotted around the hills in the area, common property, with stone walls built and maintained by generations of shepherds.  They are generally located in open areas where the soil is not good enough for farming, but tufts of good grass provide enough food for our sheep, as long as we keep moving around.

It is a lifestyle that keeps us cut off from the life of cities and towns, where work ends at sunset and men sleep in safety behind walls and gates.  For us, nights are often times of interrupted sleep, times when a trained instinct can trigger sudden watchfulness lest swift danger should erupt from behind a shadowy rock.  Yet many other nights meander quietly from dusk to dawn without any unpleasant interruptions.

On this night, there was nothing to indicate that something special was coming.  Even when we discussed it later, none us could remember anything different about the sunset or the evening breezes.  There was nothing to make the night distinctive as we each settled our sheep for the night and cooked our evening meal.  The fire had been made ready for the night too, large enough to deter wild animals but not so bright as to ruin the night vision of the watchman.  Shepherds and sheep had all fallen asleep, leaving a single watchman alone to contemplate the chill of the night and the cold clear stars that shone above.

I was the watchman that night.

An hour passed and the moon had risen.  Then, without any warning, suddenly a brighter light spread over the scene.  Now from time to time we shepherds do see things like this, bright lights in the sky, and even what some people call “shooting stars”.  Sometimes they last for a few seconds, and once I even saw one that swept across the sky and then exploded into pieces that lit up the countryside like daylight.

But this was different.  The light grew steadily and seemed to be everywhere around me.  For a while, it didn’t even occur to me to wake the other shepherds – I just sat and gazed around in wonder as the trees and shrubs nearby were lit with this strange, ever-strengthening glow...