We were sleeping. We shouldn’t have been, and when they wrote up the account, they were very gracious, not wanting any of us to get into trouble, although by then it had been years! Well, I do think Shimon was awake – he always said he was, but that he was as surprised as the rest of us when they came. We had had a bit of late supper, the fire was still going, and now we were huddled up in our cloaks with the blankets around us – these hills are no laughing matter in the windy darkness of the Judean Mountains. We were there with the flocks.
They came from out of nowhere, and the best I can describe it is like sound and silence at the same time, like peace and panic, awe and of-course-ness all mingling together at the same time. The angel came first – and she spoke in my heart, my head and my ears all at the same time, spoke in words and in light and in truth, how else can I put it, and I was on my knees trying to take in what had just happened. The Saviour had been born, the Messiah, the King. And for some reason, we of all the people in the world were invited to go and see… My heart leapt and continued to dance and jump in somersaults as the sky was suddenly full of what I knew was the heavenly host although I had never seen or heard them before. The words were whispered like thunder, sung like nothing I had ever heard before, like silk and silence, like waterfalls.
And then it was completely still, and dark again, like a lamp someone had blown out for the night and apart from the ringing of eternity and promise in my ears, I could hear nothing for a while, not even Yitzhak next to me, nor my own breath. Then sound came rushing back – the wind, the sheep, the overjoyed laughter and the dazed questions – and then we decided to make our way down into Bethlehem, to see this thing that we had been told about.
And we found that it was just as we had been told. There was a child, in the front courtyard of a very normal house, tucked away among the animals for warmth, wrapped snugly and sleeping in a feeding trough on a good amount of hay, and there was a young woman with him, and a man… Folk like us, not rich or posh but people in normal clothes, with normal lives, and this was a normal child – only he was anything but normal – he was the Messiah, the Son-of-God, the Chosen one, the One who had been promised.
I held him. He was so little, so fragile, so wonderfully new – and he carried all the promise of God’s salvation in that little body. I felt the need to be quiet, hushed with awe and amazement. We stayed a bit, then having nothing to say and nothing to do, we left. But I have always wondered why it was that the angel came to us, to a bunch of shepherds in a rural field on a hillside in the dark of night…
Perhaps it was because the child himself would be a Shepherd? Perhaps… Perhaps it was just the sheer grace and kindness of God. I will never know, but I never forgot that night.