Luke 2:17

Luke has just told how Mary “brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn” (Luke 2:7). From that quiet birth the story moves out into “the same country”, the countryside around Bethlehem, where shepherds were “abiding in the field”. The verb agrauléō means to camp out or live in the open, so these men were staying out with their animals. They were “keeping watch over their flock by night”, and the verb phylássō means to watch, to guard and to keep safe. At night a flock was most exposed to wolves and thieves, and lambing season called for this kind of watch above all. Bethlehem was known for its sheep, and some of its flocks are said to have been raised for the sacrifices at the temple in Jerusalem.

The word poimḗn means a shepherd, and in a figurative sense a pastor. The work was essential, but the men who did it stood low in the eyes of their neighbours. Living outdoors among animals made it hard for them to keep the ceremonial law strictly, and shepherds were often counted as ritually unclean and looked on with suspicion. God passed over the leaders of Jerusalem and sent the greatest news ever told to these men in a field at night. They were simply doing their ordinary work faithfully when he met them, and the darkness of their watch was about to be filled with his glory.

That choice runs all through Luke’s Gospel. Mary has already praised God because “He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree” (Luke 1:52–53). Jesus would come preaching the gospel to the poor (Luke 4:18), call the poor blessed (Luke 6:20), and welcome outcasts and sinners, as Luke 15 shows with its parable of the lost sheep (Luke 15:3–7), because “the Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost” (Luke 19:10). Paul tells the church that God “hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty” (1 Corinthians 1:27), so that all the glory is his (1 Corinthians 1:26–29), and Jesus thanked his Father for revealing his truth “unto babes” (Matthew 11:25). The psalmist’s wonder suits the shepherds well: “What is man, that thou art mindful of him?” (Psalm 8:4). God’s favour rests on his own free choice and grace, and from its first telling the good news of Jesus is for people of every standing, the overlooked among them.

“And, lo” (idoú, “behold”) marks how sudden the change is. The word ángelos comes from a root meaning to bring tidings and means a messenger, here a messenger sent from the presence of God. The angel “came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them”.

The word for glory, dóxa, comes from a verb meaning to seem or think and is related to appearance. Here it is the visible shining of God’s own presence, his majesty and holiness made seen, the glory often called the Shekinah. This is the glory that filled the tabernacle so that even Moses was unable to enter (Exodus 40:34–35), and the presence that went before Israel as a pillar of fire by night (Exodus 13:21–22). It shone “round about them”, so the shepherds stood inside the light, and the dark field where they had been watching was filled with it.

“They were sore afraid.” The Greek says literally “they feared a great fear”, joining the verb phobéō with mégas, “great”. phobéō means to be alarmed or frightened, and also to stand in awe and to revere.

The angel’s “Fear not” is the word the angel spoke to Zacharias in the temple (Luke 1:13), and here the reason follows at once with “for”. “Behold” (idoú) again draws the eye to what comes next. “I bring you good tidings” is a single Greek verb, euangelízō, built from eu, “well”, and the root of ángelos, “messenger”. It means to announce good news, and it is the word behind “evangelize” and behind the gospel itself. The angel is literally preaching the gospel to the shepherds, and the gospel he preaches is the birth of the Saviour.

The good tidings are “of great joy”, mégas chará. chará means gladness, cheerfulness and calm delight. This joy rests on what God has done to save us, so it holds firm through sorrow and trial. Jesus spoke of the same joy when he told his disciples, “These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full” (John 15:11), and “your joy no man taketh from you” (John 16:22). Paul prays, “Now the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing” (Romans 15:13).

The joy “shall be to all people”. The word laós means a people or nation, and it is used especially of God’s chosen people. Greek has a narrower word, dēmos, for the populace of one town or community. The good tidings come first to Israel, the people to whom the Christ was promised, and from Israel they reach every nation. Isaiah heard God say of his servant, “I will also give thee for a light to the Gentiles, that thou mayest be my salvation unto the end of the earth” (Isaiah 49:6). “God so loved the world” (John 3:16) that the risen Jesus sent his disciples to “teach all nations” (Matthew 28:19–20) and to be his witnesses “unto the uttermost part of the earth” (Acts 1:8). At the end John saw “a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues” (Revelation 7:9–10). The joy announced to a few shepherds is meant for the whole world, rich and poor, Jew and Gentile.

Verse 11 is the heart of the angel’s message. “Unto you” is plural, so the gift is for these shepherds and, through them, for all who hear. “This day” sets the birth on a real day in history, and the words echo Isaiah’s promise, “For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given” (Isaiah 9:6–7).

The angel gives the shepherds a way to know the child: “this shall be a sign unto you”. The word sēmeîon means a sign, a token or indication, and elsewhere a miracle. Here it is a mark God gives so that the shepherds can find the right child and confirm the message with their own eyes. The sign itself is a humble one.

“Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes.” bréphos means an infant, properly one still unborn, and here a newborn child. Swaddling clothes were strips of cloth wound tightly around a newborn for warmth and security and, as people then held, to help the limbs grow straight. Babies everywhere in Bethlehem were wrapped this way, and the detail shows how fully human and helpless the Christ the Lord of verse 11 had become.

“Lying in a manger” is the part that marks him out. keîmai means to lie outstretched, and phátnē, from a word meaning to eat, is a crib for fodder, a feeding trough for animals. Many babies were born in Bethlehem, and only one would be found lying in a manger. Mary laid him there because “there was no room for them in the inn”, and the newborn King lay in a trough where animals ate, far from any palace or royal cradle.

“And suddenly” (exaíphnēs, unexpectedly, all at once) the one angel was joined by “a multitude of the heavenly host”. plēthos means a fulness, a great number or throng, and it stands against the single messenger who first appeared. “Host” is stratiá, from the word for an army, a word used both of the angels and of the lights of heaven. With ouránios, “heavenly”, it pictures the ordered army of heaven, gathered to serve God’s will. On earth Caesar Augustus ruled and issued his decrees (Luke 2:1), and here heaven’s army appears to announce the birth of the true King, showing where all power lies.

What this army does is praise. ainéō means to praise, and its object here is God, theós. Heaven answers the coming of the Son with worship. A psalm calls on them to do it: “Bless ye the LORD, all ye his hosts; ye ministers of his, that do his pleasure” (Psalm 103:20–21). Hebrews says that when God “bringeth in the firstbegotten into the world, he saith, And let all the angels of God worship him” (Hebrews 1:6), and the host over Bethlehem does exactly that. Angels appear again in Revelation, “ten thousand times ten thousand”, crying, “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain” (Revelation 5:11–12), and God has given Jesus the name at which “every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth” (Philippians 2:9–11). Heaven itself takes part as the kingdom of God, which Jesus would go on to preach (Luke 4:43), begins to break in on earth.

The song of the host has two halves that balance each other, glory to God in the highest heaven and peace on earth. “In the highest” (en hypsistois) means the highest heavens, where God dwells with his angels. Glory, dóxa, here means the honour, praise and worship due to God, because the birth of his Son shows his power, his character and his saving plan. The first purpose of the incarnation is the glory of God, and the blessing of the earth flows from it.

“On earth” is gē, the soil, a land, and the whole globe with all who live on it. To that world the angels announce “peace”, eirḗnē. The word probably comes from a verb meaning to join, and it covers peace, quietness, rest, and being “set at one again”. It carries the full sense of the Hebrew shalom: wholeness, well-being and right relationship, above all with God. Jesus was born under the Pax Romana, a peace Rome kept by military might. The peace of this song reconciles sinners to God, and from there it reaches into the heart and into our dealings with one another.

Christ himself is this peace. Isaiah named him “The Prince of Peace” (Isaiah 9:6). Paul writes, “For he is our peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us” (Ephesians 2:14), and he goes on to say that Christ reconciled us to God by the cross (Ephesians 2:14–16). Jesus told his disciples, “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you” (John 14:27).

“Good will toward men” is eudokía, from eû, “well”, and the root of dokéō, “to seem”. It means satisfaction, delight, kindness, good pleasure and purpose. The good will is God’s: his gracious pleasure and purpose to bless and save people through his Son, the love with which “God so loved the world” (John 3:16).

When the angels “were gone away from them into heaven”, the vision ended and the shepherds were alone with what they had heard. They “said one to another, Let us now go even unto Bethlehem”: together, at once (“now”), and all the way to the place the angel had named (“even unto”). They left their flocks because they wanted to “see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us.”

Three words carry the verse. gínomai, to come into being or to happen, appears twice, in “it came to pass” and “is come to pass”. What the angels announced has really happened in history, and the shepherds go to see a fact. “Thing” is rhēma, which means an utterance, a word or saying, and also the matter a word speaks of. The shepherds are going to see the word God spoke, now made a visible event. gnōrízō, “hath made known”, means to make known or reveal. The shepherds give the credit to the Lord, because this knowledge came to them as his gift and the angel was his messenger. The verb “see”, eídō, means to see, to perceive and to know.

Their faith acted. They did what James urges, “be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only” (James 1:22), and they found Jesus’ promise true, “seek, and ye shall find” (Matthew 7:7). What they went to see was the Word himself, who “was God” (John 1:1) and “was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14), “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15), for “all the promises of God in him are yea, and in him Amen” (2 Corinthians 1:20).

“When they had seen it”, with the verb eídō again, the shepherds had seen with their own eyes what they had heard, and they “made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child”. diagnōrízō is gnōrízō with dia, “through”, added: to make known thoroughly, widely and openly. The Lord had made the news known to them (verse 15), and now they make it known all around. What they told was the angel’s message, that this child was a Saviour, Christ the Lord, and they passed it on faithfully. The word for child, paidíon, is a diminutive, “little child”, so they were declaring the greatness of a helpless infant.

These humble, unlearned men became the first human heralds of Christ’s birth, and God has used ordinary people to spread his news ever since. Their telling is the psalmist’s: “Come and hear, all ye that fear God, and I will declare what he hath done for my soul” (Psalm 66:16). It is the apostles’ too: “For we cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard” (Acts 4:20). Paul asks, “how shall they hear without a preacher?” (Romans 10:14). The shepherds told of a child, and the church after them tells of the same Jesus crucified and risen, the one we confess as Lord (Romans 10:9), “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6), of whom all the Scriptures testify (John 5:39).

“But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.” The little word “But” (dé) sets Mary apart from the wondering crowd. syntēréō, “kept”, means to keep closely together, to preserve and treasure. “These things” is rhēma again, the words and the events they spoke of. symbállō, “pondered”, literally means to throw together. Mary laid the pieces side by side and compared them: Gabriel’s announcement (Luke 1:26–38), her own answer, “be it unto me according to thy word” (Luke 1:38), the shepherds’ report of angels, and the child in the manger. kardía, the heart, is in Scripture the centre of the whole person, the seat of mind, will, feeling and moral choice, so Mary was taking these things in at the deepest level of her being.

This is the meditation Scripture commends to all God’s people. The blessed man delights in the law of the LORD, “and in his law doth he meditate day and night” (Psalm 1:2), and the psalmist says, “Thy word have I hid in mine heart” (Psalm 119:11). Luke tells of the same habit twelve years later, when Mary “kept all these sayings in her heart” after finding Jesus in the temple (Luke 2:51), and her understanding of her Son kept growing through his whole life. Luke gives the faith of women a prominent place in his Gospel, and Mary is its clearest example. The shepherds spoke and Mary kept, and both are faithful responses to God’s word. Her pondering points to what Paul prays for every believer, “That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith” (Ephesians 3:17).

“And the shepherds returned”, back to their fields and flocks and their ordinary work, “glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen, as it was told unto them.” doxázō, “glorifying”, is the verb that goes with dóxa, and it means to honour, magnify and esteem as glorious. ainéō, “praising”, is the same verb used of the angels in verse 13. The angels sang “Glory to God”, and now men on earth give him glory with the same praise, so earth answers heaven.

They praised God for what they had “heard and seen”, akoúō and eídō. They heard the angel’s word first, and then they saw it with their own eyes, and their worship rested on both. “As it was told unto them” closes the account: everything matched the word. God had kept the promises spoken long before through Isaiah (Isaiah 7:14) and Micah (Micah 5:2), and the shepherds found him faithful down to the manger. So they did what the psalmist calls for, “Bless the LORD, O my soul: and all that is within me, bless his holy name” (Psalm 103:1). Paul describes people who “knew God” and “glorified him not as God, neither were thankful” (Romans 1:21), and these shepherds are the opposite. They also told others what they had heard and seen, the pattern of witness Jesus would give his followers (Matthew 28:19–20).

Their praise is a small foretaste of the worship the whole creation will give to the Lamb, “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain” (Revelation 5:12), when every creature in heaven and on earth says, “Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power, be unto him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever and ever” (Revelation 5:13). The child they praised God for is “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15), by whom “were all things created” (Colossians 1:16), and he is the shepherd who goes after the lost sheep until he finds it (Luke 15:3–7).

The angel’s words were “unto you”, and they still are. The same Saviour, Christ the Lord, is announced to us in the gospel, and the God who met shepherds at their night’s work meets people in the middle of ordinary days. Whatever your standing, this news was meant for you from its first telling, because God chose to give it first to people the world overlooked.

The shepherds show how the news takes hold. They heard, they went to see, they found it true, they told others, and they praised God. Some of us are more like Mary, keeping these things and turning them over for years as our understanding grows, and her way is just as faithful. Both begin with God’s word and end in worship. You can join the angels’ song and the shepherds’ praise on any day of the year, because everything happened “as it was told unto them”, and God’s promises to you in Christ are just as sure.