To better understand the amazement, the fear and the hope that the angel’s visit brought to the shepherds, we need to ask those living in poverty now.
They are best placed to tell us. They are the ones who can show us how similar the shepherds’ lives were to their own.
Like the shepherds, those who live in poverty today are scorned and excluded, be it in France, in Europe or in Israel. People say that the poorest count for nothing, not even in the eyes of God. Like the shepherds, they hardly have a place in today’s churches, and in the courts their word counts for nothing.
Whatever the country or the age, the housing of those in poverty is always poor. There, they would live in shacks and caves, here in slums, and forever, their lot is to move from place to place, like outcasts.
At the time of the census described in the Gospel, there were a great many people on the move. Joseph and Mary rubbed shoulders with them on the road to Bethlehem and now were counted amongst them.
Like them, they were neither recognised nor welcomed in this city, that of the House of David, their own kinsfolk. Now homeless and anonymous, they were regarded as good for nothing and sent outside the city walls, as they still are today,
How can it be that these shepherds, shunned by everyone, would be chosen by God simply because they had made room for Mary, Joseph and Jesus? How could anyone in Israel believe that they would be the messengers of the Son of God, born of Mary?
People living in poverty today can help us discover what the shepherds would have been thinking when faced with such a mission.
They had always heard it said that God was not interested in them and yet, they could not erase the insane hope that stirred in their hearts when the angel said to them that a Saviour, who is the Christ, had been born in Bethlehem. They believed the angel at once, because they had waited all their lives, throughout the ages, for the powerful to be cast down from their thrones and the oppressed and the humbled to be lifted up.
The shepherds, the poorest people, knew they would not be believed. They needed a sign, that they might dare to go and tell people the astonishing news. And for a sign, the angel told them they would find a child wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.
It’s one thing to be messengers with so little credibility in the eyes of the Jewish people, but to proclaim that a poor person, a pauper, let alone a poor child, was the Messiah, would have really condemned the shepherds to ridicule, and had them accused of blasphemy, since no one in Israel would have believed such an unimaginable event.
But the shepherds did believe and went to the manger and there they saw with God’s eyes and believed with God’s heart. They believed that, despite his origin and his poverty, this child was to be the King of the Jews, and that here and now he was already the Saviour of the world.
What’s more, the shepherds realised that this child in the manger would have the humble, the poor and those without rights as his fellow travellers throughout his life and that he would be treated as they would be.
They already understood that those who would follow Jesus would be simple and truthful, that they would struggle passionately for justice and see love as the foundation of all humanity.
This is what the shepherds were going to tell everyone. They would go and announce what the heavenly host had proclaimed, that the earth is graced by peace when hearts are bound by love.