This painting by James Tissot (1836-1902) is hosted in the Brooklyn Museum, New York. A scan of this image has been released into the public domain and digitally enhanced and resized for projection by FreeBibleimages. It is made available for free download under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.
“and they were sore afraid.” –Luke 2:9b (KJV)
If you have ever been so afraid it hurt, you know why I love the old King James translation of the shepherd’s fear. It may not have been what those seventeenth century translators meant when they rendered Luke’s description “sore afraid,” but my earliest childhood imaginings while hearing my father read this story linger—I understood the shepherds’ fear not as a vague sense of dread but a physical sensation like a mule’s kick to the solar plexus. It takes the breath out of you and leaves you sore for days.
Country songwriter/guerilla theologian (stay with me here) Tyler Childers renders this scene in a waltz time:
Lo, enough, hark
I could’ve sworn
I heard a shout
What’s going on
It’s closer, it’s coming our way
Daniel get up
Gather the sheep
Tell them there’s no
Time to sleep
My God, it’s the end of the world.
As much as I appreciate the artistic and literary renderings of the snow-covered hills where shepherds watch their sheep on a peaceful first Christmas, I love the clarity of Childers’ image— “My God, it’s the end of the world.”
And so it was.
On the night when God entered the world in human flesh, God put an end to the old world—the world in which might makes right, the world that worshiped Ceasar, feared Herod, and kept God at a safe distance. In the face of the old powers—armies, weapons, illness, and death, it’s hard to hear, believe, and ingest the message of the angels to the shepherds: “Fear not.” It’s hard because angels—messengers from God—come to us alongside the things that frighten us the most, the things that remind us we are dust and to dust we shall return.
As I write this on December 9, 2024, it is just hours since the dictator of Syria has been overthrown (sounds biblical, yes?). A tenuous ceasefire, fragile as a newborn in a snowstorm, clings to life in Lebanon. Children starve in Gaza. Hostages linger. Ukraine fights for existence. Haitians struggle to survive in a system ruled by vigilantes. Our own nation treads carefully and fearfully through the most vulnerable of times, our quadrennial leadership transition.
A friend struggles with cancer. Another grieves the sudden death of a spouse.
December darkness falls early in our part of the world and the nights are long. We have plenty of reasons to cower with the shepherds in the night, sore afraid of what the next year will bring.
Yet in thy dark streets shineth the everlasting light.
This is the world into which God entered at the birth of Jesus. This stumble-in-the-night darkness is precisely where and when we can expect the light of God’s presence to arrive—in the word of a friend, the gentle kiss of a loved one, an assuring dream, a verse of Gospel, or a country song.
Merry Christmas,
Neill Morgan
Delmar, New York
P.S. If you only listen to one country music Christmas waltz this year, this would be it. I can’t promise it will make you a fan of that twangy lap steel if you’re not already, but it will make you smile: Tyler Childers, “Luke 2:8-10.”
