Thursday, December 25, 2008 Geronimo: Subversion at Bethlehem By Atty. Reynaldo Geronimo The Trust Guru
Current tableaus of the Nativity scene which have the shepherds take to the far wings to clear the center stage for the climactic offering by the three kings of their gifts for the Babe on the manger hallow out the core theological message that the Luke wanted to express in his birth narrative of Jesus the Christ.
Serious exegetes had already admitted that the Christmas stories of Mathew and Luke do not qualify as what we now consider as historical accounts. With their improbabilities and contradictions, they will not even pass muster the journalistic standards of CNN, BBC, or ABS-CBN. Instead, as Hans Kung says, they are professions of faith, “stories which form part of the proclamation which may have emerged in the Jewish Christian communities…adapted by Matthew and Luke and placed at the openings of their Gospels” each with a character of their own.
Matthew’s inclusion of the magi was clearly intended to make the statement that the kingship of the Christ was not only over the Jews but over everyone else. On the other hand, Luke’s nightly visitors, the shepherds, were obviously meant to indicate how preferred they and their kind were going to be in the new stage of history that is inaugurated by the Birth.
The Matthean and Lucan messages are, of course, not contradictory or mutually exclusive. But to utter them both in the same breath, as do our current dramatizations of the scene at Bethlehem, is to come up with a theological chop seuy. Chop seuy, which is admittedly as delicious as our present Christmases, is neither a meat nor a vegetable dish.
My theological taste buds had always preferred, by reason of birth and personal history, the Lucan menu. And preference hardened to bias after reading Phillip Keller’s “A Shepherd Looks at Psalm 23” put out by Zondervan Publishing House of Grand Rapids, Michigan almost 40 years ago in 1970.
Keller grew up and lived in East Africa close to the simple native herders who went about their business very much like the shepherds of the Middle East. And, what is more, he himself for about 8 years, as a young man, made his livelihood as a sheep owner and rancher. He thus knows whereof he speaks when he speaks about sheep and shepherds.
Luke introduces the shepherds very simply: “In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night.”. Right off the bat, Luke makes a statement about their personality. Shepherds are not people of the City; they are merely in the region. They are apart from Bethlehem’s bustle and hustle, separate from its intrigue and insincerity, outside of its money and malice. They are, of course, coarse and crude, unschooled in manners that that in our days hide mean streaks, untutored in élan that nowadays pretend to be ethics.
They are “living in the fields”, not in one place like in lot inside a gated subdivision. They constantly move about. There is a reason for this mobility in various fields. “The greatest single safeguard,” says Keller, “which a shepherd has in handling his flock is to keep them on the move. That is to say, they dare not be left on the same ground too long. They must be shifted from pasture to pasture periodically. This prevents over-grazing of the forage. It also avoids the rutting of trails and erosion of the land from over-use. It forestalls the infestation of the sheep with internal parasites or disease, since the sheep move off the infested ground before these organisms complete their life cycles.” Shepherds thus are people on the go.
On the go, not because they do not enjoy the comforts of a having a permanent place. On the go because the nature of their job requires them to. Itinerant herders are known to deliberately lead or drive their sheep onto fresh range almost everyday according to a pattern of grazing worked out carefully in advance so that the sheep do net feed over the same ground too long or too frequently.
But, while they must keep moving, they are not really transients who do not expect to pass the same way again. Theirs are not temporary postings at places they do not really care about. On the contrary, they move on, to preserve the land they leave, to keep it from being ravaged beyond repair by their presence, to give the land by their absence time to recover and repair itself so that they could in due time return and return in welcome.
However, though not tied down to a place, shepherds are tied up with their task, wholly occupied 24/7 by it. “Sheep”, says Keller, “do not ‘just take care of themselves’ as some might suppose. They require, more than any other class of livestook, endless attention and meticulous care.” They are susceptible to fear; they are prone to harming themselves; they even do such incredibly stupid things like being “cast.” A “cast” sheep, thence our expression of “cast down,” is one lying on its back, its feet in the air, flailing away frantically struggling to stand up but with no success, not knowing what to do.
Sheep have no means of self-defense against their predators except by flight, and they take to flight and commercially stampede at the slightest sense of danger. They need to be constantly protected; shepherds must always be around, even when the flock is asleep. The shepherds, says Luke on that fateful night, were thus dutifully “keeping watch over their flock by night.”
It was to these nameless shepherds, untutored and without home, caring but unloved, that the good news was first announced; not to those with cash, capital and contacts, who could have known how to profit by it. And it was to these unlikely witnesses that was given the task of making the good news known; not to the statesmen and the corporate leaders whose very presence commanded attention.
That Luke composed his story of Christmas using shepherds as the first community recipients of what to him is the start of the an entirely new era in salvation history (previous announcements of Jesus’s birth were to individuals) is thus a complete reversal of priorities, both in his time and ours. Then, as now, the first to know and the first to react and benefit are the powerful, the wealthy, and the highly educated, with their effective means of keeping abreast, ranging from a sophisticated network of informants to cable and other transceivers of global news broadcast to the latest generation of cell phones. But they, to Luke, are not the ones who matter now.
The shepherds at center stage is Luke’s clear proclamation of the new order’s preference for those who had theretofore been at the periphery of life and of the new era’s clear bias for those who have lived outside of and therefore far from the fonts of comfort and convenience, the rise of the blessed poor, as the Babe would say 30 years later.
This Christmas may we all, like Mary, treasure this subversive, if not revolutionary message of Luke and ponder it in our hearts. Merry Christmas to all.
