Dec. 12, 2025
Stories Within Stories:
Of Shepherds and Wise Men
The Christmas season is upon us. Whether we are religious or not, the mood is one of expectation, bolstered by the new year that follows close on its tail. And whether or not we pause to reflect on the sacred stories that tell of the hope, peace, joy and love promised by the coming of Jesus into the world, it is nonetheless within them that the anticipation and assurance carried by the holiday was born. Yet in training our hopeful gaze on a distant horizon of fulfillment, we have overlooked the very this-worldly challenges embodied by the drama’s characters.
We may be excused for having missed it. The stories and their actors are so familiar. Seldom are we likely to pause to consider the stupefaction of shepherds startled by an angelic chorus or the weeks of uncomfortable travel endured by intrepid magi. But the real loss comes with our blindness to 𝘸𝘩𝘺 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 – not just there at the manger, but there in those stories, in that time and place.
The accounts of the sacred birth were penned, of course, decades after Jesus was gone from the earth, and for almost two centuries now, biblical scholars have questioned their historicity; today they generally agree that the narratives were invented rather as vehicles for teaching the good news manifest in Jesus. The discipline of history was just beginning to emerge from the medium of myth as the carrier of tradition and truth, and the gospel writers wove a tapestry of meaning upon a loom of oral history. The truth they sought to convey went far beyond faithfulness to fact; the truth they offered was anchored in the enduring impact of Jesus’s life and teaching.
This same quest for truth is precisely what calls us to engage the birth narratives – whose images surround us in creches, greeting cards and pageants – in ways that will disturb the complacency into which they have drawn us. And those of us who will welcome divine guidance in these days of threatened peace dare not shirk the task, for God, as someone once said, is in the details.
The People’s Messiah
Only two of the four biblical gospels offer birth narratives, and there are layers to the construction of the two accounts. As first Jesus’s ministry and then the task of understanding it divided the first-century Jewish population, the authors of Matthew and Luke were keen to establish Jesus’s identity as the long-hoped-for Messiah. And the best way to do that was to shape the sacred story around the prophecies of the Hebrew Bible that were believed to point to him. Such resonances are scattered throughout the gospels from beginning to end, but a number are present right here at the beginning: virginal conception, Davidic lineage, birth in Bethlehem, flight to Egypt. But once Jesus’s messianic 𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘵𝘺 was established, the authors turn to dramatic representations of the very 𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦 of the messianic role, because Jesus was not the Messiah they had expected.
The long-cherished hope for a Messiah was spun over long centuries of oppression experienced by a people whose identity was anchored in a covenant with God, promises which bound both people and God in mutual faithfulness. Their faith was in a God who had pledged to grant them the blessings of long, peaceful and prosperous life, and through them to bring those blessings to the world. And while their self-narrative attributed their subjection under foreign powers to punishment for their recurring disobedience, they never lost sight of the promise of restoration. The Messiah would be both the sign and the means of its inauguration and their emancipation, restoring what they believed to be theirs by birthright.
And just so was Jesus, though the recognition eluded many. In parables and aphorisms, in pointed critiques and in acts of mercy, Jesus portrayed the new kingdom which was God’s intention for them and for all peoples. Yet it was not to be a kingdom built by dramatic divine intervention, but a kingdom of their own creation. It was a kingdom in which there were no outcasts and no oppressed, a kingdom for the here and now. As Jesus showed them that their freedom lay in care for one another, care for all others more than for self, he offered them a way of being that was beyond the control of their oppressors. In both his being and his teaching, Jesus advanced an alternative to the poles of passive submission or violent resistance. This kingdom waited on no one but them, in their choice for immediate acts of justice that would permeate their social structures to bring a new reality into being.
When the authors of Matthew and Luke crafted their visions of who Jesus was, this was the truth they sought to capture. Not the rendering of historical event, but the awakening of the same wholeness that propelled Jesus’s life, was the substance of their texts. Their stories looked back from their vantage of the life of love resurrected from the embers of Jesus’s death, the promise of restored freedom of being, to imagine the cosmic implications of this man’s birth.
Shepherds, Magi and a King
It has been preached from countless pulpits that the angelic choir visiting isolated shepherds in the Gospel of Luke makes clear that God’s love, promised through the birth of Jesus, encompasses all, regardless of status. But there is more here. Shepherds were some of the most marginalized people in society – if one can even speak of society, as their lives were acutely solitary and impoverished. So too, as part of a people whose identity was inseparable from their religious structures and practices, they were left out of a system that required the financial resources for prescribed pilgrimages and ritual sacrifices.
Consider, then, the disparity of the scene. The shepherds do not just receive notice of their equal value in God’s eyes; they are enveloped in a stunning, unimaginable demonstration of glory fit for royalty. They are swept into a divine demonstration that bypassed priestly management. The described spectacle foreshadows Jesus’s teaching that they are not only accepted, but favored, that “the meek shall inherit the earth.” This gospel writer wants his readers to know not only that the pride and entitlement born of wealth and security occlude the true vision of God’s love that Jesus would bring, but that it is the humblest who will most readily recognize the sweeping transformation of history that Jesus represented.
Similarly, we are taught that the visiting wise men of the story in Matthew have had disclosed to them the superiority of Jesus’s kingdom to those from which the travelers come. Interpretations have viewed these figures too as a metaphor for the universality of the salvation effected by Jesus. Yet their presence in the story may contain another nuance for our seeing. Throughout this gospel, the author evinces his frustration with a Jewish leadership that refuses to recognize Jesus’s messiahship. The journeying magi, men schooled in the wisdom of ages as known in their foreign traditions, stand as a rebuke to those within the Jewish tradition who think they know better, who rest in their own expectations of what God’s work looks like. 𝘌𝘷𝘦𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘴𝘦 𝘰𝘶𝘵𝘴𝘪𝘥𝘦 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘧𝘢𝘪𝘵𝘩, says Matthew’s author, can see the truth. Or perhaps they see precisely 𝘣𝘦𝘤𝘢𝘶𝘴𝘦 they come from beyond the realm of expectation, but rather from within a field of expectancy – the eye trained on the vast vault of the universe to find the next, newest and truest revelation.
New Eyes, New Map
Naturally, we cannot know exactly what was in the minds of the compilers and interpreters of the oral history concerning Jesus, of those who shaped the books that would shape the tradition. The situation on the ground in those early decades was certainly more complex than what can be recovered by even the most diligent scholarly efforts. But neither dare we read them simplistically and anachronistically as literal accounts of Jesus’s life, or perhaps more problematic, read them in the light of subsequent theology that situated the meaning of that life solely in a preordained plan of divine judgment and redemption. For both the literal reading of scripture and the codification of doctrine were centuries in the future. The writers of the gospel accounts were in the throes of 𝘧𝘪𝘨𝘶𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘪𝘵 𝘰𝘶𝘵, of trying to learn how to live in the light of the new kingdom. The facts and the values embedded in their centuries-old religious and social culture had been completely disrupted and reimagined by this man Jesus. He had taught in riddles, challenged authority, and redefined hope. The salvation into which Jesus had summoned them was so far from the one they’d expected from the Messiah, that work was needed to create a new map. They needed to tell the stories that would invite their readers and listeners to see, to think, and to live differently. Just as Jesus had done.
It may be debated whether the maps that they and Jesus offered have brought us any nearer the reality of the new kingdom, but no one can doubt that there remains a considerable distance to go. Yet instead of succumbing to the temptation to create around Christmas a brief bubble of good feeling in the midst of the despair that threatens hope on a daily basis, perhaps this year we may try to let go of what we think we know about these stories, in order to hear the almost unbelievable hope – the hope we have failed to believe – that these stories hold out to us, the hope whose fulfillment is in our hands.
For the man that this babe would grow up to be saw a new kingdom of peace and justice not as one to which we could look forward in the next world, he clearly saw the new kingdom as the one in our power to create in this world. Not easily, certainly, and not without sacrifice. But neither was humanity fated to simply wait for it, for the door to the kingdom appeared in every new moment. And as Jesus knew the God within us as certainly as he knew the God within himself, he knew that this hope was real, waiting for us to step into it.
This is not the comfort many of us have been schooled to seek from the stories of the “first Christmas.” Yet it is nothing less than the comfort we will find in the moments, whether plentiful or few, that emerge from the trimmings of our celebrations – the moments when we reach out, across the hurt loved ones have caused us, outside comfortable social boundaries to those who have no apparent claim on our being, beyond the solace of status and stuff. The moments when we reach out to make real the love we proclaim to be the heart of Christmas.
Perhaps this year, as we listen again to the stories we have heard dozens of times, we can hear hope anew and in new ways. We may ponder the outrageousness of sending angels to a ragtag group of outcasts who brought no visible value to anyone’s existence. We may examine the limitations we place on our expectations about what the fulfillment of divine promise will look like, or from where new life will come. We may confront the wealth and power that oppress and destroy life wherever they show up, in ourselves or in others.
Because then, and only then, will we truly find the lasting comfort we have sought from these stories, for there is indeed comfort there. Comfort not in an event in the distant past that promises relief in a distant future, but a comfort that does not look past all the things in our world that these stories name: injustice, dogmatism, defensiveness. We will find comfort and hope in the story of a singular man born into that world who saw more, who was more, who inaugurated more simply in the revolutionary way he lived his life. And who told us, and showed us, that that is who we are too.
We’d love to hear from you, please share your comments with Kaira below.