This Mass, because of its Gospel, is sometimes called “the Shepherd’s Mass”. It has a quietness and intimacy to it.  “Let us go over to Bethlehem”, the shepherds say to themselves, and that can summon us as well. To “go to Bethlehem” is to celebrate Christmas, but not superficially. It’s to “find” something we hadn’t known before. It’s to “see” with new insight the “sign” the angels disclosed to the shepherds: the Saviour-Child in the manger who is Christ the Lord. To use the language of sacramental theology, it’s to enter into the “res” of Christmas, to encounter its grace.

So, hoping for this, we follow the shepherds. And, who are they, these shepherds? The Bible is full of symbols. Abel, Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Amos were shepherds and David above all. “I took you from tending the flock” the Lord says to him in his later life. It seems right that shepherds are drawn first to the shepherd king, the Son of David par excellence. Biblical history is coming to a climax. Then again, balancing the Magi who represent the Gentiles, they are Jews. Our journey is part of a great convergence. In contrast to the Magi again, whose origins were in the urban centres of Mesopotamia, they bring the hope of the countryside and its long continuities, its roughness perhaps. They were weathered, working men. Their reputations were not high, it’s said, and their testimony not valid in court. Jesus is already attracting the less than holy as he will throughout the Gospel. There’s an old link too between shepherds, poetry and music, David after all was poet and musician. Perhaps they piped their way down the Bethlehem hillside. Certainly, they are among the lowly whom the Lord prefers. For many reasons, we might align with them.

“Let us go over to Bethlehem”, they say. In Latin, transeamus from transire, a word the medievals loved for its paschal connotations. “Let us go over and [literally] see this word which has happened, which the Lord has made known to us.” Strange words. We are on our way to “see a word” – but what if the Word has become flesh?

But this journey to Bethlehem was and is a transitus, a passing-over. What did they do with their sheep, I wonder? Did they first take them back to the village or shut them up in pens on the hillside? The impression is they headed straight for Bethlehem. The truth is that the word of the angels and the promise of a Saviour had possessed them, and they left any anxieties behind. How good! Let the word come first! This is humility. My novice master used to say, “every breakthrough is a breakthrough in humility”. Every transitus is a transitus in humility. There is a theological idea that “in the beginning”, before humanity, before any Fall, the angels were shown something like same “word” as the shepherds. They were shown a woman and a child and told that she would be their queen and he their Lord and were bidden to serve the former and worship the latter. They were given a preview of the Incarnation, and the angels we call fallen were those who then exclaimed: “I shall not serve”, and chose the path of pride.

The door to the basilica of the Nativity in Bethlehem is famously small to teach us humility. To get inside we have to stoop. The shepherds crossed over from the possibility of unbelief to faith, from possible worldly preoccupation to trust, from possible pride to humility. “The first step in humility says St Benedict is obedience without delay.” The shepherds hurried, said St Luke, just as Mary hurried to the hill country to visit and help. In both cases, we sense the breath of the Holy Spirit. “The grace of the Holy Spirit, says St Ambrose, doesn’t go with delayed undertakings.”

Once again, we can put ourselves in their wake.

So, to Bethlehem they hasten. “And this will be the sign for you”, they’d been told: “you’ll find a child wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger”.  They need humility because it’s humility they’re going to see. They find Mary and Joseph and the child laid in the manger, and we keep Christmas.

And then what happens – to them, and to us?

Firstly, the shepherds are confirmed in the faith that they had put in the angel’s words, that is, in divine revelation, in Jesus. They had listened – “faith comes by hearing” – and then, come to the grotto, what they see corresponds to what they have heard. St Luke makes the point again at the end of the passage: they head back glorifying God for what they had heard and seen “as they had been told.” St Luke writes his whole Gospel for this very purpose: that the reader will know the “certain truth” of what he has already heard (Lk 1:4). The first grace of Christmas, then, is to be confirmed in our faith.

The second is to revive our sense of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist. For St Aelred of Rievaulx, Bethlehem, the House of Bread, is Holy Church, the manger the altar, the swaddled Child is the Lord hidden behind the appearances of bread and wine. Christ’s sacramental presence is Christmas for us. “We have no greater or clearer proof of Christ’s birth, he writes, than our daily reception of his Body and Blood at the altar of the Lord.”

And the shepherds go back to their sheep, back to their ordinary work and responsibilities. They don’t stop shepherding. They don’t stay with the Holy Family. They return to their community life, the “same old”, but aware of the extraordinary grace that had entered their lives and the world, and would bind them together for ever – the lasting grace of this passing feast.

St Peter’s Priory, Aberdeen, 25 December 2025