The Shepherd’s Complaint
I’d hoped to have as this week’s journal a presentable first draft of a poem I’ve been working on, but as usual the combination of other demands on my time and my own difficulty in concentrating have kept that from happening. The poem is still some hours’ work away from completion even in rough form, which works out to a couple of weeks of total time. But I’ll give you, briefly, its theme, which I’ve had in mind for some time.
Consider the shepherds whose quiet watch was disturbed by the angels singing on the night Christ was born, who went to see the child lying in the manger, and who “returned, glorifying and praising God.” Into a perfectly ordinary night came this massive shock, this intrusion of something that they probably, like most people, didn’t ordinarily give much thought to. They must have felt that they were living in a new world.
And then, after life went back to normal? As far as I can remember we don’t hear anything else about them in the Bible, nor did the world at large seem to know anything of the coming of the Messiah for another thirty years or so.
So I imagine one of the shepherds many years later, at least disillusioned and perhaps even bitter. He’s middle-aged, at least. He thinks something should have happened by now. There was all that fuss on that one night long ago, and then…nothing. It must have been some kind of false sign, or maybe just a delusion. That’s the way life is, isn’t it? A wonderful and exciting beginning, followed by a slow declension into the same old thing, and, in the end, disappointment, as usual.
Let’s say it’s twenty-eight years later. Traditionally it’s been thought that Jesus began his public ministry at around the age of thirty. So the shepherd is again standing at the brink of great events, of another and greater manifestation of the power of God, but he has no idea that it’s coming. From his observation point in time, nothing has happened, nothing is happening.
That’s the situation of our civilization, and the way we all live our individual lives. It’s easy to scoff at the expectation that God is once again going to intervene, this time bringing an end to earthly history as we have known it. It’s easy to become disheartened about our personal hope of attaining the perfect joy and peace which has haunted our lives since we were born. I said disheartened, but it’s worse than that—it’s easy to give up completely, as most of the post-Christian West has given up.
Yet the end of what we know, the end of our personal lives and the end of history, followed by the beginning of something else which we can hardly imagine, is coming at us at an unknown speed, arriving perhaps tonight or perhaps not for many years yet, perhaps not even for centuries with respect to the world as a whole. But it’s out there somewhere, coming at us still, in the dark and impossible to avoid. Like the shepherds, we’ll have the same old thing until suddenly one day we don’t.
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