Thoughts for the Day

Luke 2: 20 The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told.

Advent is over, but I hope you will allow me this postscript to the series today reflecting on that last phrase of the last of Luke’s first 100 verses.

If Luke had closed this section of narrative without adding “which were just as they had been told”, it would still have read well.  And Luke has already told us what the angel said (or at least a summary of the key points), so we can see this for ourselves without him pointing it out.  Why then take up valuable space with this non-essential?

It could simply be for emphasis, especially if they were given more details than Luke recorded.  But did he really need to emphasise that God’s messenger had told the shepherds the truth? Could we possibly doubt it?

Perhaps though, Luke is encouraging us to take this a step further.  If we are ‘of course’ not surprised that the shepherds found things “just as they had been told”, should we not be equally confident in the other statements about Jesus which, at that point, had yet to be fulfilled?  And, if we are confident in the message of that one angel, should we not also be confident in the messages Luke has earlier recorded from Gabriel to Zechariah and Mary?

Perhaps also, to take it a step still further, if we are confident in the trustworthiness of the angels’ messages, Luke is challenging us to have equal confidence in the prophetic words he records, both quotations from Old Testament prophets and those he records from Zechariah and others.  Human beings may be more fallible (we assume) in conveying messages, but prophetic messages are still from the same source, God!

Finally, is there perhaps an echo here of Luke’s opening remarks?  He records that the shepherds found things “just as they had been told”, and he wants us to know that he too has faithfully investigated and is accurately recording what he has been told.  Which brings us back to how we began this journey into Luke’s writing, our decision about whether to believe him, and whether, as he put it, his orderly account will indeed have helped us know the certainty of the things we have been taught.

Merry Christmas and thanks for following this series.