L. R. Tarsitano—Saint Andrew’s Church, Savannah

Christmas, 2004

The First Gospel

“And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord” (Luke 2:10-11).

The shepherds abiding in the fields on the night that Jesus Christ was born were ordinary Old Testament Jews. We obviously don’t know much about their religious education, but we do know this—when the glory of the LORD shown around them, they were “sore afraid.” They were well-instructed, at least to this extent—they knew what the Patriarchs and the Prophets knew: that ordinary, sinful, mortal men could not long endure even the slightest part of the glory of the LORD God Almighty without being overwhelmed or even dying.

The shepherds were afraid for their lives, as well they should have been. The fear of the Lord is not some phobia or psychological defect, as so many falsely believe today. As the Scriptures teach, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and a gift of the Holy Ghost. Sinful man has no place to stand before the righteousness of God, no way to bear the justice of God’s perfect judgment. The shepherds felt naked before the power of God, and this proves that they were honorable, pious men, responding to the glory of the LORD in the only way that they knew, based on history and revelation thus far.

But a new chapter of history and revelation is first generally published to them on that night. It had begun nine months earlier with the annunciation of St. Mary and the virgin conception of Jesus Christ by the Holy Ghost, but now the time had come to announce it to the world, represented here by the shepherds. The angel’s “fear not” is not, however, a contradiction of the old past. It is the announcement of a new present, complete with the “good tidings of great joy” that are the first public preaching of the Gospel: “For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.”

Everything changes for those shepherds, and likewise everything changes, as the angel declares, for “all people,” whatever their past, whether they were born Jews or Gentiles. And the key terms of this transforming Gospel, of these “good tidings of great joy” are these: the city of David; a Savior; Christ; and the Lord.

The first term, “the city of David,” means on that night the equivalent of the phrase “according to the Scriptures” that we recite in the Nicene Creed. This day, as the shepherds listen to the angel and as Jesus is born in Bethlehem, the city of David, the promises of the Old Testament are visibly kept by God. What had been, until now, a series of pledges from God that he would redeem mankind from its sin, that he would make the family of Abraham the instrument of that redemption for the whole world, and that a single man, a son of the house of David, would carry out the good and saving will of God for mankind, is now an accomplished reality.

The second term, “a Savior,” announces both the nature and the permanence of what the child born in Bethlehem would do, and of what now he has made certain forever. The child of the Old Testament prophecies would take onto himself the sins of the whole world. He would live the revelation given to Isaiah as a surety from God: “Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows…he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed” (Isaiah 53:4-5).

Moreover, the work of this Savior in redeeming the world in his own blood will never have to be repeated. He is not “one savior among many saviors.” He is unique, and his work is unrepeatable both in its uniqueness and in its perfection, once and for all. As St. Paul will later expand and explain the angel’s message to the shepherds, “Neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own blood he entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us” (Hebrews 9:12). And “eternal redemption” need not and cannot be repeated.

The third term, “Christ,” reinforces the first two. Jesus, born in Bethlehem, is the Messiah promised by God: the One chosen and anointed by the Father in heaven to perform his saving will on the earth. The Messiah is the personal and living consolation of Israel, called in the Greek of the New Testament “the Christ” and become the living and personal consolation of all the redeemed.

Now, many strange and erroneous beliefs about the Christ had developed by the time of Jesus’ birth. The silliest of these beliefs was that the Christ should be a great earthly ruler and potentate, a kind of “Jewish Caesar,” so that many people would pester Jesus throughout his life to claim an earthly throne and empire. But the Christ of the Scriptures and the Christ of the angel’s Gospel is so much greater than an earthly emperor that such expectations are revealed to us for what they are: trivial and small-minded.

The Eternal Lord God has not chosen and anointed the Christ to ascend a human throne. The Eternal Lord God has not prepared a Chosen People for eighteen centuries to produce yet another foolish empire of men. The Eternal Father in heaven has chosen this one man to give eternal life, to be the Savior of the world, and to be seated in his glorified humanity at the right hand of the throne of God when his work of salvation is accomplished.

The fourth term, then, “the Lord,” explains how this one child and the man that he will become can fulfill the prophecies, be the Savior, and do the work of the Christ. He is the Eternal Son of God, made flesh of a human mother. He is the God of all, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, become a human being to glorify his Father in heaven and to save mankind from within mankind as both True God and true man.

When the angel uses the words “the Lord” to identify the child born in Bethlehem, there can be no reasonable doubt about what he means. “The Lord” means one thing only in the language of the Scriptures, and it meant one thing only in the everyday language of those shepherds: the Lord is God, and God is the Lord. The glory of the Lord that shone round about those shepherds is the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ, even as Jesus Christ is born in Bethlehem.

The new present of the angel’s “fear not” is the coming of Emmanuel: God with us. Sinful man can hope to stand before God because God has become man to be man’s Savior and to destroy the deadly power of sin. Redeemed man can stand before God, not as a stranger or an enemy, but as a child of God by adoption and grace, because the Eternal Son of God made man stands for him and with him.

It was the privilege of those shepherds on that night to be the first to hear the Gospel, and they heard it from the lips of an angel, however briefly and compactly: “For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.” It is our privilege tonight to hear the same words, the same angel, and the same Gospel, and to hear them magnified by the mighty works of the Lord Jesus Christ and by two thousand years of the witness of the saints.

St. Luke tells us about that night: “And it came to pass, as the angels were gone away from them into heaven, the shepherds said one to another, Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us” (Luke 2:15). They went, and wondered, and worshipped; and “the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen, as it was told unto them” (Luke 2:20).

And what is expected of us? The very same thing—that we should go to Christ, be with Christ, wonder, worship, glorify and praise God, witness to what we have seen and been told, and join in the eternal hymn of the Gospel: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.” And that is what a “Merry Christmas” means, both for those shepherds and for us. Merry Christmas.