In Fields Outside Of Bethlehem

Devotional

When angels appeared to people in the bible, they often had to start by saying “do not be afraid”. We are not talking about rosy-faced babies with Cupid wings here. These are angelic beings – denizens of the spiritual realm, created for the presence of the almighty God, fearsome soldiers, agents of His unstoppable Will, messengers of his irrefutable Word, and worshippers of His unspeakable Glory. We continue in our daily lives, interacting with this physical realm in which we are confined. How easily we disregard any notion that there might be a spiritual realm! As human beings, we are a strange collection of paradoxes… Yes, we might feel and act in ways that imply that we are more than simply meat and bone and firing synapses – that we are persons – spiritual entities with physical bodies… But we rarely articulate it in a coherent way. We rarely meditate on the possibility of the spiritual realm. We hear of angels and miracles in the bible, but the idea feels somehow distant, unreal to us. Perhaps we even reject it, or resent the idea as fanciful. The shepherds would have felt the same way. But see how instantaneously their perspective was changed. Like a colour-blind person putting on lenses that allow them to see colour, or a deaf person gaining their hearing – that’s how it must have felt for those shepherds to encounter the angels. But a revelation that begins with spiritual glory and heavenly music ends with an even more incredible realisation – that the God of creation could come and enter our world as a physical human being – a bundle of synapses, and meat and bone – and that we could know Him, and be known. Let us not lose sight of the wondrous truth we sing at Christmas.