Luke 2:8-9
And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified.
“Terrified” is a strong word. I don’t like heights, and I’m not wild about spiders, but I wouldn’t say either makes me feel terrified. Now if you put me on top of a water tower and threw a live tarantula at me I would probably feel something close to terror; but there haven’t been many times in my life when I could say I was truly terrified.
Notice that this story, which we typically see as a kind of warm and fuzzy holiday story, starts with terror!
An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified.
I think we can understand the shepherd’s terror in two ways. First, it’s natural to feel fear when we are both shocked and surprised by something you don’t expect. I can’t begin to imagine brilliance of the light that burst upon the shepherds that night. I would think that a “great company of the heavenly host” would make quite a racket too! Who wouldn’t feel at least somewhat frightened?
But I think they were terrified for a second reason; one that Jeff mentioned last week in “10 Minutes with God”, and that is, they were exposed to and by the glory of God.
Throughout the Bible the glory of God is a fearsome thing. God’s glory is his holiness made visible and therefore threatens to consume all that is not holy.
In the book of Exodus, God himself warns his servant Moses to approach his glory with great care. After God has promised to send his presence to accompany Moses as he leads the people of Israel, Moses wants more:
Then Moses said, “Now show me your glory.”
And the Lord said, “I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you, and I will proclaim my name, the Lord, in your presence. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. But,” he said, “you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.”
Then the Lord said, “There is a place near me where you may stand on a rock. When my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft in the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will remove my hand and you will see my back; but my face must not be seen.” Exodus 33:18-23
In other words, Moses is only allowed to see God’s glory from the back! God tells Moses that his glory is so great it cannot be seen directly by a human being, even a man as great as Moses. God’s glory can only be seen indirectly, from where he has been, through what he has done.
When I was in about the second grade I observed my first partial eclipse of the sun. It was a big thing at school and our teacher showed us how to make the cardboard apparatus that would allow us to watch the effects of the eclipse without actually staring at the sun. She warned us that if we stared at the sun too long we could damage our eyes. I think the exact words she used were, “You’ll go blind.”
Now, I didn’t know anything about ultra-violet rays but the idea of my eyes being burned into little black cinders was enough to keep me from staring at the eclipse! (By the way, I looked it up and while looking at the sun during an eclipse doesn’t typically cause permanent damage your eyes, looking directly at the sun through a telescope, binoculars or even a camera can indeed cause serious injury.)
The point is that while staring directly at the sun is somewhat dangerous, the sun is that which allows us to see everything else.
In the same way, we cannot look upon God directly, but his glory is everywhere.
The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. (Psalm 19:1-2)
So when we marvel at the beauty of a Midwestern sunset, we aren’t just watching a meteorological event, we are seeing the trailing edge of the glory of God. When our eyes well up at the birth of a child, we aren’t just watching the culmination of the human gestation process, we are witnessing the glory of God passing by.
And while we do not typically feel terror at these moments, perhaps we should. Not the kind of terror that makes us run in fear; rather, the kind of terror that drives us to our knees in worship. The kind of terror that sings with the angels:
“Glory to God in the highest!”
Pastor Brian Coffey
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