The Shepherd's Life

‘Snow. Shepherds fear and loathe deep snow and drifting winds. Snow kills. It buries sheep. It buries the grass and makes them even more dependent on us for survival. So we suffer everyone else’s excitement. Snowballs. Snowmen. Sledging. We fear it. A little snow is harmless…. But the combination of wind and deep snow is a killer.’

In his evocative description of The Shepherd’s Life, James Rebanks dispels a whole series of poetic fantasies about the life of a shepherd. Rebanks is particularly exercised by William Wordsworth’s rather romanticized ideas about his profession. He speaks passionately about his sense of connection with the landscape of the Lake District. It is, he says ‘a peopled landscape. Every acre of it has been defined by the actions of men and women over the centuries’. 

Rebanks read History at Magdalen College. He would entertain his tutors with stories about dry-stone walling in Cumbria. When his tutor said, ‘Oh well, I imagine you will miss it’, Rebanks told him that he hadn’t stopped doing it during the vacation and he was going back once he had graduated. Whatever the assumptions his tutor might make about his future vocation, he wanted to be a shepherd. He wanted to be back in the shadow of the fells.

A particularly striking passage in his book is his description of gathering the sheep at particular points in the year for clipping and lambing. As their shepherd, Rebanks has not seen them for two months. The sheep graze on the fells out of sight for weeks on end. They enjoy their own independence and autonomy. 

But when it comes to gathering, the local shepherds must work together. No-one can bring all the sheep down from the hills alone. Indeed, there are areas of the fells which are particularly inaccessible, and the labour of bringing down the sheep from remote gullies on the mountainside is demanding and sometimes grueling work: ‘The best shepherds and dogs are sent to the hardest places’. They are the ones who are sent to the forgotten corners of the earth.

In his gospel, St Luke the evangelist presents the nativity of Jesus rather differently from St Matthew. Matthew speaks of Magi bringing exotic and expensive gifts to the Christ-child. Luke places the birth of Jesus in a more ambiguous and precarious world. He is born with little security. The family sleeping rough, Mary placing the new born baby in a manger, and the whole sorry tale being witnessed by a motley crowd of shepherds, who had descended from the hills. 

They too are sent to a forgotten corner of the earth, the city of Bethlehem, on the very edge of the Roman Empire – miles away from the imperial palaces of Rome. And the reference to a census at the beginning of this story is not simply a chronological clue – by all accounts, Quirinius didn’t commission a census until the year 7AD, which is a little late. A census was an exercise in control. It was an act of oppression. People were counted not so that social scientists could assess all sorts of trends in the Judaean countryside. People were counted so that the imperial authorities could extract as many taxes as possible from the inhabitants of these conquered, and largely forgotten, lands.

St Luke has a particular concern for the poor and the oppressed in his gospel, and it is no accident that Luke has the events of the nativity witnessed by shepherds. Like Rebanks, we may need to dispel the poetic fantasies. Shepherds were the car park attendants of the ancient world, the night time workers on zero-hour contracts, the people who usually didn’t count and who were rarely seen, the people who lived on the margins of civilization. For them, the world was an inhospitable and sometimes hostile place. And it is to them that Luke has the angel announce ‘good news’. 

They are the ones to hear the gospel for the first time. They are the first to see the Christ child. And here is the mystery at the heart of Christmas: God reveals himself to us not in power and glory, or in might and majesty. We see his face in the vulnerability of a little child. He comes alongside us as one of us. He enters a fallen and ambiguous and sometimes cruel world, and through his life he teaches us to love, to trust, and to hope.