Keeping Watch

Read Mark 13:32–37.

Have you ever wondered why the angel comes to visit those shepherds living in the fields outside Bethlehem with the “good news of great joy” about the birth of the Messiah? What qualifies them to receive such a wonderful announcement?

It’s a commonplace of biblical interpretation that God’s choice of the shepherds aligns with Luke’s worldview and theology; namely, Luke perceives the coming of Christ as primarily good news for the poor and marginalized. It’s no accident that in Luke 4 Jesus opens his public ministry with a sermon in which he quotes Isaiah 61: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor” (Luke 4:18). The poor, the marginalized, the discarded are all of immense value in the eyes of God, and those scruffy shepherds qualify on all three counts.

This is all true, of course. That’s how it became so commonplace. But perhaps there is something else involved, and perhaps an apocalyptic parable from Mark’s gospel can shed some light on that something else.

The parable comes at the end of Mark 13, a chapter that has been dubbed the “Little Apocalypse” because of its orientation on the end times. (I preached on this apocalyptic text a few weeks ago.) Jesus is telling his disciples what to expect before the coming of the Son of Man, or Human One, at the culmination of the age. He speaks of wars and rumors of wars, of persecutions, of false messiahs, and of the final climactic moment when the Human One arrives on the clouds “with great power and glory” (Mark 13:26).

But then he warns them that they cannot know the exact time these events will occur. “Be on guard!” he says. “Be alert! You do not know when that time will come” (v. 33, NIV). Then he tells a parable about a man who goes away on a trip, leaving his servants in charge of the various household tasks and assigning the door warden to “keep watch” (v. 34, NIV). Because the servants “do not know when the owner of the house will come back—whether in the evening, or at midnight, or when the rooster crows, or at dawn” (v. 35, NIV), he warns them to stay awake. “If [the householder] comes suddenly, do not let him find you sleeping. What I say to you, I say to everyone: ‘Watch!’” (vv. 36–37, NIV).

Which bring us back to the shepherds. What does Luke say they are doing just before the angel comes? They are “living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night” (Luke 2:8, emphasis added). Not only do they represent all the poor people on the margins that are Luke’s (and Jesus’s, and God’s) special concern, but they are also following the advice of Jesus from that parable in Mark 13: they are keeping watch. The angel comes suddenly with the news about the (first) coming of the Human One, and they are awake to hear it because they have been keeping watch.

In what ways do we need to keep watch? The thing about the shepherds is that they were not necessarily keeping watch for anything special—they were scared out of their wits, after all, by the appearance of the angel, which would seem to indicate they weren’t expecting anything of the kind—they were just doing their job as faithfully as they knew how. What is it we need to be doing to exhibit the same kind of faithfulness? What work is set before us that we should be busy with so that we are not found asleep when the householder comes home?

That, after all, is how we glorify God—not necessarily by performing some startling act of acrobatic faith—but with simple faithfulness in the everyday tasks of discipleship. Caring for our neighbors. Speaking the truth in love. Blooming where we are planted. Working together to make the world resemble more closely Jesus’s vision of the commonwealth of God. Offering ourselves to God in prayer.

Keeping watch.

Grace and peace,
bob