What Angels Wish They Knew

Well, can you imagine the Christmas story without angels? Did you pick up how many times angels appeared? Angels actually, amongst other things, remind us that the unseen world is real. It’s amazing how often you come across people who will make mention of either fallen angels or faithful angels, but definitely angels. Angels, the Bible tells us, were present at the creation of the world. Angels are present when time as we know it comes to an end. It was an angel that came to Joseph to announce that Jesus was going to be born, that his name was to be Jesus because he would save his people from their sins.[1] It was an angel that then came to Mary to announce that Jesus was coming and that this Jesus was going to be a King who would ultimately rule forever.[2]

It was, as we just heard, the angels who then came to the shepherds in the fields of Bethlehem, and they announced what the shepherds themselves could never have imagined would take place. After all, you would think if there was an event such as this about to take place that would impact the entire world, that would impact history forever, you would probably have started with somebody other than a group of shepherds who were just out in the fields. They weren’t prosperous. They weren’t significant in many ways. In fact, shepherds were of such repute that they would never be entertained in a court of law. They could never give testimony in a court of law. And yet it is to these individuals that the angel comes so that they can then in turn give testimony. And the angels announced to them “good news … great joy … for all the people. [’Cause] unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.”

Now, with all that said, this brief talk that I’m giving to you now is actually not about angels, but it is about what angels wish they knew. It is about what angels long to look into. That actually comes in the first letter of Peter, where he describes how all that took place in the Old Testament was the focus of the prophets, who sent the story onward. And then he says, “And actually, the angels look down from heaven”[3]—if you can imagine angels hanging over the parapet of heaven, and they’re looking down and inquiring as to what in the world is actually happening here. So although they weren’t messengers of the message, they were observers; they were in some sense participants. But angels do not know what the children of God know.

There’s an old hymn, seldom sung, and it has a verse that makes this plain. It goes like this:

There is singing up in heaven
Such as we have never known.
As the angels sing of victory
And the lamb upon the throne. …

But when we sing redemption’s story,
They will fold their wings,
For angels never knew the joy
That our salvation brings.[4]

But they’re announcing this amazing event—what we refer to as the incarnation, a one-of-a-kind, unique. If you are a bit of a pedant like me, then you will be annoyed when you hear people use the word unique in relative terms, because by definition, something is unique. There are no degrees of uniqueness. There is not “very unique” or “quite unique” or “almost unique.” There is just unique. And when we come to the invasion of time by God himself, he shows himself, and he comes to do something for us.

Now, usually, when people tell us of something that is hard to understand—and for me, there’s a lot of things that are hard to understand—they then say something like “Well, it’s like this,” and whatever the “this” might be, which is supposed to make a hard thing understandable. But when you come to the incarnation—when you come to the story of God stepping down into time—it’s not possible to say, “It’s like this.” Because it is not “like this.” It’s not like anything else at all.

The Bible helps us to understand that God, in Jesus, has done something that is unique and unmistakable.

And that’s why we need our Bibles. Because the Bible then helps us to understand that God, in Jesus, has done something that is unique, and it is unmistakable. Every time that Christmas comes around—and I’ve been doing this now for seventy-two years of Christmases—I understand when people say, “I’m not sure I’ve ever really got ahold of Christmas. I’m not sure that I have got to the essence of it at all. And why is it that all of this stuff has to come out saying the same thing? Why are the angels on about the same story? In short order,” someone says, “why do I need a savior? If that’s what Christmas is about, why do I need a savior?” And some people actually are of the opinion that they don’t need a savior—but they know that somebody up their street needs a savior, or perhaps somebody they went to school with needs a savior, but they don’t need a savior.

Well, let me tell you what the Bible says. It actually makes sense. The reason we need a Savior is because we’re sinful. We don’t want to admit it, but we can’t deny it. And until we face up to it, we won’t be able to make sense of life, we won’t be able to make sense of the world, we won’t be able to make sense of the Bible, we won’t be able to make sense of ourselves, and we won’t actually be able to make sense of the Christmas story. Because the Christmas story is actually about this—that God made us to love him, to trust him, to obey him, to enjoy the beauty of the world that he made, but we decided to turn our back on that idea, figuring that we could perhaps work out a program all of our own; that God has established a standard of perfection that we can never keep; that we fail to hit the target; that we park on the double yellow lines; that we transgress; that we disobey authority.

And it’s not a very pleasant picture, but the Bible says that we’re, all of us, like lost sheep.[5] Like lost sheep. Have you seen lost sheep? They’re lost! They do really strange things. It’s not exactly a very palatable notion, is it? You turn to the person next to you and say, “Do you know that you’re a lost sheep, I’m a lost sheep? That’s what the Bible says.” Why would it say such a thing? Because it’s true. It’s a wonderful picture.

Paul Simon in one of his albums, around 2011, has a song actually entitled “Questions for the Angels.” I won’t sing it to you, you’ll be relieved to know, but I will give you the quote from the first verse. It goes like this:

A pilgrim on a pilgrimage
Walked across the Brooklyn Bridge,
His sneakers torn,
In the hour when the homeless move their cardboard blankets
And the new day is born,
Folded in his backpack pocket
The questions that he copied from his heart:
“Who am I in this lonely world?
And where will I make my bed tonight,
When twilight turns to dark?”[6]

“Look at all these lonely people. Where do they all come from?”[7] The lost sheep.

But yet, rather than look to Jesus as the Savior, as the Shepherd, we continue to look to ourselves and to think that we can figure it all out. People tell me all the time, “I don’t think you should say all these things, Alistair. After all, I’ve figured it out: A good God, if he exists, will reward nice people if they just do their best. That’s the philosophy. That’s how I’m going to get through my life. God presumably, like a very congenial headmaster, has decided to grade on the curve. And although we may not be at the bottom, at least there’s a few people below us, and so as long as somebody else misses the bus, I don’t care, as long as I get the bus.”

And so it’s the kind of philosophy that comes from The Wizard of Oz. Why am I thinking about The Wizard of Oz? Well, think about those ruby slippers. Have you been alive this week? Do you realize how much they sold for on auction? For $28 million somebody bought the ruby slippers. With the auction fees added to it, it came out at $32.25 million for a pair of slippers. Now, I’m looking at your shoes; it doesn’t look anything close to that at all.

But here’s the philosophy from The Wizard of Oz. The Wizard of Oz has got no notion—the Tin Man or any one of them—they’ve got no idea that they’re lost sheep. And the wizard says to them, “If you look down deep and for long enough, you’ll discover there’s nothing you can’t do. If you’ll just look inside yourself, you’ll be able to find the answer.” Now, if the answer is inside of you, let me ask you: Why would God go to the extent of sending Jesus as a Savior? Why not simply send a message, like The Wizard of Oz, that says, “Just look inside yourself; you can find the answer”?

In fact, that’s a fairly common notion, isn’t it? “The reason that I am the way I am is because of something that is outside of me”—either “Somebody did something to me,” or this, or the next thing. “And if it’s all outside of me, then surely the answer is inside of me.” Then you come to the Christmas story, and it reverses it. It actually says the problem is inside of us, and the answer to the dilemma is outside of us.

Now, some of you are saying, “Well, I thought this was Christmas. It’s supposed to be about love. Why did you start this sin stuff, for goodness’ sake?” You know, in 2007, my doctor phoned me up one day, and he said, “I don’t think you have cancer, but just in case you may have cancer, I’d like you to come tomorrow morning and let me biopsy you.” I said, “Will it hurt?” He said, “Well, no, it won’t hurt.” He said, “It’ll be a little uncomfortable, but I won’t hurt you.” He said, “I don’t think you have cancer, but we might as well check.” And so I went, and we checked. And the following morning, he called me up to say, “You have cancer.”

Now, did I hate him for that? Did I say to him, “What an unloving person you are! I cannot believe… I thought you liked me. I thought you were looking after me. Why did you tell me that? Why did you give me that diagnosis?” Do you know what he said? “’Cause I love you. That’s why I cared for you. That’s why I did what I did.”

That’s the story of Christmas. Why would God give such a diagnosis, were it not for the fact that he does it in order that we might be driven towards the cure? That’s why at the center of the Christmas story, we don’t actually have a cradle, but we have a cross: because “all we like sheep have gone astray”; each of us has turned to go our own way; and “the Lord has laid on him”—that’s on Jesus, the Savior—“the iniquity of us all.”[8] It’s a unique story. Jesus has promised to save all those who trust in him. We don’t deserve such a salvation, and we can’t earn it. It is a gift, and it is received by faith.

At the center of the Christmas story, we don’t actually have a cradle, but we have a cross.

As soon as you say the word faith, somebody says, “Well, this is my stop. I get off the bus right here. I don’t do faith. I don’t do faith. I’m a rational man”—“I’m a rational woman”—“I did physics and further physics, and I just believe everything is totally rational. And I feel sorry for the people who, when rationality reaches its terminus, they have to drop in with the story of faith.” And so you’ve decided not to listen any further.

Maybe when you think of faith, you think of the White Queen in Alice Through the Looking-Glass. Could have been a “leaking” glass as well, for all I know. But anyway, Through the Looking-Glass. Because the White Queen in that book, you will remember, she says faith is believing “six impossible things before breakfast.”[9] So if you’re a person of faith, what you do is you just believe impossible things. There’s no rationale in it at all.

Interestingly, when the Bible uses the word “faith”—pistis in Greek—it’s not an intrinsically religious word. Because in actual fact, all day, every day, we are exercising faith. Another way to put it is to say not “I have faith” but “I depend,” or “I trust,” or “I rely.”

Now, if you say to me, “I rely,” I say, “Rely on whom or rely on what?” You just don’t rely. And it is the object of our reliance, it is the object of our trust, it is the object of our faith that provides the foundation for actually trusting. Because what the Bible is really saying to us is this: that the events of the incarnation took place in a real place at a real time with real people in real history, that the story of the Bible—in fact, the coins in your pocket (if anyone still has coins) will be marked by a date, and that date is directly related to what took place in the incarnation, before Jesus and after Jesus.

And the facts of history stand the test. Roman historians, Jewish historians all testify to the reality of the person of Jesus. The facts as given to us in the Bible are that Jesus was born, Jesus lived a perfect life, Jesus died on a cross for sinners, and Jesus was raised to life again. Those are the facts.

Now, here’s the deal: They’re either true, or they’re false. They’re either true or false. But they are facts. Faith involves actually accepting them as facts. You say, “Well, I accept that.” And there are plenty of people who have believed that entirely. They say, “Well, I do believe there was a Jesus. I think I believe that he did die. I’m not sure about the resurrection and so on.” So you have facts, and then you have the assent to the facts, and then you have trust. Because trust comes when we are actually trusting in the facts as given.

Now, some of you, I can tell already, you went to the hairdresser’s this week. I can see. What an act of faith on your part! And do you ever worry as I worry when I go to CVS, when I sit at the window, and I give them my name, and I give them my date of birth, and they give me a bottle that I believe is the stuff that my doctor thought was what I should have? But then I say to myself, “What if they gave me the stuff for the lady that was in the car in front? Maybe I’ll grow wings. Who knows what could happen to me?” But it’s trust. It’s trust. It’s trust.

Do you ever fly? Whew! Yeah. You don’t want the guy up front going “Whee!” No! No, no. You want that calm American voice. Yeah. It’s trust.

Let me tell you something: When God opens a person’s eyes to the facts, when God opens a person’s mind to give assent to the facts, when God opens a person’s understanding to trust those facts, then faith takes hold.

It was taught to me at school as a boy in an acrostic, F-A-I-T-H: “Forsaking All, I Take Him.” That’s faith: forsaking everything else. So long as you trust in your religion, so long as you trust in your devotion, so long as you trust in your supposed goodness, you will never trust Jesus as your Savior. Because you’ll be trusting something else: “A good God will reward nice people if I do my best. Well, I’ll just try and trust that I can do my best.”

You may be here tonight—you got dragged in here, perhaps—and you’re wondering how you got in the middle of the row. But perhaps you’re in attendance, and part of the reason is that you are in keeping with the response of the shepherds. Because when the message comes to the shepherds, I like the way they respond. Did you notice it in the reading? And when the angels had gone away into heaven, one of the guys says to his friend, “Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened.” He doesn’t say, “Let’s go to Bethlehem and find out what those crazy angels are on about with their mythology that they’ve just dropped down on us here, why they would come to us.” No: “Let’s go and see this thing that has happened.”

Perhaps you’re here for that very same reason. You might have been at seventy Christmases just like me, but you’ve never figured it out. Have you figured out that it actually happened?

One of my favorite Bible stories is about a man who did just that: He went to see what happened. He was a small man, and he was a tax collector, and he was working, essentially, for the Roman authorities, which was a fairly lucrative position in his day. It allowed him to siphon things off in his direction. And the word had reached him that Jesus of Nazareth was going to be coming through their town. And so, like the shepherds, he said, “I’m going to go and see this thing that is happening.” And being small—you can read this, incidentally, in the nineteenth chapter of Luke—and being small, he climbed up into a tree. His name was Zacchaeus.[10]

Why he actually went is, I suppose, anybody’s guess. Perhaps he went just out of curiosity, because Jesus was making a stir. Perhaps he went out of a desire for community, because he was not the kind of person in the community that would have been known for having a lot of friends because of the part that he played in the economy. Perhaps he went out of a sense of conscience. Perhaps he’d heard about this one who had been healing and helping. And maybe he went up the tree in the hope that perhaps he would catch a glimpse of him.

Could be similarly, this evening, you’re here—not a tax collector, but you’re doing okay. Are you here out of curiosity? Are you here out of a desire for communion with people? Are you here because deep down inside of you, you know that what the Bible says about sin is true? Well, you’re not up a tree, and Jesus is not here. It’s just me. The amazing thing is that although he went looking for Jesus, he discovered that Jesus was looking for him. You’ll have noticed that that was actually what was said by Marcie in the video earlier—that she was running in another direction, and suddenly, she found that it was Jesus, the Savior, the Good Shepherd, who came and pursued.

And that’s exactly what happened to this little man. Jesus said, “Come down the tree. I want to come to your house”[11]—and as a result of that encounter, a divine visitation, and the life of Zaccheus is turned completely upside down. And interestingly, in the song that we just had played for us, the response in that song is “Well, what could I give to Jesus? What could I give? If I’m a poor man… If I was a shepherd, I could bring a lamb,”[12] or so on. And what really happened in the life of Zaccheus was that he turned himself around in such a way to give back to those from whom he’d been purloining things—that Jesus actually, as it were, stands out on his front porch, and he says, “This man is a new man, because the Son has come seeking to save those who are lost.”[13]

The reason that God has gone to the extent of sending Jesus is because of his love for us—a love that extends to every one of us. He made us. He knows us. He knows what’s best for us. He knows that our lives are a veritable shambles when we try it in our own way. And he comes to pursue us. And all that we can do in response is accept what he offers. We can’t earn it. We couldn’t figure it out. But we can receive it.

I mean, as a Scotsman, I have to tell you: I like getting free stuff. It’s just inside of me. And so I really do well with the gospel. I mean, it’s good. If you told me, “It’d cost you this” or “cost you this,” I’d say, “No, I don’t think so. No, I don’t want to do that.” But it said, “No, you just receive it.” The wages that sin pays is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus.[14]

The reason that God has gone to the extent of sending Jesus is because of his love for us—a love that extends to every one of us.

When you leave tonight, there are little Gospels of John out in the vestibule. There are other things which you can feel free to take. And it may well be that a reading through the Gospel of John would help to crystallize, perhaps clarify, some of the things that I’ve said. First of all, I apologize for taking longer than three minutes. Secondly, if you work for Walgreen’s, I apologize for mentioning CVS. So, I can confess my sins and be done with it.

But you’ll find this little prayer. I’m going to read it for you now. You can find it when you take one away with you. And, indeed, you’ll be very welcome to our Christmas Eve service and next Sunday, too, if you ever care to return. But here is the response—facts, assent, trust:

Heavenly Father, I believe that Jesus Christ is your Son and that he died on the cross to save me from my sin. I believe that he rose again to life and that he invites me to live forever with him in heaven as part of your family. Because of what Jesus has done, I ask you to forgive me of my sin and give me eternal life. Help me to live in a way that pleases and honors you. Amen.

And in our closing carol, where you get your second opportunity to sing, one of the ways one of the verses simply puts it, that…

O holy child of Bethlehem,
Descend to us, we pray.
Cast out our sin and enter in;
Be born in us today.[15]

It may be that there’s just one person out of this vast crowd who’s going to sing that tonight—perhaps for the first time you ever sang it, or perhaps the first time you ever sang it and meant it—and that verse is going to be your prayer and your acceptance to the gift that is provided in Jesus for all who believe.[16]

We thank you, gracious God, for the gift of your dear, beloved Son. We thank you, Lord Jesus, for coming so that we might learn what it is to trust you and to know you and to be forgiven by you. We pray that as we part from one another, you will take us on our way in safety. We thank you for each other, for the people around us. We thank you for those that are the extended members of our family, some near to us and some far from us. We pray for them even this night.

And so, may the Lord bless us and keep us. May the Lord make his face to shine upon us and be gracious to us. May the Lord lift up the light of his countenance upon us and give us his peace tonight, and until Jesus comes or calls us to himself, and then forevermore. Amen.

Amen. Merry Christmas.

[1] See Matthew 1:20–21.

[2] See Luke 1:26–33.

[3] 1 Peter 1:12 (paraphrased).

[4] Johnson Oatman Jr., “Holy, Holy, Is What the Angels Sing” (1894).

[5] See Isaiah 53:6.

[6] Paul Simon, “Questions for the Angels” (2010).

[7] John Lennon and Paul McCartney, “Eleanor Rigby” (1966). Lyrics lightly altered.

[8] Isaiah 53:6 (ESV).

[9] Lewis Carroll, Alice Through the Looking Glass (1871), chap. 5.

[10] See Luke 19:1–4.

[11] Luke 19:5 (paraphrased).

[12] Christina Rossetti, “In the Bleak Midwinter” (1872). Lyrics lightly altered.

[13] Luke 19:9–10 (paraphrased).

[14] See Romans 6:23.

[15] Phillips Brooks, “O Little Town of Bethlehem” (1868).

[16] See Romans 3:22.