Be Not Afraid

And in that region there were shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were filled with fear. And the angel said to them, 'Be not afraid ...'
—Luke 2:8-10

When we hear these familiar words from Luke's Gospel, cheerful scenes from Christmas cards immediately spring to mind: quiet people in handsome robes gathered around a fire on the hillsides or winged angels dressed for a wedding floating in a sky full of stars, one of which is huge and hangs over the attractive town of Bethlehem in the distance. We can imagine the child with eyes sparkling in the manger nearby, the smell of hay, and the quiet munching of several peaceful farm animals.

We easily leave unexplored key words in Luke's narrative. He writes about fear in the night; a fear unexpectedly diminished by a birth the angel voice announces, but a birth, Matthew relates, that will stir the fear of Herod so profoundly that his own response will be to murder the younger sons of Bethlehem.

The setting of this biblical text is the night. The meaning of night is the focus of an old story about a rabbi who enters into discussion with his students. When, he asks them, can one know the night has ended and the day has begun? Is it that moment, suggests one student, when you can tell the difference between a sheep and a dog? No, says the rabbi, that isn't it. Is it, asks another, when you can see the difference between an olive tree and a fig tree? Not that either, says the rabbi. Rather, he says, it is that moment when you can look at a face never seen before and recognize the stranger as a brother or sister. Until that moment, he adds, no matter how bright the day, it is still the night.

Most of us live in the night most of our lives. We are trained for the night by the state and often by the church. We are schooled not to recognize brothers or sisters but rather to see labels: white or black, male or female, capitalist or communist, friend or enemy, us or them. We have become adept at retaining the night in the boundaries such words draw. We come to know whom to protect and whom to threaten, whom to care for and whom to ignore. We become determined guardians of the night.

The night that came over the shepherds was at least the night of time, the predictable hours when the sun is not in view. But perhaps they too, like so many of us, lived in that longer night: the night of fear. Certainly the shepherds had much to fear. They lived under Roman occupation, an earlier system of militarized society which in many ways, despite the absence of telephone and computers, was as efficient as our own militarized society, and in some ways more terrifying. Those who made trouble quickly found their way to the torturers, and many suffered a naked death on the cross. It was not a Christmas card world for the shepherds.

Then an angel appeared in the night sky. While the shepherds lived in an age that believed in angels, they were no more often seen then than they are today. It is the habit of angels not to be seen. But apparently when they are made visible, they are not the decorative objects that hang placidly above the familiar manger. They are shining, magnificent beings, and in the night sky over Bethlehem's hills, an angel's sudden appearance was dazzling and terrifying. The shepherds, says Luke, were "filled with fear."

And what are the angel's first words to the shepherds? They are among the most important, if most ignored, found anywhere in the Bible: "Be not afraid."

This is by no means the only place we find these words. The angel said the very same to Mary when her pregnancy began, and again to Joseph when he was hesitant to marry a woman who had become pregnant before the wedding. At various times Jesus said the same to his disciples, including when he walked on the water, at the Transfiguration, and again at the empty tomb. "Courage! It is I! Be not afraid."

The fear spoken against is not the "fear of God" so often recommended in the Bible, which is that state of profound awe at the power and majesty of God as ruler of the universe. The fear God warns us against is that which impoverishes conscience, crippling our response to those around us, numbing us to their needs, blinding us in such a way that we fail to recognize others as our brothers and sisters, as children of God no less than ourselves.

Such fears deaden the soul and diminish our capacity for awe and wonder. The angel says to the shepherds, and to us as well: "Be not afraid." At least, we might say, do not be ruled by fear. Realize that violence, before it touches the body, first destroys the spiritual life of its victims with fear. It is fear that drives some to dominate others, and fear that reduces many of the others to submission. "The root of war," said Thomas Merton, "is fear."

Christmas has been trivialized and sentimentalized. The angel is made into an ornament and the choir of angels into a chorus line. We eat and drink and sing with tranquilizing images, enjoying a brief vacation from our fears. But Christmas is not meant to be a time to evade our fears but to know them in a new way, to glimpse a way from their intimate grip on our lives.

Nothing in the traditional Christmas calendar suggests that these ought to be 12 days of amnesia about human cruelty. The day after Christmas is the Feast of St. Stephen, the first Christian martyr, who was stoned to death. Two days later the Commemoration of the Holy Innocents occurs, in memory of the children who were hacked to death in Bethlehem at Herod's orders. The days of Christmas mark the tense connection between joy and suffering.

Herod, my brother Herod, is still alive. He is alive in a certain way of seeing and acting. Many people are still governed, within themselves, by his awful fear and immense loneliness. He is alive in some measure in all of us. He is especially alive in those responsible for violence. He is alive in both the Right and Left. He lives wherever the innocent are killed or war is prepared. As he only rarely does his own dirty work, he continuously seeks our help. It wasn't Herod who killed the children, but soldiers under orders.

But we should not imagine our modern Herods only in government offices or in military uniforms. Many religious leaders still believe that holiness is founded mainly on obedience to society's political structures of domination. For them Romans 13 is more important in the conduct of public life than the Sermon on the Mount. They make Paul, who hated legalism, the spokesman for law and order, implying that he could have been chaplain at Auschwitz, for instance, because it was a legal structure set up by those placed in authority.

We hear little from these religious leaders about certain important facts of Jesus' life or the implications of these facts for ourselves. They do not mention that Jesus had no weapons, defended no flag, killed no one, lived nonviolently in an occupied country, healed an enemy who had been wounded by Peter in the garden of Gethsemane, was condemned as a threat to the status quo, and, even during the pain of death, uttered words of forgiveness to those presiding over his death. No doubt Jesus knew fear, yet he was not ruled by it.

We need to think freshly about those few words the angel said that night: Be not afraid. Ignore them and Christmas isn't much more than a Christmas tree. As long as we remain in the grip of fear, we are prisoners of the night. In the dark and cold, we cannot rejoice. We can do nothing for peace on earth—our work will only serve war on earth. Entrapped in fear, we approach Bethlehem not with the unarmed shepherds but with the sword-bearing soldiers. We stand under Herod's command, but with a critical difference: our swords are missiles; they kill not one child at a stroke but tens of thousands.

Christmas is a good time to begin standing with the shepherds, to open ourselves to that angelic invitation, and to be disarmed of our fears and the swords we carry. Freed in that way, we are no longer under the political command to hate our enemies. We can instead begin to learn obedience to the biblical command to love our enemies—not to romanticize them but to take responsibility for their lives. We might visit them, learn a few of their names, read their books and see their films, pray in their churches, and stand in the way of the weapons now aimed at them. We must stand in the way of hatred and seek every possible way to turn enemies into friends.

As we recognize our fears and let go of them bit by bit, we see how different the world seems. We realize that it truly was a constant night when fear governed our lives. We could glimpse God so rarely, in so few faces.

Growing away from the rule of fear, outgrowing the Herod in ourselves, we can approach in a new way not only those we were armed against, but also those who had put the weapons in our hands. It is possible at last to approach Herod, not as if we were subjects terrified of his punishments but as his brother or sister. We have recognized his fears in our own. Perhaps he too can give up the fears that so darken his life. In any event, he is one of us. We want his company, not his defeat or death. We want him to welcome with us the newborn children of our world, so that in the light of day we can sing in one voice, "Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace, good will to humankind."

Jim Forest was a Sojourners contributing editor and general secretary of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation when this article appeared.