A shepherd's story, for Christmas
This is the story of Benjamin. He’s been a shepherd all his life; he started as an apprentice to his father when he was eight, and in the years in between he has slept out on hillsides more nights than he can count. Now he’s forty. He’s getting a bit old for sleeping on the ground. His sons, like him, have been his apprentices; now they’re coming up to twenty, they’re doing more of the night work. He still takes the sheep, and the fleeces, to market, though, and he still looks after them in the daytime. And if there’s a wolf around, he won’t find Benjamin an easy mark. One market day, Benjamin took the fleeces in to Jerusalem as usual. It was the usual bustle of market day – people selling, people buying, crowds pushing their way towards the Temple, a stream of people trying to get out of the Temple, street preachers and Roman soldiers and who knows who else. He never gets used to it. But this morning, his attention was caught by one of the street preachers. He was telling a...