NOTES for Luk 2:15
The shepherds' reaction to what they saw is the reaction of normal people who trust God. They were told that the Messiah had been born, they were told where to look for Him, and they go where they were told. The normal reaction of "simple" people. Simple not necessarily in the sense of coarseness or lack of education, but in the sense of that inner wholeness which stands opposed not to coarseness or ignorance, but to inner brokenness or doubleness. To what most often prevents a person from seeing and hearing God. Although the fact remains that broken, divided people, inclined to endless and fruitless reflection, are more readily found among the educated than among the uneducated.
If the angels had announced the Messiah's birth to leaders of the Pharisaic movement or teachers of the Torah well educated in the Torah, most likely Joseph and Mary would not soon have waited for guests. Indeed, before going, such people would have had to analyze everything carefully, weigh it, decide whether the vision was "correct" or "incorrect," whether it corresponded to those criteria of truth and those ideas about the Messiah accepted by learned theologians, or not. In short, learned people would not soon have gathered to look at the Messiah. And of course the issue here is not education as such.
The issue is what almost always accompanies this education in fallen man. And the issue is not only arrogance and the peculiar snobbery characteristic of some learned people, but a tendency toward modeling and schematizing even where no schemes are suitable by definition and no models work. And not even because God and the Messiah cannot be fitted into any schemes or modeled in any way, but because a person inclined to such intellectualism often begins, without noticing it himself, to model himself as well. His own life. Life from which he tries to make a scheme instead of simply living.
And then, if a person models his own life instead of simply living it, it becomes practically impossible to reach him. For God or for another person. In such a case the person disappears, identifying himself with his own scheme, with the model of his own existence. And one cannot communicate with a model or a scheme; here one can either fit in or leave. But God does not intend to fit into human schemes, and neither does the Messiah. Therefore God reveals important things to those who live simply, without schemes and models. That is more certain and reliable.