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 roughness or lack of education, but in the sense of that inner wholeness which stands opposed not to roughness or ignorance, but to inner brokenness or dividedness. To what most often keeps a person from seeing and hearing God. Although the fact remains: 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 well educated in the Torah, or to teachers of the Torah, Joseph and Mary would most likely not have had guests very soon. Indeed, before going, these people would have needed to analyze everything carefully, weigh it, decide whether the vision was "correct" or "incorrect," whether it corresponded to the criteria of truth and the ideas about the Messiah accepted by learned theologians, or not... In short, learned people would not have gathered quickly to look at the Messiah. And the issue here, of course, is not education as such.
The issue is what almost always accompanies this very education in a fallen person. And the issue is not only arrogance and the peculiar snobbery characteristic of some learned people, but an inclination 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 fit into any schemes and cannot be 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. A life out of 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 get through to him. For God and 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 has no intention of fitting into human schemes, and neither does the Messiah. That is why God reveals important things to those who live simply, without schemes and models. That way is truer and more reliable.