They were a group of hard-scrabble, working-class guys pulling a graveyard shift when something incredible happened, and for many years the shepherds of the Christmas story have been treated as little more.

They’re often seen as filler, the backdrop against which the Virgin Mary, the Christ child and even the wise men — who weren’t even there that night — stand. In church Christmas productions, the role of shepherd is given to people who need roles but don’t really need roles.

And maybe that’s the wrong perspective.

In the birth narrative in St. Luke’s gospel, eight of the 20 verses are dedicated to scenes involving the shepherds.

They were keeping a night vigil in an open field, making sure predators didn’t sneak among the sheep they were tasked with watching when angels appeared announcing the birth of the Messiah.

It’s very likely the shepherds didn’t own the sheep they were watching, that they were uneducated and that they were generally low-regarded. The image of a loveable shepherd protecting innocent sheep probably didn’t apply to the group in the fields that night, St. Mary Basilica pastor the Rev. David O’Connor said.

“I would think that shepherds in the culture of that time were anything but loveable,” he said. “They were living out with the sheep a lot of the time and probably would have had a reputation of not always respecting the rights of other people’s sheep.”

And it’s that fact, that the humble birth of the Son of God was announced to even humbler men, that is so striking.

“Here you have someone who is not very wealthy, not well educated,” Parkway Baptist Church Senior Pastor Jeff Brewer said. “God could have gone to the king or priests, people society thought highly of, but he went to the common man and allowed them to be the messenger.

“God sent his Son and proclaimed the coming of his Son to an average, ordinary shepherd — he didn’t proclaim it first to the wealthiest or smartest.”

Some theologians read the Gospels as proclaiming a message not only of hope, but of change, with the Kingdom of Heaven initiating a set of values fundamentally different from those of the world.

The men tending sheep that night would start a pattern throughout the Gospels where those on the margins of society would be the first to hear and proclaim the good news, from the shepherds at Christ’s birth to the radical John the Baptist to the women at the empty tomb following the resurrection, First Presbyterian Church co-pastor the Rev. Noelle Read said.

“They were some of the first disciples,” Read said.

“I think that Christ always has a preferential view of the poor, disenfranchised, the least of these. Jesus came to overturn the status quo, the power regime of the empire, and even in the Old Testament God uses very unsuspecting people to be part of his ways — I think God picks unlikely people.”

And unlikely as they were, the shepherds took the message the angels brought to them to heart. The biblical narrative tells of how, after hearing of the birth, they dropped what they were doing to go to a cave outside Bethlehem and see the newborn child.

“It seems like they acted on radical faith or curiosity to heed the message (of the angels) and trust that it was something they needed to see,” Read said.

Taking that chance meant putting their economic well-being at risk, Brewer said.

“Even if they were watching their own sheep, how ridiculous would this be for them to leave their sheep and run into town — this was their livelihood,” he said.

“It would be like if you had a business and you heard something, and you ran out leaving the doors open while you told someone across town this news.”

Actions like that affirm the reality of the angelic visit to the shepherds, Brewer said.

“It was not a figment of their imagination, this wasn’t a prank. These guys were not necessarily in high demand, and it would not necessarily be a big deal to put someone else in their place — what these shepherds experienced was real.”

But perhaps as important when considering the faith of the shepherds is the fact that they very likely did not believe in the God of the Israelites, from whom Christ came.

“They most likely did not have the faith of the Old Testament people, but the way the event was given to them, there was probably a curiosity that compelled them,” O’Connor said.

After seeing the Christ child in Bethlehem, the shepherds took the message to the streets, making known what they had seen.

And when they eventually went back to work, the Bible says they went rejoicing.

“One application we can take from this is that there may be people in our midst who haven’t had a faith experience, and if they were willing to take the risk — whether it be out of curiosity or a genuine search — and in the process, if they had an experience of God or a genuine religious experience, they would walk away changed,” O’Connor said.

Believers can look at the story of the shepherds and find a model for their lives, Doty Road Church of God Pastor Simeon Green said.

When they heard the message, the shepherds didn’t just internalize it, they acted on it.

“After hearing the angel, being told about the babe and where he would be found in Bethlehem, they took appropriate action — they went to Bethlehem to see this thing,” Green said.

Having seen the baby, they first celebrated and then started sharing what had happened to them.

“They celebrated with joy because it changed their lives,” Green said. “It was a wonder so great they couldn’t help telling everybody what they saw — and that’s what it is about Jesus.

“They found a joy that the world cannot deliver and cannot deny. They found a wholeness they could not achieve through any kind of counseling. They found a peace no bank account could produce. They found a love no one else could give.”

“They found Jesus and we can too.”