Westward Leading, Still Proceeding?

The Star of Bethlehem … it tops our Christmas trees and shows up in our carols..  But what was that star and what was its meaning?

We all have gotten a Christmas card showing the nighttime scene of three travelers saddled up on camels, wearing exotic Oriental garb, and gazing up at a star that marks out a path for them to follow.  The whole world is dark, but for these lone travelers, there is light enough to mark their way, heaven-sent light that blesses and guides their journey.

Among Bible scholars and other interested researchers, there are two schools of thought about the star and how it guided the Magi.  The first is that it was a miraculous new celestial object, not a star, but really something quite different, something that to the naïve observer resembled a star in size and brightness.  Unlike a star, this object had the power to travel independently across the face of the sky like a moving beacon-light that played “Follow-the-leader” with the Magi, directing them across the many intersecting paths from Persia to Palestine in a journey that went from north to south and from east to west.   It is this school of thought that inspires our Christmas card pictures and our carols of the season.

The second school of thought is that the star of Bethlehem was a star, or more likely a planet—maybe Jupiter, maybe Mars, maybe even Saturn or Uranus.  But in any case, it was not something new in the sky.  The Star of Bethlehem was one of those celestial objects that had always been around, and is still out there to be seen if you know where to look, but this object, planet or star, was once interpreted by the astrologically-minded Magi of Persia as having a meaning that would lead them to journey to Palestine to find the newborn King of the Jews.

Which of these two schools of thought is most compatible with the story of the Nativity that we find in the Gospels?  While one cannot dogmatize about such an issue, I think that if we really read the Bible for what it says, without reading anything into it, we can make an informed choice between the two options.

What does the Gospel of Matthew say?  Does it say that that wise men followed a starry beacon across the rugged terrain of the Middle East to Jerusalem?

The answer is no:  when the wise men show up at the door of King Herod, they do not say that they have been following a moving star.  They say, “Where is He that is born King of the Jews? For we have seen His star in the East and have come to worship Him.” 

Think about what that statement says and does not say.  It does not say, “We have been seeing his star continually as it was leading us on a southwestern course for the last six months.” 

It says, rather, “We saw a star in the East.”  This could mean one of two things.  Either they are saying, “We’re from East of here, and back East we looked up in the sky and saw a star.”  The syntax of the Greek does not favor this reading.

What they really seem to be saying is: “We looked into the Eastern sky—the part of the sky where all the stars rise into view night after night—and one night, in the East, we saw a star (or a planet), and from the position of this star in relationship to other stars, according to our way of reading the Zodiac, et cetera, we understood this star to be the herald of the birth of a new king for the Jews.”  

Remember who the Magi are:  they are Zoroastrian high priests who practiced astrology.  On any given night they could look up at the sky and make predictions about the rise and fall of kings and kingdoms, based on thery elaborate theories of the meanings of the constellations and planetary conjunctions and so on and so forth.  They didn’t need any strange new objects to make bold predictions. They didn’t need comets or supernovas or meteor showers or passing asteroids.  They looked at the same old stars and planets night after night and came up with new ideas, just like the horoscope page in the newspaper does even now.  If they thought they saw the star of a new king, it doesn’t mean they saw a new star.  It just means that the stars and planets happened to line up in a way that was meaningful according to their superstitious way of interpreting the sky.

So the Magi said of the newborn King: “We have seen His star in the East and have come to worship Him.”  The Gospel doesn’t ever say that the star of Bethlehem appeared in the western sky to lead visitors from the Orient on a journey to the west.  We read this into the Gospel account, but it’s not really there.

And it doesn’t make sense, if you think about it.  We happily cherish that Christmas card scene of the wise men on camels, saddled up in the dark of night with their eye on the star.  But in the ancient world, no one travelled at night, especially through foreign terrain.  If you travelled across land, you travelled by day and you slept at night.  So if the wise men were following a westward-leading star, they had to be following an object that was bright enough to be seen in the sky even when the sun was up, even at high noon, even at early evening when the sun would have been in the west-southwest, which is to say, directly ahead of them on the path they would be following, blocking out the light of everything else except for an extremely bright object.

Here’s the point: any celestial object that bright and lasting as long as it took to get from Persia to Jerusalem would have been noticed by someone other than the Magi of Persia. 

And no one else did.  There is no mention in the ancient historians of such an object.  Not among the Romans, not among the Jews, not among the people of India, not among the Chinese, who above all kept meticulous records of what they saw in the sky.  For the decades before and after 1 A.D., there is no mention of anything like this.  Daytime in Persia (travel time) is nighttime in China.  If the Persians were following an object during the day that was bright enough to be seen, the Chinese would have seen it at night.  If the star always remained so low on the horizon that the Chinese could not see it, the Persians would have called it something other than a star.

And we see this from the Gospel too.  When the wise men arrive at Jerusalem and ask where the newborn King is, what does Herod ask them in return?  Matthew 2:7—“ Then Herod, when he had privily called the wise men, inquired of them diligently what time the star appeared.”  Herod didn’t know when the star first appeared.  Herod had just finished conferring with his priests and scribes.  They didn’t know when the star had appeared.  They hadn’t noticed any strange new star in the last couple of years: if they had, they wouldn’t have needed to ask the question.  So if the wisemen were following a star, it was a star that only they saw and no one else. 

But the real proof that the wise men were not following a westward leading star in the western sky during the day is the fact that they showed up at the doorstep of Herod at all.  If they had a bright celestial beacon, it could have taken them right up to the front step of the house of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.  That didn’t happen.

From the way the Magi interpreted stars, they knew that a new king was born in Judea.  Perhaps they saw one of the planets cross into the constellation of Aries the Ram, which was associated by the Romans with the land of the Jews.  But once the Magi got to Judea, they had to start knocking on doors for more information.  This fact does not fit in with the Christmas card picture of the Star of Bethlehem. 

And in fact, the Gospel tells us that the Magi had not been seeing the star all the way from Persia to Jerusalem.  It is clear from the story that after talking with Herod, after getting directed to Bethlehem, after being turned around, in other words, to face the east again, the Magi saw the star once more.  Matthew 2:9—“ When they had heard the king, they departed; and lo, the star which they saw in the East went before them until it came and stood over where the young Child was.  When they saw the star, they rejoiced with exceeding great joy.” 

Now, only now at the very end of their journey, slouching eastwards towards Bethlehem, looking into the eastern sky at twilight, watching the rising of the stars, NOW do they see the new king’s star again, now does it act as a beacon to identify for them a specific direction, a specific house.   In order to do this for them, the star of Bethlehem doesn’t have to be an unusual or bright object, it doesn’t have to move differently from all the other stars.  If it had, Herod and his henchmen would have seen it too and would have been out lickety-split with a brigade of soldiers, because you can bet your bottom shekel that Herod was watching the stars after his visit with the Magi.

But the Star of Bethlehem didn’t attract Herod’s attention.  It didn’t have to be different from any other star.  It merely had to lay ahead of the Magi looking east and be positioned over a specific spot.  Every star in the sky can do this for someone: the North Star Polaris does this every night for someone somewhere.  The Magi simply knew which star in the sky to follow.  And if they were here with us tonight, perhaps they could even pick out that star for us to see as well.

As I said, there are two schools of thought about the star of Bethlehem, and there is no definitive way to decide between the two of them.  For what it’s worth, Saint John Chrysostom thought that the star of Bethlehem was not a star, but a miraculous airborne light that only the Magi could see, and that this light led them beacon-like from Persia to Judea.  But remember that Saint John was living in an era when even educated people still believed that there might be something to astrology, to the idea that the stars influence human affairs; and of course, if we understand the Gospel of Matthew as saying that the Magi correctly divined from the stars that there was a newborn King of the Jews, then this might lend some credibility to astrology that Saint John did not want to give it.  And in fact, before him, there was a Christian theologian named Origen whose very popular theories and philosophies had some room for the possibility that astrology held some water … and Saint John was reacting to that.

Nevertheless, if we read the text of the Gospel without reading anything into it, we see that the story as told requires no special kind of star.  Anyone of the planets visible to the naked eye could fill the bill, depending on the astrological ideas of the Magi in question.

Does this interpretation rob the story of the Magi of its wonder?  Does this mean that there was nothing miraculous about the star of Bethlehem?

Quite the opposite!

In the epistle reading of Christmas night, we heard how Saint Paul said (Gal. 4:4) that “in the fullness of time, God sent forth His Son.”  With this expression, the fullness of time, Saint Paul signals to us that there was nothing accidental about the circumstances of Christ’s birth.  God in his kingship over all things had orchestrated every detail of the moment of Christ’s arrival, in a preparation that had spanned centuries.  The Roman emperor was moved to enroll all the people of the Empire, necessitating Joseph and Mary’s trip to Bethlehem, so that the prophecy of the Christ being born there would be fulfilled.  The inn was full when they arrived, so that the prophecies of his lowly birth could be fulfilled.  God worked these things through His might.

Through the conquests of Alexander the Great, the greater part of the civilized world spoke Greek, and had a thirst for a higher philosophy of life.  It was a time when people were open to new ideas, new religions; when people were ready to abandon the superstitions and idolatries of the past.  If anything, the fact that the Magi were willing to travel that great distance to bring gifts to Christ proves that God can use even superstition and unbelief to draw people to Himself.

It was a time when the mission of bringing the Gospel to the whole world was aided by the Roman Empire and its engineering skills, laying out as it had roads to every corner of Mediterranean world, into Europe and Africa and even into Asia.  It was a time when the Gospel of the Jewish Messiah had a ready-made audience in every major city, due to the dispersion of the Jews by the Babylonians and Assyrians many centuries before. 

It was as time when, through the domination of Roman military might, there was relative peace in the world and free passage across borders (as the journey of the Magi itself illustrates), in a way that never existed before and perhaps never has existed since.  The time was absolutely right for the worldwide expansion of the Good News of the coming of the Son of God.

And all these things were centuries in the making.  In the fullness of time, God sent His Son into the world.  But the preparations for the coming of the Christ did not begin two centuries earlier, or four centuries earlier, or even ten centuries earlier.  If we hold that the Star of Bethlehem appeared in the right place at the right time for those Magi to see it and understand it as a herald of the newborn King of the Jews, this means that God from the fourth day of creation, eons and eons ago, set the stars and planets in position so that they would line up just so, in this meaningful way to the astrologers, so that they would go forth and worship him.

And this in its own way is a miracle.  The miracle of God’s providence in our lives in all kinds of ways, big and small.  And this miracle is just as great and just as gracious as any of the miracles of the Scriptures.  It is the grace that comes to us in the timing of the ordinary things of life, the grace that comes to us in the disasters averted and the normal blessings of life and love enjoyed.  We look for miracles, and we miss the miracle of God’s oversight and guidance of our lives at all times, in blessings seen and unseen, as we say in the Divine Liturgy.

As you look, this New Year’s Eve, on the year that has passed, and look forward to the year ahead, look with the eyes of the Magi.  Look at the constellation of things that make up your life, the same old things that have always been there and will always be there, and see in them the Good News of the presence of Christ in your world.  The Star of Bethlehem can still be seen by those who look for it.  And they can still go forth bearing their gifts of love, and every day worship the newborn King.