"Star"
Knox, 2 January, 2010 © Scott McAndless
Numbers 24:12-19, Isaiah 60:1-6, Matthew 2:1-12
Also reading from Josephus: Jewish War 6.5.4
I remember many Christmases ago when I was growing up in Toronto we went down to the McLaughlin Planetarium at the Royal Ontario Museum for a special show. I don’t remember what the show was called but I remember what it was about – it was about the search for the Christmas Star. And, as I remember it (and I’ll admit that I was pretty impressionable at the time), it was a pretty impressive show.
It was also a kind of interesting show looking back on it today. Here was an institution, the Planetarium, that was devoted to science – committed to teaching people about some of the amazing discoveries in astronomy and astrophysics – and they were struggling to understand and interpret something that is usually seen from a totally different perspective, the perspective of faith and belief that sometimes comes without a lot of evidence. We seem to be in a world today where people increasingly assume that faith and science have to be opposites and that there is no reconciliation between the two. It is kind of refreshing to think back on that show and its assumption that faith and science could actually have worthwhile things to say to each other.
I also remember that the show really didn’t have an answer for the question of what was exactly the star that is described in Matthew’s Gospel. There are a few problems with what Matthew describes. He calls it a star, but we know that people in ancient times could call many heavenly bodies stars – including things like asteroids, comets, planets and perhaps even conjunctions of planets. But, even taking that into consideration, it is kind of hard to figure out exactly what Matthew is talking about. The “star” that he describes apparently appears at a very specific time that coincides with the birth of Jesus. This appearance prompts the magi to leave their home (presumably in Persia because that is where magi were found at that time) and travel to Jerusalem.
The magi seem to arrive in Jerusalem about two years after the first appearance of the star. I think we can deduce this from the fact that King Herod asks them when the star appeared and, based on their information, orders that all children in Bethlehem up to the age of two years old be murdered. But when the magi arrive in Jerusalem about two years later, the star seems to have disappeared and so they need to stop and ask directions. (Which leads to my theory, by the way, that the magi must have had at least one woman in their company because when have you ever heard of a man who was willing to stop and ask for directions?)
After the magi leave Herod, the star starts to behave even more strangely. It suddenly reappears (if it ever disappeared) and actually leads the magi not only to the town of Bethlehem but directly to the very house where the child is living. Now that is quite a trick for any heavenly body! So what exactly is Matthew describing? Some sort of heavenly body that appears and disappears and is able to move and even to very specifically indicate a geographical location on the earth.
It kind of sounds a bit like a comet – a strange comet, admittedly, but for centuries it was largely assumed that that was what Matthew was describing. And it would be wonderful if that were the case, of course, because comets are entirely predictable. They orbit around the sun and so they appear in the earth’s skies at intervals that may be centuries apart, but are always on schedule. Astronomers can not only predict when one will appear, they can also tell us the dates of every past appearance going back many centuries. So, if a comet appeared at the time of Jesus’ birth, that should actually enable us to figure out the exact date of the birth of Jesus – a date that, unfortunately, is still a bit of a mystery to us.
But, sad to say, that cannot be the case. No known comet appeared in the sky above the earth at any time near the birth date of Jesus. But, you might say, could it not have been an unknown comet – one that no astronomer has yet found? That also is very unlikely. People noticed comets back then. We have many reports, for example, of a comet that was seen in Rome and in China about four decades before the birth of Jesus. Augustus Caesar even struck a coin commemorating that comet. But there are no reports of such a thing from the time of the birth of Jesus – not a single one unless, of course, we count the description in the Gospel of Matthew.
And so, they concluded in the planetarium show that I saw, it couldn’t have been a comet. They went on to note that the Magi would have been astrologers and that, as astrologers, they would have paid close attention to things that other people commonly ignore – such things as conjunctions of planets. And it turns out that in the year 7 B.C. three planets, Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn came together in a very rare conjunction that only occurs once every 125 years. Given that Matthew seems to be saying that Jesus was born sometime around the year 6 BC (that is, two years before the death of King Herod in 4 BC), it seems possible that that conjunction is what Matthew is calling the Star – though how a conjunction of planets could have led the magi to a specific house in Bethlehem would still remain a mystery.
But we also need to realize that Matthew is doing more than just talking about what happened when Jesus was born. There was another book written probably a few years before Matthew wrote his gospel that may help us to understand some of the concerns that Matthew had as he wrote. Sometime around 75 ad, a Jewish historian named Josephus wrote an account of the tumultuous events that led up to the destruction of Jerusalem five years earlier in 70 ad.
Now, Josephus is not a perfect historian. He is clearly writing his book in such a way as to please his patron, the Roman Emperor Vespasian – the man whose son actually destroyed Jerusalem – so there are some things that he says that we definitely need to take with a grain of salt. But most historians agree that he does paint a pretty accurate picture of the social situation that led many Jews in the late 60’s to start an armed rebellion against Rome.
And Josephus says something very interesting when he is listing the causes of the Jewish War. He says that “what most inspired them to undertake this war was an ambiguous oracle also found in their sacred writings, that someone from their country would become ruler of the world.” He blames it, in other words, on a prophecy from the Bible – one that had such a hold over the imaginations of the people that it made them do some pretty crazy things.
And what was the prophecy that had the people so under its spell? It is plain from what he says about it in other places that Josephus is talking about a passage from Numbers chapter 24: “A star will come out of Jacob; a sceptre will rise out of Israel.” So consider what that means for a moment. Josephus is telling us that in the time of Jesus and at the time when Matthew was writing his gospel, Jewish people all over the place were going crazy over a prophesy about a star. And Matthew surely must have heard about this craze which leads me to wonder whether he felt he should talk about that prophecy in his gospel.
I mean, clearly Matthew knew (from his faith) that this “star prophecy” (as it was called) spoke about Jesus. But he also knew that not everyone agreed with him on that point. He knew that there were people who saw the fulfilment of that prophecy in others: in the leaders of the Jewish revolt, in other figures who came along from time to time. He may have even known that Josephus believed that the Roman Emperor Vespasian was the fulfilment of that prophecy because Vespasian, although he was not a Jew, was acclaimed as emperor while he was in Judea.
So Matthew had a need to make it clear to his readers that Jesus, and nobody else, was the “star” who came out of Israel – the one who would bear the sceptre and rule over all the world. So it is really is no great surprise that he opens his gospel with an account of a star. Whatever else the story of the magi and the star means, and whatever else is behind it, the story is also Matthew’s way of saying to his readers, “Hey, you know that thing that everyone was so excited about – that prophecy that everyone was expecting would change everything because it was about to be fulfilled? Well, they missed it. It had already happened when Jesus came about 70 years before that rebellion even happened.”
And I find it interesting as we look around us at the world today. In many ways, we haven’t changed. People, just like then, are still led by ideas – like that ancient prophecy – into doing things or supporting things that really aren’t going to do themselves or anybody much good in the long run.
People want peace and security, for example (and these are very good things that we should all desire), but somehow they let themselves be persuaded that they have to pursue war or give up liberty to get peace and security. People want financial security and a good economy to create opportunities for themselves and others – again, noble goals – but somehow they are persuaded that the only way that this can happen is if all kinds of benefits are given away to the wealthiest people or to huge companies and financial institutions. It seems all kinds of foolish things are still being done in the name of noble ideas.
I think that, given that things have changed so little in human nature since Matthew wrote, we maybe ought to consider responding like he did. He faced down the madness of his own time – the reams of people who where were pumped up by this ancient prophecy and so easily led into a pointless and ultimately self-destructive rebellion. And he challenged them and their foolishness by telling them that that great saviour they were hoping for had all ready been given to them – given in Jesus decades before – and that they had just failed to recognize what God had already done.
I wonder, can we do that today because the truth of the matter is that the salvation and the hope that our world craves and does foolish things in pursuit of today have already been given to us in Jesus. We have just failed to recognize the power of what has been given.
Matthew wrote his gospel so that people would never forget what God had accomplished in sending Jesus. He told us that that message of what Jesus would accomplish was first announced by a star that appeared in the heavens but that only a small band of magi understood that message.
Today, we are called to be that group of magi. We are the ones who have seen what God has already accomplished for us in and through Jesus and we are called to spread the message to all who will hear that we need not run after the false hopes – not anymore.