Star Light, star bright

It's Christmastime, and people are debating the Star of Bethlehem yet again. Neil DeGrasse Tyson skimmed over some of the theories about it on his StarTalk radio podcast. He mentioned Halley's Comet, which swung by our neighborhood in 12BC. But it was probably too early to herald Jesus's birth. Maybe it was a nova recorded by the Chinese around 5BC. Maybe not.

Conjunctions of planets have been used as candidates. Saturn and Jupiter had a triple conjunction in 7BC. But conjunctions are pretty common in the night sky.

But any astronomical candidate has to account for the strange behavior of the star of Bethlehem in Matthew's account, the only gospel that mentions the star.

When Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, in the days of King Herod, behold, magi from the east arrived in Jerusalem, saying, “Where is the newborn king of the Jews? We saw his star at its rising and have come to do him homage.

Then Herod called the magi secretly and ascertained from them the time of the star’s appearance.

And behold, the star that they had seen at its rising preceded them, until it came and stopped over the place where the child was.They were overjoyed at seeing the star, and on entering the house they saw the child with Mary his mother.

As others have pointed out, this was a weird star. It is both strange and ordinray, appearing out of nowhere, then "rising" as the celestial sphere turns. But after the magi's audience with Herod, the star moves oddly, leading the magi until it unmistakeably stops over Jesus's birthplace.

Was the star,then, directly overhead when the magi approached the stable? If so, how did the magi know precisely what location was directly under the star? Go outside on a starry night, look straight up and tell me (without a computerized star map) which house is directly beneath any star overhead. Is it your own house? The neighbor's? Or someone ten miles down the road? And if the star was not an actual celestial body, but hovered beneath the heavens -- maybe a hundred feet up, when why would highly-sophisticated magi call it a star?

Short of divinely-arranged discernment, it's hard to square Matthew's story with any thing in the natural world.

Which leaves us with few options. Either Matthew picked up a story, created by others, about Jesus's birth that was circulating in 85AD. Or, as many theologians like to think, he invented a highly symbolic story about the birth of Christ and its deeper meaning. Or he just made up a story to make Jesus seem important -- even from the day of his birth. He even threw in a few special celestial touches to tart up the story.

My sense? I am unconvinced by the astronomical possibilities. No one else in the world saw what the magi saw, as told by Matthew. But it seems equally unlikely that Matthew would have concocted a story with such meaning, peril and symbolic connections to the Scriptures. This was not just about crafting a better Hercules story. There are layers of depth and meaning to Matthew's account that suggest, at the least, that he wished to situate the nativity of Jesus into a cosmic, political and (most importantly) a moral context. So while I don't wonder anymore about what the Star of Bethlehem was, I am more transported by what it might mean.

Like the magi, we are strangers in a strange land, guided by forces we don't fully comprehend. We risk being trapped by the fears and selfish agendas of our fellow, weak human beings. And we carry gifts with us, which (when moved be the wisdom of the heart) we share with those in need. Our joy and gift is to have encountered the divine, even when disguised in poverty and humility. And made wiser by our encounter with divine strength in human weakness, we return home by another way, to tell our story to those who lacked the grace to have seen the star at its rising.