I am scared of stars. As beautiful as the sky is on a clear night, looking up and seeing things that still shine when in fact they are long dead, imagining just how far away all of them are and trying to make sense of the sheer enormity of the universe, I’m afraid, fills me with dread, mixed with the most overwhelming sort of awe. It makes me think of my own insignificance and of the incomprehensible, terrifying might of the one who created it all. Why, why is all of it up there and how come I have not been given any power to measure and understand it?! To me, it is too big, too unfamiliar and just too much, so I genuinely struggle to look up at night for longer than a few seconds.
Paradoxically though, I find astrophysics fascinating! All that stuff about quasars, supernovae, black holes and the density of matter is extraordinary! It is also amazing to know that apparently a lot of the matter around us and even within us is made of star dust. Heavier elements of stars are carried into space and spread across millions of miles until forces of gravity pull them together to make new suns and planets, including our solar system and our own bodies. The carbon atoms in our bodies have come from stars and travelled through other organisms too, so an atom in your skin could have been a piece of a dinosaur once. And iron from the ancient stars makes up iron in our blood. I think this is quite extraordinary!
So here I am, caught up between fear and excitement, awe and curiosity when it comes to stars. But I find comfort in thinking that those who studied the stars in ancient times may have felt the same. Before developing the arrogance that often (not always!) comes with scientific knowledge, people must have retained a degree of fear before something greater than them. Equally though, they were curious enough to study the constellations and do mad things like following moving stars.
For a long time, the star of Bethlehem has been a great mystery – perhaps another miraculous aspect of the generally miraculous narrative of Christ’s birth. But people have asked questions and proposed hypotheses. To begin with, it has been suggested that the three kings or magi are in fact astronomers or astrologists, which in the ancient world was essentially the same thing. They probably came from Syria and must have had a particular interest and a degree of expertise in studying the stars to recognise an unusual phenomenon. As a side comment, there probably wasn’t just three of them but no one knows how many there were. Then the theories begin to multiply, speculating on the nature of the ‘star’. And each theory runs into a bit of a problem. What the magi observed in the sky may have been a supernova explosion, but there is no record of observation or an existing remnant that would indicate that it had happened. It may have been a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn but they would not be close enough to each other to appear as one object, and the Bible tells us it was one star. It could have been a rare conjunction of other planets, but again, it would not have appeared as one star. It could have been a stationary point of Jupiter but there is nothing special in this as it happens every year, so the magi are unlikely to have followed it.
Brothers and sisters, we live in a fascinating time because just some days ago, in December, the Journal of the British Astronomical Association published an article in which astronomer Mark Matney further developed another theory that the star of Bethlehem was a comet. Unlike anyone before him, Matney attempted to explain how it moved, how far it was from the earth, why it first moved and so could be followed and then stood still. Apparently it could have stopped for about two hours as its movement was counterbalanced by our planet’s rotation, an effect called ‘temporary geosynchronous motion’. Matney’s proposal is consistent with a comet being observed by Chinese astronomers in 5BC and the suggested date of Herod’s death, which means he still would have been alive, which is important for the story. In case you are interested, the article is called ‘The Star that Stopped: the Star of Bethlehem and the Comet of 5 BCE’ by Mark Matney. It can be found in the Journal of the British Astronomical Association, volume 135, issue 6. The article has some insane graphs and equations but the conclusions are laid out very clearly. I think it is exciting to know that there is actual scientific and historic basis to the story of Christ’s birth, perhaps in the same way that people have been trying to map earthquakes and solar eclipses onto the moment of his death.
Our curiosity can be satisfied and, if we accept this theory, our quest for knowledge can be over, but the quest does not actually stop here. Science cannot contain the overwhelming emotions that come with recognition of the greatness of God’s creation and smallness of human existence, it cannot contain the faith of those who walked God knows where for months trusting that the strange light in the sky would lead them to the Son of God and it most certainly does not contain the fact that 2000 years later we are still here, still talking about it.
All of these things only come when we look beyond our scientific curiosity and excitement, when we do actually acknowledge the mysteries of God’s creation and see natural phenomena as parts of a bigger order.
The magi did not just record the star – they followed it, trusting that God was using it for His supernatural purposes, and found a child whose existence science cannot even begin to explain. I am sure you have heard before that the revelation of Christ to the shepherds signifies that he is the Lord of the Jews, whereas the epiphany to the magi manifests his lordship over the Gentiles as well, but something else is happening here. The shepherds got their message about the Messiah in a supernatural way, through angels, whereas the magi used their skills, coupled with curiosity, to interpret something that belongs in the natural order of things. They recognised that God uses His creation for His purposes, that His supernatural presence is intimately intertwined with the natural order of things, that an astronomical phenomenon can be the stuff of God and not just a distant celestial occurrence.
Maybe I am not that weird after all to feel what I feel looking at and learning about stars: not just curiosity but also fear and awe. Fear and awe are the bits that connect our experience of the natural world with our experience of God, that allow us to see Him in the stars, the flowers, the water and the sky and perhaps even to discern His will if we look carefully enough. Because just as our bodies and the rest of the universe out there are not two separate worlds and are in fact made of the same star dust, so the place where God exists is not some sort of a parallel universe but is here, in this world that we live in, observe and take in every day. Not all of us are astronomers of course, but we all have been given the minds, the skills and the power to use every day, to experience our own Epiphanies and to find Christ for ourselves. Amen.