The Star in the East

Cosmic alignment at Christmas.

The wise men came from the east—from the anatolai, or the “lands of the rising sun.” That is also where they saw the bright star: en tē anatolē, in the eastern sky, shining in the direction of sunrise (Matthew 2).

This is the first strange thing. Maybe we picture the wise men “following the star” in a physical sense, pointing their camels toward it like a GPS beacon hovering over the otherwise unmarked coordinates of some unheeded donkey shack in Bethlehem. That’s what it looks like they’re doing on most greeting cards, anyway.

But that can’t be right. It’s stranger even than that: if the star were a geolocation device, then relative to the wise men it would have been in the west. They were coming “from the east,” probably somewhere in what is now Iran or Syria, toward Jerusalem. That’s a westward journey, prompted somehow by an eastern star in the sunrise lands. They can’t have been using the star as a homing beacon, or they would have ended up in Pakistan.

Instead what they tell King Herod is that they have seen a star belonging to “the king of the Jews.” Eidomen autou ton astera, “We have seen his star.” Stranger still: what makes it his?

To me, most stars look alike. From my boyhood I can trace the belt and broad shoulders of Orion. If I squint I can understand how the astronomers of Babylon saw a lopsided rectangle and called it erriqu, “the Wagon,” which in Greek became arktos, the Bear. But mostly the meaning has drained out of those symbols in the sky.

I can read in the heavens no information so precise as to communicate, in one speck of bright light, an entire Gospel’s worth of prophecy. We decode the astral language differently now, parsing the grammar of brightness and motion into data regarding distance and chemical composition. To a modern, a bright star might mean combustion, or proximity to earth.

Ancient astronomers could read the heavens physically, too. But they also had a richer lexicon, subtler and more allusive, which invested the celestial movements with legends and mythic whispers. And in that language the star, somehow, told the wise men many things. They translated what they read there into another ancient and wordless tongue, the language of stones and plants. They had seen that the child of Judah would be a king (gold). That he would be holy (incense). And that he would suffer (myrrh).

They brought these tokens with them to express the nature of their profound discovery. The symbols traveled well across linguistic borders because they were drawn from the earth, their meaning etched into the common contours of the human heart. The wise men couldn’t be sure what language the peasant woman with her newborn would speak—Hebrew? Aramaic? Would she know the Latin of her conquerors? But she would understand the smell of frankincense because she had worshipped in the temple of God. I imagine the three of them kneeling in silence to lay their ancient emblems down one by one: riches, worship, death. It was all they needed to say.

But how on earth did they know? Johannes Kepler, the mastermind of early modern astrophysics, considered it likely that the wise men saw a conjunction of Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars, intensified by the dazzling blast of nuclear fusion from a supernova. Kepler was reading the same kind of archival data that the wise men, if they were professional “magi” from the Parthian Empire, were likely to have inherited from their Persian and Babylonian predecessors.

For the Babylonians, as for the Romans, Jupiter was the planet associated with the strongest deity: Marduk, chieftain of all gods. Saturn may in turn have represented the Jews. When they crowded together and blazed with the unaccustomed brilliance of a nuclear reaction, they could have shown a signal to those with eyes to see: that a God-King was coming to Israel. Something like this would have been enough to tell these far-flung Gentiles, looking eastward, to travel west.

The Jews they found there were no friends to Marduk, and for centuries they had staked a proud claim against all pretender gods. But they agreed with the foreigners in this much: at night, the delicate interrelation of shining lights overhead could present careful watchers with otot and mo’edim, “signs and markers” of more than merely physical significance (Genesis 1:14).

Stars and planets, sun and earth had been tracing intricate patterns of motion from the first birth of time. The Gentiles had muddled their interpretation of these portents with the confusion of their fairytales. But the Jews knew the truth: this was a work of art from the mind of one creator. In the framework of earth and heaven, he had inscribed a language that magus and mother alike could understand.

Metal and starlight, spice and supernova and gold: all of it throbbed with meaning. All of it had led the wise men and the new family here, now. Not only the Jews, but even the Gentiles could know this infant king: his heraldry was everywhere.

In its root elements, anatolē means “arriving upward,” a steady heaving of the cosmic spheres into their destined place. This was a greater sunrise than the men from the east had ever seen. On Christmas night the motions of all creation finished a trajectory set for them from the beginning. Things that once seemed unrelated slid calmly into place without a moment’s delay or hurry, revealing in their final moment of alignment a calibration stretching outward to the ends of space and backward to the genesis of time.

Age upon age and nation upon nation in grand conjunction, epochs and peoples folding in upon each other until their several motions united into one straight line. It wasn’t just the family and their visitors at that Bethlehem manger: it was the patriarchs and prophets. It was Adam and Eve, our sorrow-haunted parents. It was galaxies yet unseen. And it was us, yet unborn. Things confused for generations were being set to rights in a more-than-planetary alignment. And piercing through it all, cutting across generations and lightyears like a sunbeam glancing over eons in an instant: a child. King, God, sacrifice; a new light dawning for the men who had come from the land of sunrise. They had seen his star rising in the east.

Rejoice evermore,
Spencer

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