“After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem, and asked ‘Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star in the east and have come to worship him.” (Matthew 2:1,2)
“This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.” (Luke 2:12)
It is the year 1503. This is to be the year of the Messiah’s coming! For according to Jewish calculations, this is the year when Jupiter (a planet associated with rulers) and Saturn (a planet associated with the Middle East) would pass so closely in the sky as to make a blazingly bright star. This conjunction of the planets appears in the constellation Pisces, which is associated with the Hebrews and the last days. Jewish scholar Abraham Bar Hiyya had predicted this conjunction around 1100 A.D. He thought that this cosmological phenomenon occurred every 2,859 years, with the last one given to Moses. Isaac Abravanel (1437-1508), deeply interested in the coming Messiah, took up Bar Hiyya’s work and believed that the Exodus came within 83 years after the last conjunction of 1395 B.C., and that the Messiah would thus come within 83 years after the conjunction of 1464—to be exact, in the year 1503![1]
What neither Ben Hiyya nor Abravanel realized was that this planetary conjunction, making a large “star” in the east, occurred every 257 years. What they also did not realize is that its occurrence actually happened in the year 6 B.C. (2 years before the birth of Jesus in 4 B.C.). But what is even more amazing is that in that same year, another planet, Mars, moved into the same line as Jupiter and Saturn, bringing together a “triple planetary conjunction.” What Ben Hiyya and Abravenal did not realize was that the portent of their Messiah, the “Star” in the East, actually occurred just before the birth of Jesus!
THE UNIVERSE KNEW WE WERE COMING
Could it be that God could control the heavens to direct the Magi, foreigners from a distant land, to come near to His presence? Could it be that God is so “big” as to control the dates, times, and seasons of our existence, and yet so “intimate” as to work in the hearts of those who are “far away?” Within the past 50 years, cosmologists have discovered and named a new principle of physics. It is called the “Anthropic Principle,” and it simply means that all the “myriad laws of physics were fine-tuned from the very beginning of the universe for the creation of man—that the universe we inhabit appeared to be expressly designed for the emergence of human beings.”[2] As described in Patrick Glynn’s book, God-The Evidence: The Reconciliation of Faith and Reason in a Postsecular World, there are an infinite number of “coincidences” in physics that reveal an incredibly fine-tuned universe, and each seems to be arranged for one goal: the creation and preservation of humankind. As Glynn says, what twentieth century cosmology had produced was something of a scientific embarrassment: a universe with a definite beginning (the “Big Bang”), expressly designed for life. Recent science has drawn attention to the fact that the initial conditions of the Universe (e.g., the initial velocity of recession of its components) at the time of the “Big Bang,” and the physical constants (e.g., the ratio of the electron mass to the neutron mass) occurring in the laws of nature had to lie within infinitesimally narrow ranges if intelligent life was to evolve. As renowned physicist Freeman Dyson famously said, “The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming.”[3]
But the Star would have told us that. The Star, like the beauty of sunrises and sunsets, the majesty of mountains and the tranquility of beaches, the taste of food and touch of love, all woo us and provide hints that there is more. As Gerald Manley Hopkins wrote, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” or as the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning penned, “Earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God; but only he who sees takes off his shoes; The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.” But nature only takes us so far; it only hints. Nature is only a sign pointing to that (or Who), although beyond nature, for which our souls so deeply long. The Star was only a sign, pointing to something. But what?
MESSAGE IN THE STARS
Frederick Buechner, in his essay “Message in the Stars,” poses the question: what if one night God were to arrange all the stars so that they spell out I REALLY EXIST or GOD IS. If he did that, would that finally be sufficient for people to believe in Him? Buechner says that it would suffice for a while, but over time, God probably would have to keep writing things in the stars, adding color and celestial music so “that finally the last hardened skeptic would be convinced that God must indeed exist after all.”[4] Buechner then cuts to a scene of a child looking up one night in the sky and asking the all-important question: “So what if God exists? What difference does that make?” Buechner says that is really the question:
For what we need to know, of course, is not just that God exists, not just that beyond the steely brightness of the stars there is a cosmic intelligence of some kind that keeps the whole show going, but that there is a God right here in the thick of our day-by-day lives who may not be writing messages about himself in the stars but who in one way or another is trying to get messages through our blindness as we move around down here knee-deep in the fragrant muck and misery and marvel of the world. It is not objective proof of God’s existence that we want but, whether we use religious language for it or not, the experience of God’s presence. That is the miracle that we are really after. And that is also, I think, the miracle that we really get.[5]
IMMANUEL
To what does the Star point, where does it lead? The Star leads to Immanuel, which means “God with us.” God with us. God, whom no mind could ever comprehend, who created this vast, beautiful, formidable universe, God who is there when you look up at the vast constellations of stars and among whom we “live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).
God with us. God, who is so in love with the humans he created that he has chosen to embarrass and humble himself, join the flesh and blood he created, to emerge through the birth canal into a cattle trough filled with the smell of hay and manure. While the Star was a sign to the wise, the “sign” to the shepherds and the rest of us was a manger, as Luke repeats for emphasis (Luke 2). What is the sign that God really does love you, that you really can experience deep within your soul the overwhelming love to which nature can only hint? It is the manger, it is the dusty roads of Judea, it is the cross. God taking on flesh is irrevocable—He has sealed the covenant by taking on the flesh he created. The wounds of the resurrected Jesus are a further sign that God has forever bound himself to us. Flesh and nature are all very good gifts, and the manger, the cross and the empty tomb are all signs pointing to the reality that God is not finished with us. We can count on his faithful love to make good on his promise of new bodies, new creation. And his guarantee is the love that He invites you to receive now, His own Spirit and Presence. God has begun to dwell with us, and His Spirit is now longing to begin to fill your heart (2 Corinthians 1:22).
And God with us, every one of us. Although we see in our Bibles that God has revealed Himself in a unique way through the people of Israel, the God of the Bible reminds us that He is the God of every person who has ever lived, and He has been working in every culture, in every country, in every heart, in every way. Thus, we see astrologers from faraway lands being invited to the birth of Immanuel, and we see working class shepherds given a front row seat. In Jesus’ genealogy in Matthew 1 we see a number of “foreigners,” like Tamar and Rahab the Canaanites, Ruth the Moabite, and Bathsheba the Hittite. But even more scandalous was the fact that Tamar acted like a prostitute, Rahab was a prostitute, and we will not even mention what Bathsheba did! This is scandalous because these women are mentioned by Mathew in his opening chapter as the ancestors of Jesus! Mathew is preaching the gospel even from the genealogy, or as Luther put it “Jesus is not ashamed of sinners—He even puts them in his family tree.” God has come to reconcile all of us to his love, every one of us.
THE DWELLING PLACE OF GOD WITH US
What the Star, the Anthropic Principle, the manger, and the genealogy of Jesus tell me is that none of us are beyond the reach of the wooing and wonderful love of God. “For by him all things were created, and all things were created by him and for him. He is the beginning and the firstborn from the dead. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross. May he strengthen you with his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. That you, being rooted and established in love, may together with all God’s people grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God” (Colossians 1:16-20; Ephesians 3:14-19)
[1] See Raymond E. Brown, The Birth of the Messiah (New York: Doubleday, 1993), 173.
[2] Patrick Glynn, God: The Evidence: The Reconciliation of Faith and Reason in a Postsecular World (Rocklin, CA: Prima Publishing, 1997), 23).
[3] Freeman Dyson, Disturbing the Universe (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 250.
[4] Frederick Buechner, Secrets in the Dark (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 18.
[5] Id, 19.