In Christmastide, and especially on the Epiphany, the “Star of Bethlehem” plays a prominent role—so much so that it’s almost unconsciously woven into our Christmas story. Take a look at the pictures on Christmas cards: the scene is typically a starry night, with one special star shining down on “the place where he lay.” (Okay, yes, a lot of our Christmas traditions emerged in the Northern Hemisphere, where we are just exiting the longest nights of the year.) Our carols sing of it—e.g., the three kings of orient are “following yonder star.”
I’m not going to get into debates about identifying that celestial phenomenon. What was the Star of Bethlehem? A special star? A supernova? A rarely seen planetary conjunction? That’s all interesting but somewhat secondary to the main points of the account.
First of all, a star is part of nature. Catholic theology teaches that both nature and revelation point to God: man can have a certain knowledge of God from nature. It isn’t the fullest knowledge of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but nature does lead people to God. The complexity yet functionality of the cosmos in support of life, the principles of causality that do not admit infinite regress, the degrees of perfection suffusing the universe, which make no sense absent an absolute standard against which those degrees can be measured—all those aspects of the natural world pointing to God do not require the Bible. They require a functioning mind, which is the possession of normal human beings; hence, all people can come to some knowledge of God.
In Matthew’s account of the search for “the newborn King of the Jews,” both nature and revelation come into play. Nature led the magi to Jerusalem, where they inquire in Herod’s court, assuming (wrongly) that Herod would be at least as enthused as they were to learn that “a new king’s born today.” The scene is paradoxical. When Herod asks the Jerusalem establishment where that king would be born, they pull up the answer from revelation as if it were on an index card: in Bethlehem of Judea, as the Prophet Micah foretold! They literally have what they need at their fingertips. But in contrast to the magi, the certainty of revelation grieves them. “To whom much is given, much will be expected” (Luke 12:48).
God meets people where they’re at. An earlier, poorer New American Bible translation of Matthew 2—the Epiphany account—substituted “astrologers” for magi. That term is misleading, because it has acquired something of a pejorative modern meaning. Antiquity did not necessarily split astronomy from astrology: scanning the heavens was not just an intellectual curiosity. Nor were their astrological efforts wholly superstition. The idea that God’s designs might be discerned in nature as well as natural and historical events is not mere superstition; it can also be Providence. That is how these three pagans understood God’s designs might be discovered, and God meets people where they’re at, including in the stars.
A star provides orientation. Even if you’re lost, there are certain ways you can get to know your directions. The sun—a star—moves from east to west. And although other stars change with the earth’s orbit through the seasons of the year, Polaris—the North Star—remains a fixed compass point. To get out of being lost, you always need one true point.
Pope Leo the Great attributes a special significance to the star in terms of salvation history. When God makes his covenant with Abraham, promising the patriarch he would be the father of many nations, God takes this nomad out to look at the nighttime desert sky. He promised Abraham his descendants would be as numerous as the stars of the sky (Gen. 26:4). That promise is now fulfilled in Christ, the “firstborn of many brothers” (Rom. 8:29). The covenant of salvation that God launches with a wandering Aramean, then extends to a people he leads out of Egyptian bondage, is now made universal: all people can now claim Abraham as their “father in faith” through the Firstborn Son, Jesus Christ. And so, because Abraham’s posterity—“as numerous as the stars of the sky”—is revealed in the infant, it is fitting that the Star of Bethlehem leads the Gentiles, as representatives of the rest of humanity outside Israel, to him who is “the light to the nations and the glory of your people, Israel.” The Epiphany’s first reading from Isaiah testifies to this: “Your light has come. . . . Nations shall walk by your light and kings by your shining radiance.” Literally and analogically, that is what the first Epiphany is about: “A people who dwelt in darkness have seen a great light” (Is 9:2).
Yes, we celebrate Epiphany as the revelation of God’s saving Word to the Gentiles. But by extension, this feast is also the truest and surest basis of proclaiming the equality of all human beings. The message of this day is that, by grace, anybody and everybody can be saved, and it is God’s will that “all men be saved and come to knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. 2:4). There is no more certain basis for human equality than the universal invitation to eternal life with God.
In the second reading for Christmas Mass during the day, the author of Hebrews opens by saying that “in times past, God spoke in partial and various ways.” He spoke to Moses and the prophets. He spoke through a tiny whisper to Elijah. He spoke to Pharaoh through signs and wonders that Pharaoh called plagues. He spoke in Egypt and in Babylon, in Israel and in the Jewish Diaspora. But now, as the barrier between Jew and Gentile is razed, he speaks this last “partial” time in a particularly appropriate way: by a star’s light, which leads men to “the true Light that has come into the world” (John 3:19).