Heavenly light

On Nov. 5 at eventide, my son Jake and I headed south on I-25 from Castle Rock toward my new home in Colorado Springs. On our right: Pike’s Peak and the Front Range, its jagged ridgelines sawing into the blue-green vesper light. On our left, floating low over the Black Forest’s ponderosa pines: the Beaver Moon.

That’s what Native tribes and early American pioneers called November’s full moon, although no one is quite sure who called it that first.

This November’s full moon was a “supermoon,” the modern term for the giant orb that appears when our moon waxes full at perigee, the point in an object’s elliptical orbit that brings it closest to earth. The moon isn’t really bigger, of course, only closer—and brighter, reflecting up to 30% more sunlight toward Earth, according to NASA.

In Colorado Springs, the colossal moon turned gold for a few minutes and then, as it rose, so bright it seemed someone had switched on a searchlight in heaven.

This month, we celebrate the birth of Christ and the time Someone did switch on a distinctively heavenly light: the Star of Bethlehem. Though traditional nativity scenes often show the star over the manger, scholars vary on how old Jesus was at the time of the Magi’s visit.

I’ve read a lot about the Magi, but not a lot about the star itself, the nature of which is still debated today. A December 2023 article on JSTOR, a digital database of scholarly journals, notes “the believer historian or astronomer wants to prove that there is a connection between what the Bible tells and what happened in the skies … the nonbeliever wants to disprove any such thing.”

In 2014, at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, an astronomer and a theologian helmed an entire international conference on the star, inviting Near East and modern astronomy experts, among others.

Scholars have debated heavenly lights since the ancients. Both “great” lights, the sun and moon, are spoken of in Genesis 1, but not until Day 4 of creation. Yet, Genesis 1:3 proclaims, “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’” raising a critical question: Of what nature was that light before God made the sun?

In Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas suggested that God first produced “luminous matter” to dispel darkness, then on Day 4 organized it into the sun and moon, eliminating the apparent contradiction.

Some ancient rabbis said the Day 1 light referred to divine or moral illumination, the revelation of God’s presence as He inaugurated time. Others proposed the light was literal, a pre-solar divine radiance, which became the Or HaGanuz, or “hidden light.” In this view, after the serpent deceived Eve, God judged His radiance too pure for fallen man and concealed it, preserving it for the righteous in the future.

Throughout Scripture, divine light marks the intersection of heaven and earth (John 1:9, John 8:1, 2 Corinthians 4:6). Nativity tradition notwithstanding, Luke’s detailed account of Christ’s birth does not record a unique heavenly light, but instead God’s Shekinah glory, which is referenced many times in Scripture: The heavenly host ephistēmi (“stood near”) the shepherds, and God’s glory perielampsen autous (“shone around them”). Further, the text explicitly says the angels “went away into heaven,” implying they’d been with the shepherds, not above them like some angelic chorus singing from a choir loft in the sky.

Thus, when the Star of Bethlehem punched through the night sky, it can be argued it was unique in history: a divine heavenly light announcing a singular event.

But which event? Amateur theologian that I am (and discarding any natural explanation as pointless), I now sidle out on my exegetical limb and humbly hypothesize:

Until Christ, there was “none righteous, no, not one” (Romans 3:10–12). Perhaps the star was a glimpse of the hidden light—the Or HaGanuz—now fixed and shining over the only Righteous One, the Father gazing on His beloved Son and Heir—and a sign for the world, fulfilling Isaiah 60:3—“Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your rising”—guiding the Gentile Magi to worship the child Jesus, Everlasting King of all.