My son and I were standing outside the Camp Siloam office complex after small group a few years ago.
"Look at how the planets line up in the sky," he said.
What?
I looked up. In the night sky I could see Jupiter. And Saturn. And, farther in the east, Mars. And if I had been playing a galactic game of "connect the dots" I could have traced a straight line through them.
"Wow!" I thought. I had been looking at the night sky for over 60 years and this was the first time I became aware that the planets were pretty much lined up on the ecliptic -- the path that the sun takes across the sky. And somebody else had to make me aware of that fact.
Just before the birth of Christ, middle eastern astronomers -- Magi -- noticed something unusual in the night sky. Jupiter, the "Planet of Kings," moved past Regulus, the "Star of Kings," so closely they almost seemed to touch. Then Jupiter went into retrograde motion, in which it traveled backward through the starfield, once more closely passing Regulus. Shortly thereafter, it changed its motion again, and again passed closely to Regulus. This "triple pass" convinced the Magi that they were seeing a harbinger of a new king arriving on the scene.
But who?
The answer was found in the constellation in which the triple pass occurred, Leo, the Lion. A middle eastern Magi would have recognized that the lion was the symbol of the Jewish tribe of Judah.
But wait, there's more.
A short time later, the planets Jupiter and Venus formed a conjunction in the early evening sky that would have been as bright as a full moon. The Magi would have seen this conjunction in the western sky just after sunset...directly over Israel.
It is possible that the middle eastern Magi were theological descendants of the prophet Daniel. And if that's the case, at this point if they were saddling up their camels, they had a good reason to, because they were going to see The King. Not "a" king -- Jewish kings were pretty much a dime a dozen -- but "the" King. Messiah. God in human flesh. And so they set out for Judea, and an encounter with a man who had been looking at the night sky all his life and, like me, not realizing what he was seeing.
A man named Herod.
TO BE CONTINUED.
-- Doug Chastain is a retired teacher and is currently a large-vehicle transportation specialist for the Siloam Springs School District. (Okay, he drives a bus.) He is also a grass maintenance technician at Camp Siloam. (Yeah, he mows the lawn.) You can contact him at [email protected] . The opinions expressed are those of the author.