JUST over a year ago, our organ scholar at Portsmouth Cathedral asked me to suggest a text for an Epiphany anthem that he was hoping to compose. I settled on a passage that had fascinated me when I was a theology undergraduate, from a letter composed by the second-century Christian apologist Ignatius of Antioch:
“A star shone forth in heaven above all the other stars: its light was inexpressible, its novelty astonished everyone. And all the rest of the stars, with the sun and the moon, formed a chorus to this star: its light blazed brilliantly above them all. And everything trembled and shook, as nothing alike had ever been seen in the sky before. Hence every kind of magic was destroyed, and every bond of wickedness disappeared, ignorance was removed and the old tyrannies abolished. God himself appeared in human form.”
Our organ scholar, Kim Chin, subsequently produced his anthem, which our choir duly sang at Epiphany. But my rediscovery of Ignatius’s text also reminded me that his understanding of the Epiphany star was rather different from what we might assume from Christmas cards and cheerful carols such as “As with gladness men of old”.
For Ignatius, the appearance of the star was an announcement of the end of the reign of magic, the death of sorcery. For him, gold, frankincense, and myrrh were not so much precious gifts for an infant king as a surrender to Christ of the occult arts that enabled the tyranny of the imperial powers. As Allen Brent points out in A Political History of Early Christianity (Bloomsbury, 2009), the main reason that the early Christians were persecuted was because their expectations of a heavenly apocalypse were considered damaging to Roman claims to have established universal peace and harmony, not least between earth and heaven.
As we begin 2026, I wonder whether we need a fresh dose of Ignatius’s teaching. The world today seems to be enthralled by contemporary forms of magic: the magic of MAGA and President Putin’s Russia; the magic of the super-rich; the magic of money, which claims us all as consumers; the magic of ideologies, which divide us into victims or oppressors.
The star was a sign of heavenly change, a reflection of the new era of the incarnation. Christ’s coming is the good news that lasts and continues to transform us. The coming of Christ reconciles us to God, and assures us that heaven and earth are not ultimately divided. As the days get longer, and this new year unfolds, Christians owe to the world a duty of cheerfulness and hope. Humanity, not magic, is what God brings to us: the unexpected present of Christ’s life and death. All so familiar, I know, but also still novel and surprising, shining like the star that is brighter than all the other stars.