Happy Hanukkah

Here in Melbourne, Australia, the local Jewish community hosted an eight day public event in Federation Square called ‘Chanukah – Pillars of Light’. It finished yesterday (as I write). Each evening, different public figures would put in an appearance. They would sign a lit-up pillar, adding a note of positivity. Performers would delight the (covid-safe) crowds. Jewish games, discussions and more took place. The most significant part of each evening was the lighting of a candle on the menorah (a particular style of candle stick holder – see the screenshot below of the advertising for the event).

What is Hanukkah (Chanukah) about? Why is a non-Jewish Christian woman wishing you ‘Happy Hanukkah’ here? Is it Biblical?

Join me on a trip in our imagination (pretty much the only way to travel during these strange days). Let’s go back in time and across the world. I hope that you, like me, will find it fascinating and hope-engendering.

Time: Second century BC
Place: Israel

Exhilaration and devastation mingled in the community. Against all odds, Jewish guerrilla fighters had expelled the oppressors from their Temple. But at what cost? And what a mess confronted the people as they reclaimed their holy place of worship.

Brave people surveyed the damage. The altar to the Most High God had been defiled. Pigs had been sacrificed on it. It had become an altar to a Greek god, Zeus.

Where was Jehovah God?

Slowly the people began to clean. The menorah (the oil-lamp branched lampstand) was recovered. It was, perhaps, a more recent copy of the one Moses had made as instructed by God himself. (See Exodus 25:31-40.)

They found one small bottle of pure olive oil; oil uncontaminated by the atrocities which had been committed there. It would keep the lamps burning for a day, perhaps. It would take them longer to source what they needed. So much for reinstating what their Scriptures required.

Command the Israelites to bring you clear oil of pressed olives for the light so that the lamps may be kept burning. …. This is to be a lasting ordinance among the Israelites for the generations to come.

God’s instructions to Moses as recorded in Exodus 27:20, 21b NIV

And yet, miraculously, the lamps burned for eight days. EIGHT days. Surely God was with them.

By the eighth day, more oil had been obtained. The Temple was cleansed. It was dedicated afresh to the Lord, the God who was with them, whose light shone in the midst of their community, never going out.

Every year since that time, whenever possible, people celebrated this miracle. The festival culminated with the Day of Dedication, on the eighth day. God was with them. How good was that?!

Time: First century AD
Place: Israel

It was the Feast of Dedication again … perhaps the 194th such feast since the custom had begun, give or take a few years. The Jewish name for this feast literally comes from Hebrew word meaning ‘to dedicate’ and is pronounced something like ‘Hanukkah’.

It was winter in more senses than one. Life was hard. Oppression was severe. But the oil-filled lamps burned, symbolising God’s presence.

A man arrived on the scene. A crowd of Jews gathered around that man, demanding the truth.

Then came the Feast of Dedication at Jerusalem. It was winter, and Jesus was in the temple area walking in Solomon’s Colonnade. The Jews gathered around him, saying, “How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Christ, tell us plainly.”

John 10:22-24 NIV

In the weeks preceding this event, Jesus had had a lot to say about ‘light’. He had claimed to be ‘the light of the world’ (John 8:12). He had healed a blind man, insinuating that the religious leaders were, in fact, the blind ones (John 9:40-41). That didn’t go down well.

Now he stood there at the climax of the Feast of Dedication (Hannukah). For the first time, as requested by the mob, he made his position crystal clear.

I and the Father are one.

… the Father is in me and I in the Father.

John 10:30, 38b NIV

Surrounded by lamps and celebratory lights, the people picked up stones, intending to snuff out the Light of the World. They tried to seize him, but he slipped away.

He would not return to the city until Passover.

Time: Twenty-first century
Places: Varied

Bright lights decorate trees, shop windows, street, buildings and more. Light is an important part of Christmas celebrations the world over. They’re cheerful, lifting our spirits, and appreciated more than ever after a year like 2020.

The lights remind us of the birth of Jesus, the Light of the World, prophesied from ancient times. I wrote at length about light and Christmas in a recent blog post.

Yet there is so much more. Consider the Jewish celebration of Hanukkah and Jesus’ bold proclamation at that very festival of his divine nature. As followers of Jesus Christ (Christians), this Jewish festival is even richer in meaning than I, at least, had realised.

Think back to the broken, contaminated, filthy Temple of the second century BC. The people found a little bottle of oil. They lit the wicks on the oil lamp. Light broke into the dark and gloom, symbolising God’s presence. Miraculously, the oil lamps burnt for eight days, until a generous supply could be sourced. God was present, despite the mess.

Think back to the first Christmas. Mary gave birth to a little scrap of humanity, a helpless baby boy. Eight days later, she submitted him to a minor medical procedure, marking him clearly as one of God’s own.

On the eighth day, when it was time to circumcise him, he was named Jesus, the name the angel had given him before he had been conceived.

Luke 2:21 NIV

Jesus – the name means ‘Saviour’. (See Matthew 1:21 and Luke 2:11.) God was present in a very real and tangible way, despite the mess into which he was born.

Hanukkah – the feast of dedication. Jesus, God incarnate, was dedicated afresh on the eighth day after his birth. Years later, at the festival of dedication – Hannukah, he would publicly claim to be God incarnate.

String up those lights! God is with us! Celebrate!

Time: Now and then and in the time to come
Place: Wherever God’s church exists

Life was tough for those early followers of Christ. It can be tough for us today too. Throughout the centuries, it has not been easy.

Jesus gave an early church leader a very special vision. He wanted to encourage his people to persevere. Here are a couple of images, as valid for us now as they were for the seven churches spoken about in the vision.

… I saw seven golden lampstands, and among the lampstands was someone “like a son of man”…. His face was like the sun shining in all its brilliance….

… he said, “Do not be afraid. I am the First and the Last. I am the Living One; I was dead, and behold I am alive for ever and ever! And I hold the keys of death and Hades….

“… the seven lampstands are the seven churches.”

Revelation 1:12b-13a, 16b-18, 20b

The oil-filled lamps are us! I find myself singing the old chorus, ‘Give me oil in my lamp, keep me burning; give me oil in my lamp, I pray; give me oil in my lamp, keep me burning, burning, burning; keep me burning till the break of day’. (Though perhaps the ‘me’ and ‘my’ in the song would be better sung as ‘us’ and ‘our’.)

Jesus remains amongst us now. He walks among his lampstands. His very Spirit indwells us, just as the olive oil once filled and fueled the Temple lampstands.

But wait … there is more.

After chapters and chapters of highly symbolic, terrifying scenes of conflict in both the physical and spiritual realms in the book of Revelation, we find victory.

I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp.

Revelation 21:22-23 NIV (my emphasis)

Remember the Jewish Temple lamps that were never to have gone out? For a time they did, but not forever. It may have felt like God was absent, but he had not forgotten them.

It began small, but with God’s divine intervention, light broke into the darkness. What is the ‘it’ which began small but ended up brilliantly radiant?

‘It’ is the light from the lamps in the Jewish temple in Jerusalem after it was reclaimed from oppressors in the second century before Christ. And ‘it’ is the Light of the World who was born as a helpless little baby that first Christmas morning and who went on redeem creation. And ‘it’ is God’s people, the church, and his kingdom who struggle still but whose future is secure.

Happy Hanukkah!