Oil and Fire

Propers: The Fourth Sunday of Easter, A.D. 2019 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

One of the hallmarks of Judeo-Christian religion is the conviction that God is the God of history. His plans unfold over time. Now, this doesn’t mean that just because certain things happen God therefore willed for those things to happen in that way. All manner of sin and disaster befall us that God explicitly neither wants nor wills. We’ve made a mess of history.

Yet God works out His purposes for our salvation even in spite of our sin. No matter how bad things get, no matter how many times our world falls apart, God is ever with us, piecing our lives back together, resurrecting the damned and the dead. And so history, seen through the lens of faith, becomes for us the scroll upon which God writes the story of His ceaseless love for humankind and for all that He has made. The Bible is steeped in history, because history is steeped in God.

So it shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, when I say that this morning’s brief little Gospel reading has rather a lot of history behind it.

We find Jesus in the great Temple of Jerusalem on the Festival of the Dedication; which is to say, Hanukkah. This is actually the only mention of Hanukkah in the Bible, unless yours happens to include the Greek books that bridge the gap between the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament. The story of Hanukkah is pretty straightforward. The Greeks have conquered Israel.

This is certainly nothing new for the Israelites. They’ve been conquered by all the best empires: the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, and now by the descendants of the armies of Alexander the Great. And one particularly loopy Greek king, Antiochus by name, decides to wipe out Judean culture and religion entirely, desecrating the Temple, eradicating the biblical Law.

And this does not sit well with one ornery priestly family called the Maccabees, the Hammerers, who lead an uprising against the Greeks, cast them out from the Holy Land, and miraculously rededicate the Temple in Jerusalem to the One True God. This feast of the rededication is Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights.

The sad irony, however, is that the story of the Maccabees ends with the newly independent kingdom of Israel forging an alliance with a rising power to the West in order to make sure that the Greeks do not come back. This new ally is the only power that the Greeks appear to fear, the power that eventually defeats all the descendants of Alexander the Great: Rome. And it turns out that inviting Romans in to keep Greeks out is rather like releasing a school of piranha to deal with a shark. Now you’ve got a bigger problem.

By the time of Jesus, a century and a half after the Maccabees, the Romans have taken over completely, ruling with an iron fist in a velvet glove. And people come to Jesus, loyal Judeans all, and find Him in the Temple, in the very Portico of Solomon—Solomon, the son of David—and they ask Him outright the question that’s on everyone’s mind: “Are you the Messiah?”

Now, messiah means one who is anointed with oil, and the Greek word for that is christos: Christ. But these folks are asking something rather more specific here.

“Are you the Anointed One,” they want to know, “whom God promised through the prophets from of old, the true Heir of King David, the Christ who will liberate us from Rome as the Maccabees liberated us from the Greeks before them? Don’t leave us in suspense anymore. Are you the King foretold or not?”

And Jesus tells them, in effect, that they already have their answer. See what He has been doing all this time amongst them. See how Jesus has fed the multitude in the wilderness, as Moses did with bread from heaven. See how He has healed the sick, restored sight to the blind, forgiven the sinners and raised up the dead—all the things that the Messiah is to do. His actions, it should be clear, speak louder than words.

But just so there is no confusion: “My sheep hear my voice,” He says. “I know them, and they follow me. I give to them eternal life and they shall never perish, and no-one and nothing will ever snatch them out of my hand … The Father and I are One.”

This is heavy stuff. The Good Shepherd language is vintage Middle Eastern kingship. All the great rulers identified themselves as the shepherds of their people, guarding them, guiding them, feeding and protecting them. Israel’s greatest king, after all, King David, was himself a shepherd-boy who made good.

But beyond this, the shocking, seemingly blasphemous proclamation—“The Father and I are One”—identifies Jesus not only as the Christ, but as God Himself as well. And we’ve had hints of this in the prophets. They said all along that a Son of David would come to shepherd God’s people, and that God Himself would be their Shepherd as well. Now here He is, the best of both worlds: Son of God and Son of Man: Immanuel, God-With-Us, God in the flesh.

In other words, the people of Judea, the people of Israel, are looking for a Christ to lead armies into battle and throw off the shackles of Rome. They’ve seen that before and they want that again. They want a war. They want blood. They want a Maccabee. And who could blame them, really? But Jesus makes it clear that He is not like those other kings, other prophets, other gods. He has not come to raise the sword and liberate one nation from slavery under Rome. He has come instead, as God on earth, to save all peoples and all nations from slavery to sin and death and hell.

And this will not be accomplished by armies wielding fire and sword. It will be accomplished by works of healing and peace and mercy and love, by the selfless self-emptying of God Himself upon the Cross. That is how sin and death and hell are conquered. That is how life is restored to the dead.

This is not the Messiah we thought we’d been waiting for. This is someone infinitely greater, infinitely higher, infinitely more. This is Jesus Christ, come to die and rise again.

You probably know the tradition that just a little oil miraculously burned for eight days and nights at the rededication of the Temple. That’s why Hanukkah is the Festival of Lights. One you may not know is the tradition found in the time of Jesus that the Messiah, the Anointed One, would be revealed at Hanukkah. The connections are too good to ignore: Christ, after all, means chrism, an anointing with oil. And olive oil was everything in the ancient world. It was food and medicine and soap and light. It was how bodies were prepared for burial. It was how kings and priests and prophets were consecrated to the service of God.

So of course it’s at the Festival of Lights—the festival of oil and fire and anticipation of the Christ—that the Judeans seek out Jesus, in the Temple, in the Portico of Solomon, right where He belongs. Hanukkah is the festival of the Messiah, of the Christ. And this is what I meant when I said at the beginning that the Bible is steeped in history, because history is steeped in God.

For Hanukkah is celebrated, my brothers and sisters, beginning on the twenty-fifth day of the Hebrew month of Kislev, the month that corresponds with December on the Roman calendar. Christ is here revealed as God on December 25th—what we have come to call the Christ Mass, the divine liturgy of the Chrismed One.

“Are You the Christ?” they ask Him, on this ancient Christmas day.

“I think you will find,” He replies, “that my history here speaks for itself.”

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.


For more on the scholarship connecting Hanukkah to Christmas, check out the Jesus of Nazareth trilogy by Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI.