** FATHER FRANK’S RANTS Rant Number 800 6/12/18 HANUKKAH: GOD AGAINST THE GODS

HANUKKAH - THE JEWISH FESTIVAL OF LIGHTS - CELEBRATES THE TRIUMPH OF MONOTHEISM THROUGH MARTYRDOM. A LESSON FOR OUR TIME?
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The mighty God of Israel knocked out the gods of Olympus, the waning pagan deities. That is what Hanukkah celebrates. The Festival of Lights, kept by Jews all over the world, recalls a momentous victory for monotheism. After a multicultural tyrant had tried to erase the worship of the One True God, the Maccabean heroes showed the way ahead: through suffering and martyrdom to eternal bliss and glory. In our godless times, a lesson most topical. Hanukkah matters.

Got a Bible? II and II Maccabees chart the epic struggle. The Hellenistic ruler of most of the Middle East back then was Antiochus IV. A madman who thought himself God – his chosen title was ‘Epiphanes’, which means ‘God Manifest’. Quite rightly the Jews punned on that and mocked him as ‘Epimanes’, the Maniac. And Antiochus in his madness had a plan. Wanted to impose Hellenism, a type of bastard Greek culture, over his subject peoples. That meant forcing on them alien customs. From boys running naked in the Gymnasium, to worshipping pagan idols and to eating rich, fatty food. All violations of Hebrew law. The most horrendous profanation was when the tyrant built a statue of the Greek god Jupiter inside the Jerusalem Temple. The Holy of Holies, the seat of the Shekinah, God’s Presence amidst his people. Defiance of Antiochus’s crazy will invited martyrdom, however.

Martyrdom is no metaphor. It was a long, protracted, bloody war between the popular resistance and the forces of the evil maniac. A most iconic episode is that of the Maccabean family. Seven Jewish brothers and their mother were arrested, to compel them under torture into apostasy, e.g. to eat swine’s flesh. The tortures they underwent beggar belief. One by one the martyrs were scourged, their limbs dislocated with racks and hooks, fingers twisted with thumbscrews, their living flesh cut into pieces, mangled with red-hot irons, their skin torn off, scalped, burnt into cauldrons, and, still breathing, they were fried in pans. Makes you shudder just to think about it, eh? And yet, the miracle is that none of them recanted. None renounced their ancestral faith – the pure worship of the True God.

Antiochus, typical idolater, could not comprehend the young men’s faith. He tried a last trick. To get the mother to plead with them to ‘be reasonable’ and embrace pagan practices. The lady pretended to go along but, whispering in the Hebrew language that the tyrant could not understand, she derided Antiochus and exhorted the last lad not to give up: ‘My son, do not fear this butcher. Prove worthy of your brothers. Accept death, so that in God’s mercy I might get you back in the heavenly realm, along with your brave brothers’. The boy heeded her call. With his last words before succumbing to his torturers he scoffed at the tyrant, warning him of the Almighty’s impending wrath and judgment.

Indeed God is not mocked. Antiochus got his comeuppance. After his armies were routed, his bowels were struck with disease. Still living, his body festered with worms, his flesh rotted and he stank so much that even his soldiers could not bear it. At last, before he died, he revoked his edicts and restored to the Jews their Temple. Not that Heaven forgave him his crimes. The fate of the murderous and blasphemous tyrant is a vindication the Maccabean martyrs’ innocent blood. The Hanukkah festival perpetuates their memory.

Hanukkah. Was it all an exaggeration? Were the Maccabean resisters unreasonable fanatics? Extremists? Guilty of religious ‘exclusivism’? Surely only a bit of ‘pluralism’ was required. Previous Jewish kings like Manasseh had before erected altars to pagan deities and sacrifices to strange gods. King Ahab’s sluttish Queen, Jezebel, had persuaded her husband to worship her Phoenician idols, Baal and Astarte in Samaria. A sensible bit of multiculturalism, surely? Intolerant of prophets like Elijah to rebel against that! Likewise did the Maccabean brothers go too far in laying down their lives for trifling matters like unclean food? But such secularist babblings misunderstand the nature of genuine faith. The shallow multiculturist or multi-faiths apologist is an outsider looking on. He cannot grasp the true dimension of the Transcendent. Of an Almighty, all-holy God who cannot co-exist with phoney rivals. Anyone who challenges that will learn it to his cost.

Present-day versions of King Antiochus don’t go in for crude means like the racks and the dungeon. They, ever so liberal (like the scheming British government), try subtler tactics. Instead, they offer believers perks, jobs, inducements, all sorts of goodies to seduce them, to make them compromise their faith. To get them to accommodate themselves to the idols of our culture. To accept co-existence with the forces of evil, corruption and disintegration. All monotheists alike face the same, insidious invitations. The example of the Maccabees should shame them into rebuffing the lures of the idols. And kicking the creeps into the gutter where they belong.

Hanukkah falls right now, close to Christmas. Are they incompatible feasts? But Jesus himself kept the Festival of Lights, as St John attests (10:22). His enemies doubted his messianic status and he slapped them down. It is fitting the Christ, the hope of Israel, the Holy One whose miraculous birth Christ-Mass commemorates, should reassert and reinforce the timeless meaning of Hanukkah: God the One triumphs eternally over the false gods.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli

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