Jesus and the Festival of Dedication/Hanukkah (John 10:22–39)

(avg. read time: 4–9 mins.)

I have discussed previously the literature (especially 1 Maccabees) that tells us of the origins of Hanukkah. But one connection with the NT that I deliberately left out was the one occasion where the festival is referenced. That is, the Gospel of John refers to this day as the Festival of Dedication, and it provides a setting for a story about Jesus. There are two sets of background necessary to establish here before I arrive at the central theme of how this text describes Jesus’s relationship to Hanukkah and what it means. One set concerns the story of Hanukkah and the other set concerns the story John has been telling about Jesus, specifically through references to Jewish festivals and praxis.

Almost two centuries before the birth of Jesus (~175 BCE), Antiochus IV (who surnamed himself Epiphanes or “God-manifest”) was the Hellenistic Seleucid ruler over the land of Israel, the latest in a long line of gentile overlords since the Babylonian conquest. However, he was not simply another ruler over the Jews. His policies were especially offensive towards Jews who sought to preserve their distinctive religious identity. In order to consolidate his rule and to unify his subjects, Antiochus IV was more assertive than his predecessors in promoting Hellenization (especially around 169/168 BCE). 1 and 2 Maccabees provide a detailed listing of his actions in this regard, but in short, he forbade Jews from performing their practices such as resting on the Sabbath, circumcising male infants, and performing their regular sacrifices while commanding the sacrifices of unclean animals (most notably, pigs) and setting up images of the Greek gods. He also commanded the burning of Torahs and the erection of an altar to Zeus. Furthermore, anyone dedicated to observing the Torah was subject to execution. A priest by the name of Mattathias and his sons (John, Simon, Judas, Eleazar, and Jonathan) led a guerrilla-style revolt against Antiochus (167–164 BCE). After Mattathias’s death, Judas Maccabeus led the revolt to a major victory at Mizpah and a repossession of Jerusalem. The key order of business was, of course, the restoration of the temple after its pagan desecration. The people rebuilt the altar and the sanctuary in the temple; they made new vessels, burned incense, and replaced the bread of the Presence; they offered a sacrifice on the new altar; and they celebrated the dedication of the temple after its cleansing for eight days with more sacrifices, more refurbishing, more songs, and more worship (hence the eight days of Hanukkah). Throughout the subsequent Hasmonean dynasty, this festival functioned as a reminder of how the dynasty began and of what the Jews perceived as God’s delivering action from pagan oppression. The Hasmonean period clearly still did not resemble the promises from the prophets of old, but Hanukkah, like Purim, was a festival added to the central three (Passover, Pentecost, and Tabernacles) to reaffirm the identity of the Jewish people as the people of God, an identity based on God’s delivering action. At least the establishment of it and some periods thereafter represented good memories for generations, just as it was with the united monarchy of Israel, even though that period, too, was less than ideal. Such remembrance also shaped hope, especially after the Roman conquest in 63 BCE. For example, Pss. Sol. 17:21–46—part of a document probably written in Jerusalem after the Roman conquest and before Jesus—anticipated the day when the Messiah would come as a conquering king to purge the gentiles from the promised land and set up the kingdom of God’s righteousness centered in a restored Jerusalem.

To come from the other direction, the Gospel according to John has established a theme from the beginning of Jesus as the fulfillment and even replacement of Torah and Judaism (but not the Jewish people) in general. He hints at this fact beginning in the prologue by calling Jesus “the Word” surpassing the previously known Word of God: the Torah (1:16–18, also note vv. 10–13). He notes this theme in many other ways throughout the narrative (e.g., Jesus as consistent with but superior to Moses, Jesus as the one about whom Moses and the Scriptures testify, and Jesus as the center of the new Passover), but the one that is the focus of this entry is his use of Jewish symbols, rituals, and holy days (besides the text in question, see 2:6, 13, 18–23; 5:1, 9; 6:4; 7:2; 9:14; 11:55; 13:1; 19:14). Sometimes John explicitly connects the reference to the point of the passage (e.g., the two healings on Sabbaths), but generally these references seem to be almost incidental and without an explicit connection to what is going on in the passage. However, the more closely one reads, the more it becomes clear that these time markers are John’s way of making a point about Jesus’s embodiment and fulfillment of the day/festival, ritual, or symbol in question. As the briefest analysis of a case in point, consider the reference to the approaching Passover in 6:4. John interjects this note while introducing the only miracle of Jesus’s ministry recorded in all four Gospels: the feeding of the 5,000. The miraculous feeding out in the country recalls the provision of manna during the wilderness wandering (in fact, Jesus explicitly makes this connection in the subsequent teaching) and the crowd’s reaction recorded in 6:14–15 shows that they also make the connection, presumably thinking that Jesus is the prophet promised in Deut 18:15–18 and wanting to make him king because of it. In 6:26–40, 48–58 Jesus claims to be not merely the provider of bread, but the bread of life himself, a bread that is superior to the manna because through him one can have everlasting life. In other words, through Jesus one comes to the new exodus and the manna—as an encapsulation of the exodus in this case—is not a reappearance of the old; it is superior in its lasting efficacy, sustenance, and creative power.

So how do these two threads connect in the passage in question? Throughout the book, other people debate Jesus’s identity. One such debate immediately precedes this passage as the Jews debate Jesus’ healing of the blind man in ch. 9 and his identification of himself as the gate for his sheep and as the good shepherd. Both images indicate that the true sheep, the true Israel, the true people of God will recognize him, and they will join together with the sheep he will bring from elsewhere (10:11–18). The shepherd image in particular recalls many passages in the OT in which the people of Israel are sheep and God or a leader is the shepherd (God: Gen 48:15; 49:24; Pss 23:1; 28:9; 80:1; Eccl 12:11; Isa 40:11; 63:11; Jer 31:10; Ezek 34:11–22, 31; Mic 7:14; Zech 9:16; 10:3; leaders: Num 27:17; 2 Sam 5:2; 7:7; 24:17; Ps 78:71–72; Isa 44:28; 63:11; Jer 3:15; 17:16; 23:4; Ezek 34:23–24; 37:24; Mic 5:4–6; cf. Zech 13:7–9). With the debate set off by the healing and the teaching in the background, John mentions the Festival of Dedication taking place at this time. As Jesus is in Jerusalem, some of the Jews try to end the debate once and for all by asking Jesus whether or not he is the Messiah. The question certainly seems to be a legitimate one to ask, because of both the recent events recorded in this book and the setting in which royal messianic expectations would be at the forefront of the minds of many as they remember the days of God’s deliverance through the Maccabean revolt, the Hasmonean rule, and the yet-to-be-fulfilled promises of God for which the events commemorated at Hanukkah provide only the slightest of tastes. In fact, it could be that some of the same people who wanted to make him king in 6:14–15 were looking for validation for their hope, that the fullness of time had finally come upon them, and that this Jesus would fulfill his name and save the people of God from their gentile overlords.

However, Jesus claims that to ask the question after witnessing his works is to indicate more about the questioner than about Jesus. Throughout the Gospel, there is a strong link between Jesus’s identity and action, such that Jesus does what he is. He is the medium of the message and the embodied message itself. He provides bread and is the bread of life; he gives sight to the blind and is the light of the world; he proclaims the truth and is the truth; he raises the dead to life and is the resurrection and the life. This connection extends from the Prologue’s identification of Jesus as the Word of God, an identity that unites word and deed because God’s word has such effective and authoritative power. But the recognition of the true shepherd requires being a true sheep, so anyone who challenges or questions his identity thereby receives a challenge to his/her purported identity as part of the people of God. It is because of his double challenge to their understanding of God’s identity—by claiming his oneness with the Father and his mutual indwelling with him—and to their belief in their identity as the people of God simply because of their heritage that they charge him with blasphemy. His claim to be God comes not only from his claim to be one with the Father, but in his claim to be the shepherd who defines the sheep.

In these ways, John illustrates that Jesus is the fulfillment of Hanukkah, but not in the way people expected. Instead of cleansing and rededicating a temple sullied by the presence of gentiles, Jesus fulfills the function it was supposed to have because he is God’s-presence-in-person, and indeed God’s sanctuary-in-person (John 2:18–22). The true people of God are no longer defined simply by the Torah, the temple in Jerusalem, or other Jewish distinctives; they are defined around Jesus and identification with him. Though many of them had messianic expectations of a king who would come to conquer the gentiles, Jesus affirms that he is the Messiah, but that he is also God Incarnate (thereby redefining their understanding of God around himself), that his delivering action is of a different kind, and that he provides everlasting life through that action. He is King, but his kingdom is of an entirely different kind than the Hasmoneans. Some of the Jews see him as they saw Antiochus IV, as a blasphemer. But unlike Antiochus IV, he actually is God Manifest and fulfills the Jewish faith, rather than abrogating it altogether.