Like many other Christians, this year I have lit Chanukah lights all the way up to last night’s eight candle (plus the servant candle).

There is, however, some controversy as to whether Christians should participate in Chanukah, so I want to suggest three reasons, especially in 2025, why this was a good thing to do for those in the Church.

First, we light Chanukah candles to show solidarity with Jews around the world at a time of heightened persecution. From the October 7 pogrom, to the Heaton Park Attack and Bondi Beach massacre, via the massive increase in online antisemitic material, our Jewish friends are experiencing unprecedented hostility on a day by day basis. Chanukah is the festival of lights, a public display that God’s people will not have their lights put out and their worship of God extinguished.

You don’t have to believe the Chanukah story, let alone join in the prayers and blessings, to participate in the message behind the candles. That’s especially important in 2025 when secular and religious Jews alike are simply being killed for being who they are. Chanukah lights are a display of humble defiance, a declaration that violence and intimidation cannot stamp out identity.

Second, the Chanukah story of the miracle of the eight day provision of light is part of our religious heritage. Granted, the story is not part of the mainstream Bible, as it’s contained in one of the apocryphal books on which Christians disagree whether it should be scripture. The Anglican Articles of Religion say these books are “read for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine”.

In 1 and 2 Maccabees we read of the desecration of God’s temple in Jerusalem by the Selucids, and the Jewish uprising that restores and cleanses God’s holy place. Specifically, the Temple light needed to burn for eight days to complete the rededication, but the Jews only had oil for 24 hours. By a miracle, the lights were lit and they lasted eight days, way beyond what the oil could reasonably provide.

Chanukah, if you believe the accounts, is God’s last saving act before the coming of Jesus. It is about the restoration of God’s presence with his people, through his own grace and power, not the people’s. It is a story of light coming into the world and shining among God’s people in the absence of fuel of their own.

Read it all in Premier Christianity