.

Hanukkah:
Festival of Lights
Sun 14 Dec 2025 – Mon 22 Dec 2025

.

My Advent pattern for preparing the daily FFF posts is to pray a day ahead. Each morning I read the scriptures for the following day and then live the ups and downs of the day with these texts in the back of my mind.

This is a great grace for me and I rarely have a struggle about what to write –  which gives me confidence that Jesus wants me to write these reflections.

I delight that if I am open to Jesus, He does provide.

Then later in the day I write the reflection and upload it to the website ready to be mailed to subscribers early the next morning.

I like the way that Jesus is very synodal in his teaching methods using the considerations of his audience as a starting point for his dialogical instruction. Of course Jesus’ school teachers would also have used this Socratic Method – question and conversation – since Socrates has popularised this style four hundred years earlier.

In today’s gospel we have a perfect example: “Jesus said to the chief priests and elders of the people, ‘What is your opinion? (A man had two sons…)”  Y

ou’ll immediately be able to recall many other times when Jesus begins with a question: Why do you call me good? Who do you say that I am? Do you love me? Why are you afraid? What is it you want?

I looked it up and in the gospels Jesus asks more than 150 questions.

My daily pondering also involve a lot of questions: Why did I say that? Why did I do that? What should I do now?

And today with the tragic news from Bondi has me asking why, why, why, and what can i / we do?

Unfortunately the Church has not always been a good communicator of the beauty and breadth of God-centred faith. It was only 70 years ago that the Catholic Good Friday liturgy stopped praying for the “perfidious” (untrustworthy and deceitful) Jews.

The justification was always that the original Latin perfidis only meant faithless.

However the First People of God were and are people of great faith, our sisters and brothers with Islam in professing faith in the ONE God. Together we, Judaism, Islam and Christianity, are known as the Monothesic (one God) family of faith.

Yesterday the New Zealand Catholic Interfaith Committee published an inspiring letter – a strong refocus following Sunday’s Bondi tragedy.

The writers conclude their letter in prayer and today, in the heart of these Hanukkah Festival of Light days, let us join with the First People of God to pray::

May the light of the Hanukkah candles
small yet steadfast
be a beacon that dispels fear
softens hearts
and renews hope for peace.
May it remind us that light
is strongest when it is shared
and that even in
the darkest moments
goodness endures.

+++

Take an initiative and send me a date time and place for a FFF cafe-catchups. john@fff.org.nz. I’ll advertise these on each morning’s post throughout Advent.

New Plymouth
Thursday 18 December 1.30pm
Stumble Inn
200 Mangorei Road
New Plymouth. Joan

Moku Cafe in Christchurch yesterday.