Jackson Community Church

JUBILEE COMMENTARY

Now, if you remember from earlier episodes about the book of Leviticus, your favorite book of the Bible, in the Torah, God told the people of Israel every seven times seventh year to perform this Year of Jubilee where all debts would be forgiven, all slaves would be set free, and anybody who lost their family land would have it restored back to them. It was like this total Eden reset for everybody in Israel… the prophets of the Hebrew Bible begin to use that Jubilee, hope as a way of thinking about not just what would happen in another 49 or 50 years, but to think about the whole of Israel’s history and the whole of human history would get a fresh restart in this year of God’s favor that He was going to bring one day.
Jesus walks into his hometown synagogue on the Sabbath, he picks up the scroll of Isaiah and he read this: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to announce good news for the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free all who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” And then, such a great part of the story, we’re told that Jesus closed the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down while everyone’s eyes in the synagogue were fixed on him. And in that moment … he says, “Today, this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”— BibleProjec, full article: https://d1bsmz3sdihplr.cloudfront.net/media/Podcast%20Transcripts/TBP%20Transcripts/7th%20Day%20Rest_E11_Jesus%20and%20His%20Jubilee%20Mission%20Transcript.pdf

Indeed, like the Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount, this passage reveals God’s special deference toward the poor and marginalized and can make the relatively privileged—the rich and the religious, the free and the full— feel a bit left out when the good news is delivered first to the perceived outsiders. It seems this tendency to equate justice and dignity for the marginalized with persecution of the privileged is an old one. But in this sermon and throughout his ministry, Jesus does not simply advocate for equality. He advocates for a complete reversal of priorities that blesses the poor, the outsiders, and the oppressed first and warns that those most in danger of missing the gospel are those who benefit from the world’s economy.
Jesus, invoking the words of Isaiah and sharing God’s dreams for the world, announces the inauguration of a new Kingdom in which the Year of Jubilee—when debts are forgiven, slaves set free, land and its abundance shared—is celebrated perpetually.
“At the center of biblical faith,” says Walter Brueggemann in a sermon on this passage, “is a command from God that curbs economic transactions by an act of communal sanity that restores everyone to proper place in the economy, because life in the community of faith does not consist of getting more but in sharing well.”
This is good news for those in desperate need of a fresh start.   It’s bad news for those who kinda like things the way they are, those who buy the lie that all that extra stuff and power and prestige they won in the rat race make them more important, more worthy, more good. …Which, let’s face it, is most of us.  — Rachel Held Evans, full article: https://rachelheldevans.com/blog/advent-three-lectionary-jubilee#google_vignette

The word yovel is also a matter of some dispute. Its Hebrew root — yud, bet, lamed — is phonetically similar to the modern English word jubilee. Many authorities — Rashi chief among them — believe the word refers to the blowing of shofar, since it shares a root with the biblical word for ram, the horns of which are used for shofars. But others — Maimonides perhaps most famously — believe the word means something like “to bring” or “to convey,” a reference to the return of land to its original owners. Still others believe the word means something akin to “mixture” — it is also similar to the Hebrew word for flood, mabul, in which all is mixed up and confused. In this reading, the yovel year is one in which private and public property become intermingled. — My Jewish Learning, full article …
But the jubilee year has not been observed for at least two millennia. This is because the verse in Leviticus, which specifically names “all its inhabitants,” was understood by the rabbis to mean that the jubilee year only applies when all those who are meant to live in Israel — that is, all 12 tribes of Israel — do in fact live there. According to Maimonides, the jubilee years were counted after the end of the Babylonian exile and the construction of the Second Temple, but they were not observed. — My Jewish Learning: https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/sabbatical-year-shemitah-and-jubilee-year-yovel/

What [Jesus] meant was, ‘I am Jubilee. Isaiah wrote about it. I am going to enact it.’ And he set about giving social power and social access and social goods to the poor and excluded. And says Luke, ‘They were filled with rage.’…They did not want to hear about the Jubilee that would curb their accumulation, not even for Jesus. It is a hard command…….The only reason one might obey such a hard command that is concrete material, and economic divestment is that we have a different, larger vision of the future. We know what is promised and what will be, by the power of God. The command is to serve the great social vision of the Gospel, because that vision of God will only become reality when there is enough human obedience. This vision of God is not a vision of accumulation and monopoly so that those who have the most when they die win. This vision of God’s future is not about angels who have gone to heaven floating around in the sky with their loved ones. This vision, rather, is about God’s kingdom coming on earth as it already is in heaven. God’s rule where the practices of justice and mercy and kindness and peaceableness are every day the order of the day. It is a vision of the world as a peaceable neighborliness in which no one is under threat, no one is at risk, no one is in danger, because all are safe, all are valued, all are honored, all are cared for. And this community of peaceableness will come only when the vicious cycles of violent accumulation are broken. — Walter Brueggeman

Does this vision from another age have any implications for our time? — My Jewish Learning: https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/sabbatical-and-jubilee-years-as-a-social-and-political-vision/
In this vision, there is a coherent model of a “sustainable economy” in which the people are fed for many generations and millennia, and the land is not tortured into desolation. Today, ecologists and economists focus on how to create just such a sustainable economy. This is no abstraction: It is as personal as Jeremiah’s pottery jar. When people who are struggling over how to protect ancient forests and to use lumber resources properly define their battle in terms of “spotted owls” versus “logger jobs,” that is what they are fighting over.
This vision contains a coherent model of how to encourage both entrepreneurship and equality. Political theorists and activists struggle over which of these values is more important, and how to balance them. When people battle over “safety nets” and “tax incentives,” over “welfare” and “empowering the poor,” those are the issues they are fighting over.
This vision is not only about the grand design of a society, it is also about the details of everyday life. It presents us a coherent model of how families and individuals should borrow from and lend to each other, how they should buy from each other, and contains many other teachings about interpersonal ethics over money, issues that we encounter in our lives every day.

What Does the Year of Jubilee Mean for Today?
The year of jubilee operated within the context of Israel’s kinship system for the protection of the clan’s inalienable right to work their ancestral land, which they understood to be owned by God and to be enjoyed by them as a benefit of their relationship with him. These social and economic conditions no longer exist, and from a biblical point of view, God no longer administers redemption through a single political state. We must therefore view the jubilee from our current vantage point.
A wide variety of perspectives exists about the proper application, if any, of the jubilee to today’s societies. To take one example that engages seriously with contemporary realities, Christopher Wright has written extensively on the Christian appropriation of Old Testament laws.[3] He identifies principles implicit in these ancient laws in order to grasp their ethical implications for today. His treatment of the jubilee year thus considers three basic angles: the theological, the social, and the economic.[4]
Theologically, the jubilee affirms that the Lord is not only the God who owns Israel’s land; he is sovereign over all time and nature. His act of redeeming his people from Egypt committed him to provide for them on every level because they were his own. Therefore, Israel’s observance of the Sabbath day and year and the year of jubilee was a function of obedience and trust. In practical terms, the jubilee year embodies the trust all Israelites could have that God would provide for their immediate needs and for the future of their families. At the same time, it calls on the rich to trust that treating creditors compassionately will still yield an adequate return.
Looking at the social angle, the smallest unit of Israel’s kinship structure was the household that would have included three to four generations. The jubilee provided a socioeconomic solution to keep the family whole even in the face of economic calamity. Family debt was a reality in ancient times as it is today, and its effects include a frightening list of social ills. The jubilee sought to check these negative social consequences by limiting their duration so that future generations would not have to bear the burden of their distant ancestors.[5]
The economic angle reveals the two principles that we can apply today. First, God desires just distribution of the earth’s resources. According to God’s plan, the land of Canaan was assigned equitably among the people. The jubilee was not about redistribution but restoration. According to Wright, “The jubilee thus stands as a critique not only of massive private accumulation of land and related wealth but also of large-scale forms of collectivism or nationalization that destroy any meaningful sense of personal or family ownership.”[6] Second, family units must have the opportunity and resources to provide for themselves. — Bible Commentary / Produced by TOW Project, full article: https://www.theologyofwork.org/old-testament/leviticus-and-work/the-sabbath-year-and-the-year-of-jubilee-leviticus-25/