Looking at the World in the Light of Jubilee

Jubilee

The essence of jubilee, as we see it laid out in Leviticus 25, is its provision of a way of life for God’s redeemed, liberated people, enabling them to flourish and thrive through the restoration of their relationships with God, with their understanding of themselves as God’s children, with each other, and with creation. Jubilee is about justice: redemption and restoration; liberation and renewal.

Declared on the Day of Atonement every 50th year (Leviticus 25:9), the jubilee laws enabled the Israelites to connect their relationship with YHWH to their relationships to each other and with the wider creation. The laws also reminded them that as God’s chosen people, they were called and created to live in shalom, and they provided the practical processes for re-establishing that shalom in the land. The concept of jubilee returns in the New Testament, in Luke 4:16-20, in which Jesus, reading from a passage in the book of Isaiah that refers to the jubilee law, announces his identity as the promised Messiah: the one who would bring the fulfilment of the Year of the Lord’s favour – jubilee. Both jubilee and atonement are about restoration, reuniting things that have been torn apart. And the fulfilment of both atonement and jubilee requires sacrifice, and so God offers the possibility of restoration with himself, our neighbours, our enemies and the wider creation.

Jubilee, as it is explained in the Old Testament and embodied in Jesus’ ministry, is radical, counter-cultural and prophetic. It provides a model for a community living well according to God’s will for his creation so that they can flourish and thrive as individuals and as a community, and so that they can be an example, or light, to the rest of the world. Christians are liberated by Jesus’ death and resurrection, an event that becomes the foundation of our hope for the future: the coming kingdom. This salvation and hope places an ethical demand on Jesus’ followers, which needs to be explored in every time and place.

Theological Reflection on Development Practice

Organisations in the aid and development sector are rightly committed and held accountable to evaluating their work through a variety of lenses, with the aim of setting and maintaining best practices. For Christian aid and development organisations, one of the lenses that must be applied is the theological. The question that must be asked is this: how does our faith shape our work? This should be asked at and about every stage of work: from values and behaviours, to the development of projects and programmes and the setting of objectives and outcomes. What is the change that Christian faith-based organisations want to see in the world, and how should they pursue it?

Within Tearfund, theological research and reflection supports a strong emotional, rational and evidential base, underpinning the way that we develop our work strategically and how we think about our impact and success, by informing our understanding of whole-life transformation and thriving and flourishing people and communities. Our theological research and engagement supports the maintenance of Tearfund’s Christian distinctive in order to ensure that our corporate identity reflects our evangelical heritage and biblical principles. We are also committed to theological reflection on Tearfund’s own practices and to the support and facilitation of its work in the Christian development sector at large. We believe that churches and Christian NGOs ought to respond to poverty and injustice in ways that are Christ-centred and kingdom-seeking and that can change communities at all levels.

As an organisation, Tearfund is committed to carrying out our theological research and reflection as a part of the global church, in dialogue with theologians and Christian thinkers from all around the world. As Dr Jayakumar Christian explains in his foreword exploring the church’s prophetic position at the margins, the church is called to articulate new, counter-narratives to the world’s dominant stories and culture in order to inspire and call forth a movement that can transform communities and nations. He argues strongly that these narratives must come from the margins, not the centre. At Tearfund, we are privileged in many ways, and one of the privileges we have is the opportunity to connect with and listen to voices from the global margins who are articulating theology and pursing the missio dei in powerful and exciting ways. This practice of theological reflection opens us up to new voices, ideas and perspectives on the world, shaped by a wide range of different contexts and experiences, challenging and inspiring us – and those with whom we work – to think deeply, and often differently, about what it means to be a part of seeking life in all its fullness.

This Special Issue

Over recent years, Tearfund has been developing work on environmental and economic sustainability. Our theological reflection for this work has been underpinned by engagement with the concept of jubilee. We believe that this theology is important for the church’s engagement with many other contemporary issues, including many facing Tearfund and our partners. This issue of Transformation includes six original papers that explore a number of challenges and opportunities facing churches around the world through the lens of jubilee.

In ‘A Dance of the New Beginning’, Dr Rehila Jakawa explores the way that jubilee provides a vision for a new community, focusing on the promise and possibilities that it offers for Nigeria. She argues that in a context where poverty is not due to a lack of existing resources but to the unequal distribution of them, the principles of jubilee invite the church into a partnership with God to pursue faithful stewardship, equality of opportunities and a concern for ecology, as it tackles the problems of poverty.

Mutale M Kaunda and Chammah J Kaunda dig deeper into the importance of land in jubilee, exploring eco-relationality as an important factor in the pursuit of shalom in post-colonial societies. They challenge the rhetoric of ‘land expropriation without compensation’ that is present in South African politics, arguing that expropriation alone will not heal the wounds of colonisation and apartheid, and that a deeper understanding of the human relationship with land than ‘possession’ can offer is necessary.

In our third paper, Miguel Reyes explores the centrality of inclusion, restoration and rest to jubilee and examines how these categories can help the church in Central America respond to the high levels of violence that are present in communities there and to build a peace that is lasting. In his article on interreligious dialogue, Joyson Cherian also explores the ways that jubilee principles support and enable inclusion and peacebuilding within communities, in this case the plural communities of India.

It is also critical for those with more, who may often seem to need jubilee less, to reflect on the ways in which jubilee challenges their lifestyles and norms and opens up new possibilities for a discipleship that can be restorative for their communities, locally and globally, as well as for themselves, and Calvin Tiessen explores this in his article considering postures for social rest.

Finally, Miles Giljam describes the process of practically engaging with jubilee theology to a specific end: the development of an African articulation of an economy that restores all members of society. In doing so he articulates the excitement of this kind of work – and the danger that pursuing the radical ideas of jubilee poses to many of our ways of life.

This special issue also includes two reviews, each of which discusses a work that can help the church globally reflect further on jubilee, and an article that reflects and builds on the theologian Juan Stam’s thoughts on jubilee. In this, Harold Segura articulates the belief that jubilee calls the church to conversion and renewal in the pursuit of justice and mercy.

We believe that jubilee is a concept that both inspires and sustains, through its practices, the commitment to act justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with our God. We hope that this issue of Transformation can support you on this way.