A Clean Slate!

Good News for the Vulnerable

Biblical teaching about the jubilee includes two practices, both of which relate to social and economic ethics: the Sabbath of the land (Deuteronomy 15:1-4) and the year of jubilee (Leviticus 25:8-17). The first was to be put into practice every seven years and consisted of forgiving all debts. Lenders were no longer to take account of the debts of their neighbour, in order that nobody amongst them would be poor. The second was to be put into practice every 50 years, after the completion of seven Sabbaths of the land.

Count off seven sabbath years—seven times seven years—so that the seven sabbath years amount to a period of forty-nine years. Then have the trumpet sounded everywhere on the tenth day of the seventh month; on the Day of Atonement sound the trumpet throughout your land. Consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you; each of you is to return to your family property and to your own clan. (Leviticus 25:8-10)

It was good news for the poor, for those living ‘on the underside of history’, ² who were used to hearing only bad news. It was news announced with a loud trumpet sound, heralding freedom, justice and mercy. The animals and the land were also included in the healing benefits of this commandment of the Lord.

And it was, first and foremost, a commandment: a decree established by the Lord that was an expression both of his just character and of his plan of freedom and equality for the people. Because in the Lord’s commands we find not only a moral code intended to govern human coexistence, but also an implicit illustration of the character of he who commands. In God’s decrees we discover who he is and what his plan for the abundant life of his creation involves. Only by responding to his voice and obeying his precepts can we hope to live in harmony. ‘Follow my decrees and be careful to obey my laws, and you will live safely in the land. Then the land will yield its fruit, and you will eat your fill and live there in safety’ (Leviticus 25:18-19).

The jubilee commandment provides us, then, with the right perspective by which to understand all the other biblical precepts: not as religious obligations (ritual does not rule), but as the foundations of a world in which we can live in peace, justice and abundance (a calling to life in all its fullness). These precepts should be guiding and organising principles for those who call themselves people of God, because the Bible, rather than being a religious book, is a guide for living.

A Faith of Humanity and Solidarity

The biblical social ethic originating in the jubilee stands against the abuse of land, work and life. The prophets and prophesies testify to this. The prophetic function of the Old Testament is suffused with the denunciation of a religion that, though it claims to follow the true God, does not put his just ways into practice. The eigth-century BC prophet Amos, for example, lamented the failure of the equitable and just economic system of the year of the Sabbath and jubilee, a failure which paved the way for the rich and powerful to accumulate property and crush the people:

For three sins of Israel,

even for four, I will not relent.

They sell the innocent for silver,

and the needy for a pair of sandals.

They trample on the heads of the poor

as on the dust of the ground

and deny justice to the oppressed.

Father and son use the same girl

and so profane my holy name. (Amos 2:6-7)

Rituals, enacted with stoical faithfulness, may soothe our conscience and free us from feelings of guilt, but that is all they do! For this reason, Amos teaches that ritual obedience must be accompanied by the practice of justice, mercy and loving kindness that involves caring for the powerless and those living in poverty, and respecting the dignity of all human beings. The prophetic tradition announced this prospect for justice and denounced unjust practices, especially those endorsed by ritualistic, yet inhuman, religion.

God had called Israel to live out an alternative social reality to that of Canaan and other neighbouring populations. And Amos reminded them of this vocation. The prophet Isaiah, for his part, presented them with an image of God disgusted with their empty offerings and offended by a ritualism devoid of justice: ‘Stop bringing meaningless offerings! Your incense is detestable to me. New Moons, Sabbaths and convocations – I cannot bear your worthless assemblies’ (Isaiah 1:13). The root of the Israelites’ problem was a religious observance centred around ritual but far removed from a life of compassion and justice, in open defiance of the jubilee set out by the Lord.

A Jubilant Messiah

In the context of the repeated disobedience and prophetic warnings that marked the story of the Old Testament people of God, there arose the hope for a Messiah, who would –finally – come to fulfil the jubilee. With the arrival of the Saviour, the jubilee would no longer be a mere moral aspiration (in a religious sense) but would become a living moral reality (in a social sense). And that is what it was, and how Jesus meant it when he declared, in the sermon in the Nazareth synagogue announcing his ministry:

The Spirit of the Lord is on me,

because he has anointed me

to proclaim good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners

and recovery of sight for the blind,

to set the oppressed free,

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour. (Luke 4:18-19)

Jesus, citing the prophet Isaiah (61:1-2), presents himself as the one sent by the Holy Spirit to restore and bring dignity to those most in need, oppressed and humiliated. He does not come to introduce a new religion (nor was this the intention of the jubilee), but to announce freedom, give hope, bear witness to God’s loving kindness and demonstrate that his grace heals all the evils of this world. With the arrival of Jesus, the kingdom of God is unveiled (Luke 17:20-21), and the doors are opened to the longed-for future and the fulfilment of the promises announced by the prophets. ‘The time has come’, Jesus affirms (Mark 1:15); the future to which the jubilee pointed is now here. As Spanish theologian José Antonio Pagola rightly highlights, however:

Jesus speaks about the Kingdom of God in a matter-of-fact way, as something both here and yet to come. He does not see any contradiction in this. The Kingdom of God is not a time-bound occurrence, but a continuous action of the Father which, while requiring an accountable response, will not cease, despite all opposition, until the Kingdom is fully accomplished. ⁴

This new world is sprouting because its seed has been sown by the arrival of the Messiah. Now, the jubilee is advancing, unstoppable (even though current events are bent on preventing it from doing so), until its complete fulfilment. The new world is the utopia that God will make real, even in the face of opposition and setback. Jesus does not give any dates; he is not concerned with calculating the time: ‘But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Be on guard! Be alert! You do not know when that time will come’ (Mark 13:32-33). The kingdom of God will triumph and the victory has already been won by means of the crucified Saviour. This is the jubilee paradox or, as the apostle Paul calls it, the foolishness of God (1 Corinthians 1:25).

A Jubilee Church

And given that this kingdom has been ushered in, the jubilee, now more than ever, becomes the ethical requirement for those who follow the resurrected Messiah and are strengthened by the Spirit of God which came at Pentecost. The outpouring of the Spirit is a sign that the kingdom of God is now in its final stages. It is the time of the jubilee and the fellowship of believers must bear witness to this. Stam says in this regard:

It is highly possible that the very name Pentecost, being 50 days after Israel’s Passover, was linked to the Jubilee, being the 50th year in a century. Some have even contended that Pentecost happened in a Jubilee year, but whatever the case, the Pentecost fulfilled both promises found in Isaiah 61: the Spirit was poured out over the church and the faithful shared their possessions.

And so, the church’s Pentecost experience is substantiated by jubilee miracles (Acts 2:1-13; 43-47): the miracle of cross-cultural encounter (2:8), the miracle of context-appropriate evangelisation (2:14) and, amongst others, the miracle of sharing communion (2:43-47). Social ethics was part of the bigger miracle: ‘They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need’ (2:45). And the jubilee continued. For example, in the sixth chapter of Acts, the early church community decided to care for the widows who were being overlooked in the distribution of food (6:1-2). And so Luke’s narrative continues by describing how the first Christians took up the jubilee task, that of ‘effective love’, guided by God the Holy Spirit, responding to the invitation of God the Father, and following the example of God the Son. Because, as Stam also highlights, ‘where there is no practice of Jubilee, there is no Pentecost …’.

This original project for a just church had, as is obvious, some notable variations. The New Testament makes note of them: on the one hand the generosity of many of the Corinthians (2 Corinthians 8:1-5), and on the other the meanness of the believers described by James (James 2:1-13). The apostle Paul urged his readers to live out a jubilee faith. He exhorted them to respond to the needs resulting from the famine that afflicted Jerusalem at that time. He himself led the coordination of this task, despite the risks it posed to him and his companions. Referring to that apostolic event, Juan Stam remarks that ‘… it was a result of the project of Pentecost community, which in its turn was founded on the Year of Jubilee’, adding:

In 2 Corinthians 8-9 Paul describes this project’s basis and logic by means of a beautiful theology of grace and gratitude (8:9, 9:8-10:15). The background to this was that the Thessalonians (who were poorer) had honoured their promised contribution to the offering (8:1-2), while the Corinthians (who were richer) had not. Paul invokes the example of Jesus ‘who though he was rich … became poor’ (8:9). Later on, he assures them that God has the power to give them grace to be generous to the poor (9:8-10). And all of this should be born of our gratitude to God for his grace towards us (9:15).

New Church, for a New World

The Sabbaths of the land, as well as the jubilee, today demand a church committed to environmental stewardship (caring for our common home), to a Sabbath economy, i.e. a life-giving economy (that reconstructs each human being as a bodily subject, and brings renewal to the concrete realities of their lives, as well as to human existence in its totality, to relationships between people, social institutions and cultural constructs) ⁵ and to a militant spirituality (that incentivises responsible citizenship, a commitment to justice and the practice of the merciful kindness of God).

The jubilee calls us to conversion. And that conversion is the final breath for the renewal of the people of God. To become a church which, when faced daily with thousands of acts of injustice, does not stay silent, in the words of Oscar Arnulfo Romero:

[t]he church cannot remain deaf and dumb to the clamour of millions of men and women crying for freedom, oppressed by a thousand slaveries. It tells them the true freedom we should strive for: the one that Christ has already ushered in on earth through his resurrection, breaking the chains of sin and death and hell. Being like Christ, free from sin, is to be truly free and to experience true liberation. And those who, with their faith in the risen Christ, work for a more just world, cry out against the injustice of the present system, against the abuses of repressive authority, against the disorder of man exploiting man, everyone who endeavours due to the resurrection of the great liberator, only that person is a true Christian. ⁶