Sunday Eucharist - January 23rd, 2022

The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me,
Because He has anointed Me
To preach the gospel to the poor;
He has sent Me to heal the broken-hearted,
To proclaim liberty to the captives
And recovery of sight to the blind,
To set at liberty those who are oppressed;
To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord. (Luke 4:18-19)

Few passages of Christian Scripture have had more influence on me than these words recorded above. Taken from the Gospel of Luke, chapter four. They are the words of Jesus, spoken some 2,000 years ago, though Jesus is actually quoting from the prophet Isaiah, who spoke some five centuries before that. It’s a prophecy that concludes with the proclamation of ‘the acceptable year of the Lord’, which most scholars think is a reference to the Year of Jubilee, which was something instituted by Moses at least six centuries before Isaiah spoke, and is spelt out in detail in the book of Leviticus, chapter 25.

You’ll have to forgive me if all that sounds dry and academic, but what I see embodied in Jesus’ words is an ancient dream that had been nurtured and reshaped over multiple generations. It was a dream of a better world – of a just and life-giving community - that simply would not fade away, and it was a dream that Jesus said He was going to make come true!

If you go back to the Jubilee Year legislation, as laid out in Leviticus 25, it is fundamentally a program of land reform. The idea was that every 50 years, all the land would be redistributed equally between Israel’s tribes and families. In the periods between Jubilees, everyone was free to work their land as best they could, and some would inevitably do well while others would do poorly. Those who did well might buy more land from their less successful neighbours, and those who did really badly might have to hire themselves out as indentured servants to repay their debts. Even so, every 50 years it would all go back to square one. The land would go back to its original owners, all debts would be cancelled and there would be ‘liberty to the captives’. It was indeed ‘good news to the poor’.

The Year of Jubilee was designed to be a great equalizer, and, for obvious reasons, it never happened. Even though Moses had spelt it all out in black and white, there is no record in the history of the people of Israel suggesting that anybody ever tried to enact a Jubilee. This makes sense, as those who had the authority to make it happen would have always been those who had the most to lose. Even so, this Jubilee vision of equality and justice and sharing and freedom never went away, and by the time Isaiah picked up the dream, it had taken on a new form for those living in exile in Babylon, where none of them had land and where they were all prisoners.

Jesus’ sermon on Isaiah’s prophecy is one sentence long: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Was Jesus promising to finally implement a literal Mosaic Jubilee, such that the land of Palestine would be shared out evenly between all its inhabitants? Was Jesus rather offering a vision of hope to those living under the Roman occupation, just as Isaiah had used the image of the Jubilee to bring hope to Jews living under the Babylonian Occupation. Was it a bit of both, or something else again?

These words of Jesus, recorded in Luke 4, were the text for my exit-sermon from seminary in 1988. I thought I knew all the answers to these questions back then. I’m not so sure now. Even so, the proclamation of the Jubilee continues to inspire me. I still hold on to this vision of a world where there is both freedom and equality, though I’ve become increasingly aware in recent years that in the world we live in right now, the two seem to work against each other.

Where you see freedom in our world, you do not see equality. On the contrary, the less regulated a society is, the more we see survival of the fittest, where the rich do as they will and the poor do as they must. Conversely, where governments have tried to force equality, individual freedoms are radically curtailed. Everyone is put under strict government control, and deviants are censored, fined, imprisoned and killed!

Perhaps the dream of Jubilee has to take on a fresh form in every generation? For me right now, I see it as a vision of freedom. The trumpet sounds and the shackles fall. Prisoners like Julian Assange and Mordechai Vanunu are given their lives back. The sanctions that cripple people of Syria and Iran are dissolved and, in this country, people are no longer told where they can go and who they can meet, and no one can stop us from singing, dancing and praying!

If that today’s Jubilee dream? If so, it’s a Biblical dream, and a dream that Jesus promised He would make come true. I just hope it doesn’t take another 50 years.

Dave
http:/www.fatherdave.org
http://www.fighting-fathers.com