Leviticus 25:8-17 - "Good News for Who?"
/“Good News for Who?”
You shall count off seven weeks of years, seven times seven years, so that the period of seven weeks of years gives forty-nine years. Then you shall have the trumpet sounded loud; on the tenth day of the seventh month—on the day of atonement—you shall have the trumpet sounded throughout all your land. And you shall hallow the fiftieth year and you shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you: you shall return, every one of you, to your property and every one of you to your family. That fiftieth year shall be a jubilee for you: you shall not sow, or reap the aftergrowth, or harvest the unpruned vines. For it is a jubilee; it shall be holy to you: you shall eat only what the field itself produces.
In this year of jubilee, you shall return, every one of you, to your property. When you make a sale to your neighbor or buy from your neighbor, you shall not cheat one another. When you buy from your neighbor, you shall pay only for the number of years since the jubilee; the seller shall charge you only for the remaining crop years. If the years are more, you shall increase the price, and if the years are fewer, you shall diminish the price; for it is a certain number of harvests that are being sold to you. You shall not cheat one another, but you shall fear your God; for I am the Lord your God.
A Jubilee year would have been a once-in-a-lifetime experience for ancient Israelites, coming only once every fifty years. Perhaps a few who remembered it from their childhood would have lived long enough to see another in their old age. They would have told their children and their grandchildren stories of what it was like. That is if a jubilee had ever happened. There’s no evidence that Israel ever followed through on God’s commands. When I hear the word “jubilee” today, I think of Monarchs in Great Britain celebrating their gold, silver, or diamond jubilees. They treated as achievements and causes for celebration.
But Leviticus 25 does not read like a mere celebration. It reads like the text of a bill passed by Congress or the latest Supreme Court ruling. It is all about the details. Intricate, minuscule specificities about what this holy year should look like. God’s instructions are so specific they border on being absurd. An entire paragraph on how to sell houses in walled cities? Really? Really. God cares about the details because that is where life happens. If you are a person living in a house in a walled city during a jubilee year, you’re pretty darn grateful that God gave such specific instructions. After seven weeks of seven years, which is to say 49 years, the people of God are commanded to make holy the fiftieth year. A year of jubilee.
So what does God command that year to look like? First, it begins with the trumpets sounded through the lands. God says the year shall be made holy by proclaiming liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. This word ‘liberty’ is important. It comes from the Hebrew word derowr and is also translated as free-flowing or release. It is the same word the prophet Isaiah uses to describe what the Spirit of God has instructed him to do: to proclaim release to the captives and freedom to prisoners. This isn’t a metaphor.
Jubilee is for more than just the human inhabitants, it’s also about allowing the land to rest. Humans get 1 out of every 7 days to rest. The land gets 1 out of every 7 years and the Jubilee year is an extra year. There is to be no farming or harvesting. They are allowed only to pick what the land grows on its own. It sounds risky. The whole part of farming is that the land needs cultivation to grow the food we eat to survive. How could they be expected to go a whole year with land left to its own devices?
One summer while I was in Seminary, I housesat for my preaching professor while I studied Greek, an ordeal, by the way, that I barely survived. My professor’s husband loved gardening and he planted an incredible garden in the spring, just before he took a job in New England, leaving me to the best part of the job—harvesting produce that I did not plant. But much to my surprise, tomato plants kept popping up around the yard. They were in flower beds and next to bushes and all sorts of places that seemed very strange for someone to willingly plant tomatoes. As it turns out, these were volunteer tomatoes. They came from the previous year’s plants that had been turned into compost and spread out along all the beds. Unlike my garden this year, no one tucked those seeds into pellets, provided them heat mats and grow lights, or fertilized them carefully. They grew out of their own volition, were watered by the rain alone, and they were the best tomatoes that I picked that summer. Those tiny cherry tomatoes were like candy. I picked them all summer long and delighted in what the field itself produced. It was my jubilee harvest.
In the Jubilee year, it is not only the land that returns to its natural state. So do people and property. Jubilee is the promise of returning home, as Samuel Balentine puts it. In the years between Jubilees, those Israelites who had fallen on hard times, who had no safety nets, and found themselves on the brink of financial calamity would have had to sell their homes and then themselves into indentured servitude. Jubilee was the year to reclaim their ancestral homes and resume a life free from servitude. These land returns and canceling of debts are carefully calculated to be truly fair—both to the buyer and the seller. It involves more math than this pastor can quite work out. God’s instructions are clear that these financial transactions must be unbiased- “you shall not cheat each other.” And God doesn’t even say, “Don’t cheat because your neighbors are human beings made in my image and therefore worthy of fair treatment.” God knows the audience here. Altruism isn’t exactly a motivating factor in financial transactions for most people then or now. So instead God just says, “you shall fear your God; for I am the Lord your God.”
This year of Jubilee is a year of coming home. Twice, God says, “you shall return, every one of you to your property, and every one of you to your family.” It’s a year of zeroing out debts. Of ending slavery, captivity, and indentured servitude. A year of resting from the hard labor of making food grow out of the arid land. It's not a true equalizer though—those who have gained immense fortunes are not required to give it up until all are equal. It just provides a chance for people to get on their feet. Free from debts that could never be repaid, free from a life of servitude that would be passed on to the next generation. It's a fresh start. A do-over that people rarely get.
It sounds like good news, doesn’t it? But good news for who? That depends on your perspective. The Patriots winning the Super Bowl is good for the people of Boston and terrible news to the rest of America. Getting a job offer is good news for you, but it’s not good news for the other people who were up for the job. Independence Day was good news for the white settlers in this land, but not so for the indigenous people who had called this land home for millennia. Good news is a matter of perspective and position and privilege.
Canceling debts, resting from farm labor, and returning to your ancestral homes is good news for the poor, the farm laborers, indentured servants, prisoners, and those forced to sell off their sacred land… but it probably did not sound like good news to the rich. For the ones who made a living collecting high-interest loans off of the poor. For those who bought homes out from under their suffering, destitute neighbors. For those Israelites, the Jubilee year would have been the year they had to zero out debts that would have them rich. They would have to release servants and slaves who did their dirty work. They would have had to sell the ill-gotten gains of lands sold in desperation. Jubilee, too, is a matter of perspective.
But here’s the thing—just as God gives rules for fairness in the Jubilee year because God is impartial, I believe that God also seeks jubilee liberation for the rich. God sees how greed and the act of oppressing others bind the oppressor. You cannot oppress another human being and be in full relationship with God. You cannot grow your wealth on the backs of the enslaved or underpaid and be truly free. Absolute power and privilege will hollow you out and deprive you of the ability to love your neighbor as yourself. And if we cannot know and love our neighbor who reflects the image of God in our midst, we cannot love God.
It is the paradox so perfectly encapsulated in what we call the Prayer St. Francis. We sang a hymn based on it a few weeks ago. The last stanza says, “For it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.” The Kingdom of God has always upside down. And so in the Jubilee year, it is in giving up that the privileged find freedom and rest.
The year of Jubilee is good news for all, even when it doesn’t feel like it. It is good news for those who are freed from bondage. And it is good news for those who have been complicit in doing the binding. In enslaving. In profiting off others’ suffering. Someday, they will look back on the Jubilee year as good, but not before it hurts. Giving up ill-gotten treasures, land, and servants will not be easy. It will not feel fair or just. It will not sound like good news in the short term. But God knows what real good news is.
So perhaps the question for us is, “would Jubilee be good news for me?” Are we the ones with debts to be forgiven or the one who will need to forgive debts? Where do we see ourselves in God’s story? Pastor and theologian Erna Kim Hackett writes that "White Christianity suffers from a bad case of Disney Princess theology. As each individual reads Scripture, they see themselves as the princess in every story. They are Esther, never Xerxes. They are Peter, but never Judas. They are the woman anointing Jesus, never the Pharisees. They are the Jews escaping slavery, never Egypt. For citizens of the most powerful country in the world, who enslaved both Native and Black people, to see itself as Israel and not Egypt when studying Scripture is a perfect example of Disney princess theology.”
What would it mean for us to reject this Disney princess theology and read Jubilee through the lens of the rich? Since my salary is public and voted on by the congregation every year, I have no problem telling you that it puts me in the top 1.2% of the richest people in the entire world. I am rich. No matter how much I compare myself to the “actually rich” millionaires or billionaires in the country, I am still unquestionably rich in comparison to the rest of the world. So, what would a jubilee year look like for me? The farms that would not be cultivated would mean I would have to save up my harvest from the year before. My three raised beds wouldn’t last me long. What about the house I live in? Land returns in this country aren’t theoretical—I own land that was stolen from Miami, Osage, and Shawnee people. They were forced to leave against their will, and I have benefited from it. If the prisoners were set free, what would happen to all the products I buy that are made with prison labor? My Bounty paper towels, Tide laundry detergent, Pantene shampoo, and Neutrogena face wash? What would they cost me if companies finally had to pay their labor a living wage?
A Jubilee would be an economic catastrophe for this country. Our economy is built on inequality. On debts that people will never climb out of. On private prisons that reward shareholders with earnings made from keeping human beings in cages. Not to mention the countless small towns in rural America, where nearly everyone works in the prison who would be out of work. We don’t live a world designed for Jubilees.
If this sounds radical, it’s because scripture is radical. God’s vision for how the nation of God’s people are to conduct themselves is vastly different than what has ever transpired, and it sounds radical, even political to our ears. While scripture doesn’t start with politics, and certainly makes no claims about American partisan politics, it does have massive economic and political consequences. Leviticus 25, in particular, obliterates our false belief that there is a separation between what is sacred and what is secular. Leviticus shows us that God cares deeply about the intricacies of economic and political systems because those systems are filled with real-life consequences. God cares about the world we live in not on a theoretical level but an intimate one. God cares about our country with $1.6 Trillion of student debt, 2.2 million prisoners, and over-farmed lands that can only grow soybeans and over and over again until all the nutrients in the soil are gone. This is always theology first. But our theology has real-world consequences. That's not politicizing scripture. It's taking it seriously.
Jubilee doesn't have to be theoretical. There are ways that we can practice Jubilee so that it is a gift for both those who give something up and those who are given freedom. This week, I thought of jubilee when I read a story about WNBA star Maya Moore. Last year, Maya was at the peak of her career. She’d won two Olympic gold medals and four WNBA championships and could have gone for more. But instead, she shocked the sports world when announced that she would be taking a year off from professional sports to focus her time, energy, and resources to help a man named Johnathan Irons. Johnathan was only 16 years old when a victim of house burglary and assault picked his photo out of a lineup. Despite no physical evidence, an alibi, and the fact that the victim was unable to pick out the assailant from among a lineup until coached by the police, Johnathan was tried as an adult and sentenced to fifty years in prison. He served 22 years for a crime he did not commit until last Wednesday when a judge finally overturned his conviction and he was freed. In the photos of his release day, Maya is standing next to him, wearing a shirt with Micah 6:8 emblazoned upon it, “Do justice. Love mercy. Walk humbly.” Maya lived God’s jubilee command—a year of proclaiming freedom to the captives and release to the prisoners. She is a woman of valor.
Southminster, too, can practice Jubilee. We could start smaller than Maya did, of course. We could enact the Jubilee practice of forgiving debts by buying up medical debt through a non-profit called Rolling Jubilee where just $100 pays off $10,000 worth of medical debt. 66% bankruptcies in America are due to medical debt and we could be giving people a chance to get on their feet.
Or we could focus on the jubilee command “to return, every one of you to your home and your family.” We could support the immigrants in our community who cannot afford a plane ticket home. We could buy it for them and celebrate as they enact on our behalf this jubilee command and return to the family and land they love. Another way would be to honor and recognize the people who cannot return home. We could financially support the indigenous tribes whose stolen we live on. In Seattle, for example, the Duwamish tribe has a website where settlers can pay rent, a small way of returning the economic benefits to the people whose land they live upon.
Or we focus on the jubilee practice of proclaiming liberty to the captives. Of emptying jails and prisons. We could organize to end the practice of cash bail that keeps thousands of people in jail for crimes they have not been convicted of simply because they are too poor to make bail. We could give to bail funds, like PCUSA’s General Assembly did 2018 in St. Louis.
Friends, jubilee can still be practiced. It would have massive consequences and there is a reason that a jubilee for all was commanded to be only once every fifty years. It’s not forever. But it is good news. Anyone who has given sacrificially, beyond what was comfortable or reasonable knows that there is a freedom and goodness that is unmistakable in. Anyone who has received exceptional generosity knows that it can change your life. A jubilee year is a year of rest—resting from producing, resting from striving, resting from profiting. I have a favorite quote on the wall in my office that says, “once people feel nourished and refreshed, they cannot help but be kind; just so, the world aches for the generosity of a well-rested people.” Oh how we ache, for jubilee rest and the kindness it brings.
Let this be your encouragement and your challenge to ask God how you may be called to practice jubilee and in doing so, practice showing compassion. As we taught the children in VBS this week, compassion means first seeing and welcoming others, being brave and telling the truth, loving ourselves, being present with each other, and seeing God’s abundance come to life. And that is good news for all.
