The Year of Jubilee

10 And you shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants; it shall be a jubilee for you, when each of you shall return to his property and each of you shall return to his family. 11 A jubilee shall that fiftieth year be to you; in it you shall neither sow, nor reap what grows of itself, nor gather the grapes from the undressed vines. 12 For it is a jubilee; it shall be holy to you; you shall eat what it yields out of the field. 13 "In this year of jubilee each of you shall return to his property. 14 And if you sell to your neighbor or buy from your neighbor, you shall not wrong one another. 15 According to the number of years after the jubilee, you shall buy from your neighbor, and according to the number of years for crops he shall sell to you. 16 If the years are many you shall increase the price, and if the years are few you shall diminish the price, for it is the number of the crops that he is selling to you. 17 You shall not wrong one another, but you shall fear your God; for I am the LORD your God. 18 "Therefore you shall do my statutes, and keep my ordinances and perform them; so you will dwell in the land securely. 19 The land will yield its fruit, and you will eat your fill, and dwell in it securely. 20 And if you say, 'What shall we eat in the seventh year, if we may not sow or gather in our crop?' 21 I will command my blessing upon you in the sixth year, so that it will bring forth fruit for three years. 22 When you sow in the eighth year, you will be eating old produce; until the ninth year, when its produce comes in, you shall eat the old. 23 The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; for you are strangers and sojourners with me.

Leviticus 25: 10-23

While we sing songs about the "year of Jubilee", many are unaware that this Biblical concept was God's design for giant party every fifty years! How would you like to take a year off work with all your friends and family at the same time? Better yet, if you had mortgaged your family home and were in debt up to your ears, all debt was to be forgiven in the year of jubilee. It was God's way of hitting the giant reset button and refreshing everything to the way it was when the children of Israel entered the land and it was given to them. No work was to be done in the fields. Slaves were to be set free, debts were cleared and the real estate was returned to the the original owners. This was not communism where the state owns and controls everything. Rather, it is a limited form of capitalism. If one were going to lease the land until the next Jubilee, the price for doing so in year 1 would be much greater than if one were to lease it in year 49. This concept of market price based upon valuation of the time-difference of money is unique. Its purpose was to remind the people that they did not "own" land. The people were to be strangers and sojourners with the Lord. While one could still work and make a profit, one could not buy up all the land and enslave his neighbors in debt in perpetuity. The Lord is a god of second chances.

Debt enslaves people. When the Jewish people revolted against Rome in 66 A.D. one of the first things they did was to burn the temple records of all the debts that were owed. In essence, they wanted a second chance to start over as a free nation and to celebrate a jubilee type event. There is little recorded history to show that the year of Jubilee was actually carried out. Over time, the people forgot the commands.

In the 4th chapter of Luke, we have a story of Jesus reading from the Book of Isaiah. While the word "jubilee" is not mentioned the imagery is very much the same:

And he stood up to read; and there was given to him the book of the prophet Isaiah. He opened the book and found the place where it was written, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord."

Luke 4: 16-19

Jesus then told the assembly that "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.". I suspect that the first year of Jesus's ministry might have been a jubilee year. I suspect that the people recognized the message; but, they did not accept the author of jubilee.

I like a God who wants to party! It is a lot like throwing a big wingding and killing the fatted calf when the prodical son comes home. The Father says, "We have to celebrate." To often we celebrate transitory things. Somehow the good news is tied to the concept of jubilee. If one wants to pick a good year, pick a year of jubilee.