Week 5 - The Jubilee
When the men and women who God made in his image are oppressed and call out to him, he comes to rescue and repairs what's broken. This week we'll look at God's command for humans to participate in this rescue and repair work, through an event called jubilee. Hope for jubilee is a recurring theme in the Bible, and a driving concern for Christians who are devoted to doing justice.
Key Justice Scripture
"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 25:10
This Week's Justice Reading Plan
- Leviticus 1-20
- Psalm 30 - 36
Bible Project’s “One Year Reading Plan”
Justice Resources
?Word
Jubilee
"...every 50th year was to be announced as a jubilee year. All real property should automatically revert to its original owner (Leviticus 25:10; compare 25:13), and those who, compelled by poverty, had sold themselves as slaves to their brothers, should regain their liberty (Leviticus 25:10; compare 25:39).
In addition to this...there should be neither sowing nor reaping nor pruning of vines, and everybody was expected to live on what the fields and the vineyards produced "of themselves,"...
Thus there are three distinct factors constituting the essential features of the Jubilee Year: personal liberty, restitution of property, and what we might call the simple life."
?Podcast and ?Video
The BibleProject did a podcast episode on "Jesus and his Jubilee Mission". The episode does a great job tying together the orginal command to do jubilee, the prophecies about a coming ultimate jubilee, how Jesus fulfilled those prophecies, and why his followers, Chrisitans are to carry on that mission.
?Book
"White Trash - The 400 Year Untold History of CLass in America" by Nancy Isenberg (Amazon)
Isenberg chronicles how poor and lower class White folks were degraded throughout American history by myths and slurs like, "white trash". Finally, the Great Depression broke apart myths about poverty and the superiority of upper class Whites. Policy makers and government officials decided to enact jubilee-inspired legislation to rescue tens of millions of White people from poverty.
Excerpt from the book (notice the jubilee-like concern not just for economic oppression of people, but explotiation of the environment) :
"The Depression revealed that liberty for some—for the select, the privileged—was not liberty for all. In a remarkable article of 1933, titled 'The New Deal and the Constitution,' a popular writer named John Corbin questioned the claims of Americans to an exclusive quality of freedom. He posed a rhetorical question:
'Can a nation call itself free if it finds itself periodically on the verge of bankruptcy and starvation in the face of the fact that it possesses all the materials of the good life?'
He meant that freedom was compromised when a nation allowed the majority of its people to suffer devastating poverty and enduring economic insecurity.
Regulation, regional planning, and readjustment (the last a favorite New Deal term) were needed to correct market abuses, control the exploitation of natural resources, and adjust class imbalance, and to do so, in President Roosevelt’s phrase, 'not to destroy individualism but to protect it.'"
(You can also watch this deep dive interview with the author)
Last Week
In week 4 of Justice Year we learned that the goal of God's justice is the resoration of what's broken in society so there is peace, or shalom.
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