3 OT C: We need a Jubilee

 Friends

Peace be with you. 

On May 9, 2024, Pope Francis declared this year, 2025, a jubilee year. In his address, entitled “Spes Non Confundit” or “Hope does not disappoint” the Pope highlighted a few acts that we should do as a church, which are all connected to the theological virtue of hope. Lest we believe, however, that Pope Francis invented the idea of a Jubilee year, we should heed the origin he defines in the document itself. The Pope says it goes back to 1300 with the proclamation of the Jubilee done by Pope Boniface VIII. With all due respect to Pope Francis, even though this is the first expression of a Christian Jubilee year, the tradition actually goes back much farther. 

The first reading for today’s Mass describes an earlier jubilee year from the Book of Nehemiah, though at one point it was united with another Old Testament Book called Ezra. Both books describe a time when the Jewish people had just returned from being exiled, some people for as long as seventy years. They were allowed to return to Israel by a pagan Persian king named Cyrus. King Cyrus not only allowed them to return but he gave them money to rebuild the temple and allowed them to appoint a Jewish leader named Nehemiah. So Ezra is a priest and Nehemiah is sort of a politician. Ezra calls all the people who have not been allowed to practice their religion for seventy years to gather at the Temple and he reads the first five Books of the Old Testament to them and their reaction is to start crying. They cry so much that Nehemiah and Ezra have to remind them that this is meant to be a good time, that they are supposed to be rejoicing. There’s a feast going on. Why are they crying, you might ask. Partly because the people are being reminded of some of the things in the Torah that they were supposed to be doing to be in right relationship with God that they haven’t been doing. One of these would have been living out a jubilee year every 50 years. A Jubilee year demanded the release of debts, allowing your farmland to sit farrow, and observing a year-long sabbath rest. The people are mourning, therefore, because they can see that one of the reasons they went into exile in the first place was because they had neglected being in right relationship with God whenever it became inconvenient for them, especially when it was time to live out a jubilee year. They neglected their relationship with God until they didn’t know him anymore. And, even though Nehemiah is encouraging them to celebrate because now that they know this they can do something about it, this will be the last book written in the Old Testament that describes God working with and in his people. Other books will be written after Ezra and Nehemiah, like Maccabees and Tobit, but these books are almost entirely about the faithful actions of holy people and not about God working in the lives of those people. One idea as to why that is true is because the people, after being reminded to keep the jubilee year, promptly forget and allowed excuses to get in the way of living it out. 

That is until a certain carpenter decided to walk into a synagogue in Nazareth around the year 33AD and opened a scroll containing the Book of Isaiah that declared that it was going to be a jubilee year. The problem is that carpenters can’t declare jubilee years, only priests like Ezra can do that. But they have someone better than Ezra here. Jesus knew that that year, in which his death and resurrection would take place, is truly a year of forgiveness for the debt of sin and a year worthy of ridding ourselves of anything that distracts from being in right relationship with God. 

I think we need a jubilee year now more than ever because, in this time of immediate gratification, we need to work on our patience. In Paragraph Four from Pope Francis' document, he says…

“…In our fast-paced world, we are used to wanting everything now. We no longer have time simply to be with others; even families find it hard to get together and enjoy one another’s company. Patience has been put to flight by frenetic haste, and this has proved detrimental, since it leads to impatience, anxiety and even gratuitous violence, resulting in more unhappiness and self-centeredness. Nor is there much place for patience in this age of the Internet, as space and time yield to an ever-present “now”. Were we still able to contemplate creation with a sense of awe, we might better understand the importance of patience. We could appreciate the changes of the seasons and their harvests, observe the life of animals and their cycles of growth, and enjoy the clarity of vision of Saint Francis.”

Do you find yourself constantly worrying about what comes next? Do you find that you spend all day Sunday getting prepared for Monday, that every moment that isn’t occupied is spent staring at your phone or tablet? How can we use the jubilee year to refocus our lives to be more focused on God and God’s people and less focused on things and tasks?