Scripture Readings, Jan. 26, 2025

Third Sunday in Ordinary Time

Nehemiah 8:2-4a, 5-6, 8-10

1 Corinthians 12:12-30

Luke 1:1-4, 4:14-21

If you haven’t yet dusted off your ram’s horn, now is a good time to do so. The year 2025 (technically, Dec. 24, 2024, to Jan. 6, 2026) is a Year of Jubilee, from the Hebrew, “yobhel,” or “ram,” since in ancient times the jubilee year was announced by the blowing of the “shofar,” or “ram’s horn” on the Day of Atonement. “It shall be a jubilee (a “yobhel”) for you.” (Leviticus 25:10 NAB; Leviticus 25:8-55)

So what is a jubilee year? Most of us know about God’s command to keep holy the Sabbath or “seventh” day (Exodus 20:8-11 and Deuteronomy 5:12-15), on which God rested from his work of creation. As Christians, we observe this by keeping holy the Lord’s Day in honor of our Lord’s Resurrection, understood by the Church Fathers as the “eighth” day of creation. (Epistle of Barnabas, chapter 15; or Irenaeus’ “Against Heresies,” book 5, chapter 23)

We might be less familiar with the sabbatical year that God prescribed for his people to observe every seventh year when they entered the promised land. “For six years you may sow your field, and for six years prune your vineyard, gathering in their produce. But during the seventh year, the land shall have a sabbath of complete rest, a sabbath for the Lord, when you may neither sow your field nor prune your vineyard.” (Leviticus 25:3-4) Debts were released in this year, and any Israelite who had fallen into indentured servitude was set free. (Deuteronomy 15:1-18) It was a year of celebration and rest from the work of sowing and reaping through all the land.

Perhaps least familiar of all, though, is God’s command that after the seventh sabbatical year — so, every 49 years — they observe a second year of rest, called a year of “jubilee.” “You shall treat this 50th year as sacred. You shall proclaim liberty (‘aphesis’) in the land for all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you, when each of you shall return to your own property, each of you to your own family.” (Leviticus 25:10) What marked this year as different from the others was that in addition to letting the land rest, releasing debts and freeing slaves, anyone whose debt had been so great that they’d had to sell their ancestral land would regain it, thus resetting the whole economy and restoring the original provision of promised land to all the tribes of Israel described in Joshua 13-19. As they were freed from slavery and brought to the promised land in the Exodus, so they would be freed and restored to their land in the years of jubilee.

Doing so took great faith and trust in God’s Providence, not least for him to provide two years’ worth of food in that sixth-year crop. (Leviticus 25:20-22) Israel struggled to keep these sabbatical and jubilee years, along with the rest of God’s law, and so were led into exile by the Babylonians for 70 years, “Until the land retrieved its lost sabbaths.” (2 Chronicles 36:21)

During that time of exile, there came prophecy of an “anointed one” — a “messiah” — to come, 490 years (10 jubilees) after their return from exile (Daniel 9:24-27), upon whom the Spirit of the Lord would rest, as it had rested upon the anointed priest-king David. (Isaiah 61:1 and 1 Samuel 16:13) He was to “bring glad tidings to the poor,” (Isaiah 61:1) restore sight to the blind (Isaiah 35:5), and most interesting of all, to “proclaim liberty (‘aphesis’) to captives” (Isaiah 61:1) — indeed, “to set at liberty (‘aphesis’) those who are oppressed” (Isaiah 58:6; translation my own) — and to “announce a year of favor from the Lord.” (Isaiah 61:2; cf. 58:5) In other words, he would proclaim jubilee — a 10th, or perfect, culminating Jubilee.

When Jesus shows up in his hometown synagogue in Nazareth, reads these passages from the scroll of Isaiah, and proclaims, “Today this scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing” (Luke 4:14-21), it is the ultimate mic-drop. He ushers in the definitive time of Jubilee, and goes on to “proclaim liberty (‘aphesis’—‘forgiveness,’ ‘release’)” by freeing captives held in bondage to Satan (Luke 13:16; 4:35, 41); by giving sight to the blind (Luke 7:21-22; 18:35-43); and above all by releasing people from the debt of their sins (Luke 7:41-48; as well as 5:20; 7:48; and 24:47), as only God can do. By his Passion, Death and Resurrection, Jesus performs the ultimate exorcism (John 12:27-32), atoning for sin to restore us from our primordial exile in sin and death and to open the way of return to the promised land of heaven — the renewed garden where heaven and earth are reunited and the tree of life yields its fruit in due season for the healing of the nations. (Revelation 21:1-5; 22:2, 14, 19; Psalm 1) Queue the trumpets!

Such an epic Jubilee deserves a doubling of commemoration, and Pope Paul II did just that by decreeing in 1470 that the Church would celebrate the Jubilee every 25 years. Even that is not quite enough, and so extraordinary years of Jubilee are also proclaimed on occasion, as Pope Francis did in 2015 with the Year of Mercy. This current “Jubilee of Hope” is a perfect time to embrace the “liberty” Christ wins for you. Return to confession; be freed from the slave-debt of your sin; cast off deeds of darkness and walk in the light, perhaps even by making pilgrimage, healed of your blindness with eyes fixed on your true homeland — the garden that Christ cultivates. “It shall be a jubilee for you.”