Jesus And Jubilee

“… to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’ And he rolled up the scroll and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. And the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. And he began to say to them, ‘Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’” – Luke 4:20-21

In the perfect rhythm of God’s rest and restoration, every seventh day was a sabbath day. Every seventh year was a sabbath year. After every seven sabbath years was a Jubilee year, the sabbath of sabbaths. Leviticus 25 tells us they were to count “seven weeks of years, seven times seven years, so that the time of the seven weeks of years shall give you forty-nine years.” And then, in Daniel 9, we are told that the anointed one, the prince, will come in “seventy weeks” of years, seventy times seven years. The Jubilee of Jubilees. “This predicted 490 years,” writes N. T. Wright, “haunted the minds of devout Jews in the centuries immediately before and after the time of Jesus. There is plenty of evidence to indicate that people were calculating, as best they could, when that time would be up.”

It is in this context that Jesus announces his public ministry, a moment most clearly defined here in Luke 4. Jesus reads from Isaiah 61, and when he gets to the part where Isaiah refers to Leviticus 25, when he gets to the Jubilee year, he stops. He sits down and says, today this is fulfilled. The Jubilee of Jubilees, the prince of Jubilee, is here. 

There is some shadow of the Sabbath in our culture, but we don’t really have a good grasp of Jubilee. None of us have experienced it, and it is unclear whether or not the Israelites ever did; they certainly weren’t by the time of the monarchy. The Jubilee was only experienced once in a lifetime, every fifty years. It taught the Israelites that the land on which they lived belonged to God; that life was to be lived in community; that each person had equality and personal dignity in their shared identity as God’s people; that life had a rhythm of worship, work and rest. The Jubilee countered tendencies towards inequality and poverty through socioeconomic restoration of people and land. But it was also rooted in spiritual restoration; its beginning was marked by the Day of Atonement.

Jesus arrives at this time, reading this passage, to show us that he is all that the Jubilee points to. Rest, redemption, forgiveness, justice. This is what his public ministry will be about. What does the Jubilee mean to you? How is Jesus this for you?