Debt and Jubilee.

Leviticus 25:1-24.

I.

            One of the most prevalent and powerful ways the people are kept subservient, compliant, and oppressed is debt.  One of the main purposes of debt is to widen and maintain the gap between the few who have everything and the many who have little or nothing.  Debt is basically another means for transferring wealth from the people doing the work to the people… well, not doing the work. 

            One of the main purposes of God in giving the people the Torah is to ensure that they did not fall into the oppressive, exploitative, arrangement they knew in Egypt.  Debt is of course just a slightly kinder and gentler form of slavery.

            We have managed to make debt seem a little more benign by giving indebted people the illusion of ownership.  But in a crisis this quickly evaporates, as we saw in 2008 and 2009.  In that mess, you notice, it was not the debtors who got bailed out but the creditors.

            To prevent the ravages of economic inequality, God gives the people the Torah.  And a central element of the Torah is a collection of laws having to do with the Sabbath, culminating in Leviticus 25 and the laws providing for Jubilee.

            Sabbath is more comprehensive than the requirement that no work be done one day in seven.  There is also provision for a Sabbath every seventh year, when the land was to be left unworked and people were to live off what they had saved or what the land produced by itself.  And finally there is the Jubilee which is observed every 7 x 7 years, when all debts are canceled and all land reverts to its original family of ownership.

            In other words, God recognizes the tendency of human greed and depravity to cause the economy to degenerate over time into inequality.  So God gives the people a system with a built-in series of reset buttons by which equality is restored and wealth redistributed downward.  These are the periodic Sabbaths leading up to the great Jubilee every half century.

            But, like much of the Torah, by the time of Jesus even these revolutionary regulations had stagnated and been twisted into rote, empty, and oppressive religious observances.  Instead of regular ways to restore justice and equality, Sabbath laws became just another way for the authorities and the privileged to assert their control over people’s lives.  We’re not sure the Jubilee was ever celebrated at all.

            And it is Jesus’ insistence on enacting the true and original meaning and practice of Sabbath as restoration of God’s justice and peace that generates the most friction between him and the ruling authorities. 

            Why do they get so viscerally upset with Jesus when he heals and forgives on the Sabbath?  Why was it such a big deal to them?  Because they know that Sabbath is really about a redistribution of wealth and power.  They know that their power depends on keeping people poor, sick, possessed, guilty, and in debt.  Anyone who is telling the people otherwise, like Jesus, would have to go.

II.

            When Jesus comes into the world, a large part of his mission is to proclaim Jubilee.  For one thing, the timing is right.  It had been 500 years since the building of the Second Temple after the people returned from exile.  That means there were 10 missed Jubilees, leading to this super-Jubilee that some ancient writings seem to predict would herald the arrival of the Messiah.

            In any case, Jubilee themes permeate Jesus’ ministry, beginning with the hymn his mother sings even before he is born, and continuing with his inaugural sermon in Nazareth, and the Sermon on the Mount, and in his numerous healings, exorcisms, and proclamations of forgiveness, the Greek word for which is better translated as “release” and is the same word used for the remission of debts.

            Wherever we find language of restoration, release, or reversal, wherever we hear about the last and the first changing places, or the poor being lifted up and the rich brought down, or the blessings of the gentle, the bereaved, the persecuted, or the hungry, we are in the spirit of Jubilee. 

            It could be argued that when Jesus talks about the Kingdom of God, he is talking about some version of Jubilee.  And of course he talks about the Kingdom of God more than anything else.

            We don’t notice it anymore, but we pray for Jubilee every day whenever we say the Lord’s Prayer.  For some reason only a few Christian groups say the words as Jesus says them in Matthew: “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.”  Or:  Release us from our debts as we release others from their indebtedness to us.  (Most English-speaking Christians use an adulterated and obfuscated version of the prayer, in which the words “debts” and “debtors” are changed to “trespasses” and “those who trespass against us,” which isn’t in any of the gospels.)

            And Jubilee is not just about canceling debts and redistributing wealth, it also has to do with restoring the family at the center of the society.  Only with Jesus, he does not want to keep the traditional family of his time which was based on blood and where the father often ruled like a little, tyrannical king.  He establishes a new kind of family based on equality and discipleship.  It is this reformed family of people who trust in him and his message that becomes the building block of his new Jubilee community, the Kingdom of God.

            And Jesus’ larger point is that this new community and family is not simply a sociological entity, but a spiritual one.  It is an anticipation of the fulfillment of God’s original plan for humanity. 

III.

            Reading through Leviticus 25, and then looking at how Jesus fulfills this vision and spirit in his ministry, is very sobering because of how far we have fallen away from it.  I think it is reflected in that “debts vs. trespasses” thing.  Instead of using Jesus’ words, that imply a desire to build a community where we release each other from various kinds of indebtedness, including financial, many Christians choose to use words implying we want merely to overlook each other’s missteps.  We decline to hold it against each other when we invade each other’s space.  But that is a lot weaker than relinquishing the bonds of debt and owing that tie people together into webs of injustice, guilt, poverty, and inequality.

            We Presbyterians should not congratulate ourselves that we use the right words.  Last week I got a phone call in my other job from a member of a church somewhere all upset that the session was spending the principal of the church’s endowment, when he felt they should only be spending the income, and is there anything the presbytery can do about it.  To which I replied that generally a church’s money is the session’s to spend as it pleases, and I hope they’re doing something good with it and not just replacing the steeple or something. 

            That exchange just reminded me that not only are many main-line Protestant churches, especially Presbyterian churches, creditors, that is, part of the privileged class that seeks to live off the income generated by other people’s work, but we like it this way and resent any suggestion that it might be otherwise.  Which means many of us don’t want to hear the message of Leviticus 25 or, for that matter, Jesus.  We appear to think it is possible to be “Christian” while studiously ignoring, or twisting into some more domesticated, psychologized form, most of Jesus’ teaching.

            It is not just us.  Ever since at least the 4^th century the church has been busy figuring out how to be “Christian” without Jesus.  So we talk incessantly about holding the right doctrines, hierarchies, and procedures, but never mention where he says “Woe to you who are rich,” or “Give away all that you have,” or “Do not store up your treasure,” “the first shall be last and the last shall be first,” and so forth.

            Somehow we manage to say daily, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors,” and at the same time enthusiastically take on more debt and/or make more money off our debtors.  As if he only meant figurative debts and symbolic debtors?  As if he didn’t intend to actively demolish the very foundation of a predatory economy?

IV.

            The basic theological point of Leviticus 25 is in verse 23, where God says, “The land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants.”  This of course is also expressed in Psalm 24, which we hear weekly leading up to the offering: “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof; the world and all those who dwell therein.”

            Everything derives from this affirmation.  All the rules about the Sabbath day and the sabbatical year and the Jubilee year are expressions of this truth.  They are ways in which we are to remember whose we are and whose planet this is.  They are ways in which we proclaim that it is not our initiative that holds everything together, but the Word and Spirit of the Creator.  They are ways in which we affirm our radical trust in the God who has delivered us to a place of stupendous abundance, where there is more than enough for everyone.

            The whole place belongs to the One who made it.  It is not ours to dispose of as we please, but we are stewards responsible to treat the planet according to the Owner’s expressed wishes, revealed in the Torah and finally in Jesus Christ.  And it is not the Owner’s wish that a very few people have a very large amount of wealth while the vast majority of people are poor.  Which is what we have now.

            The response of the Lord to such a situation is to gather people – mainly poor, broken, disenfranchised, alien, outcasts, “sinners,” and the sick – into an alternative community, new family-like units, governed by Jesus’ vision of the spirit of the Torah, in equality, non-violence, and mutual forgiveness, nourished by his Body and Blood, in anticipation of the final renewal and restoration of Creation.

            It is the holy task of every congregation to participate in this mission.  We are witnesses to the truth that the earth and everything on it belongs to God.  Every congregation is supposed to be a place where Jesus’ values, practices, and ways of thinking are followed, and those of the world are renounced and rejected.  Every congregation is supposed to be a place of generosity, equality, justice, sharing, goodness, and love.  Every congregation needs to be a place where selfishness, greed, avarice, hoarding, inequality, stealing, and violence are unequivocally and categorically excluded.

            Every congregation is a place where jubilee is happening!  Where debts are canceled, where the new family of God is established and fed, where people come to find acceptance and learn the ways of peace.

V.

            In the end, this is how we will be evaluated.  This is how every congregation will be evaluated.  To what degree did this gathering reflect and express the Kingdom of God?  The usual criteria of a secular economy mean nothing to the Lord.  He will only want to know how well we trusted him to provide for us, and for all.  He will want to know how we made for equality and sharing in our congregation and in our society.  He will want to know whether we cynically and selfishly perpetuated a corrupt and violent system, or faithfully represented his Kingdom of justice and peace.

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