More Than Stone

Lev 25:10-14 And you shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubilee unto you; and you shall return every man unto his possession, and you shall return every man unto his family. A jubilee shall that fiftieth year be unto you: you shall not sow, neither reap that which grows of itself in it, nor gather the grapes in it of your untended vine. For it is the jubilee; it shall be holy unto you: you shall eat what it yields thereof out of the field. In the year of this jubilee you shall return every man unto his possession. And if you sell anything unto your neighbor, or buy anything of your neighbor’s hand, you shall not oppress one another:

Luke 4:18-19, 21 The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he has sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, To preach the acceptable year of the Lord. And he began to say unto them, This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears.

Messiah’s arrival was to proclaim the year of Jubilee, the “acceptable year of the Lord”. Jesus inaugurated the arrival of a perpetual Jubilee. Jubilee year was God, setting things back to rights. It reflected God’s standards for how people should treat people. In the year of Jubilee, debts of the poor were forgiven, slaves were set free and land that had been sold off was to be returned to the original owner. God set in place a system of caring for the oppressed; putting humans back on equal playing fields with one another. He knows that power and money corrupt and allow for the usury and oppression of those without.

How is it, that we have so spiritualized His words that preaching the Good News to the poor, healing the brokenhearted, freedom for captives, and recovery of sight to the blind has simply come to mean telling people that they are going to hell if they don’t accept Jesus? Did God not mean those things? Are we not to set the prisoners free? Feed the poor? Heal the sick? Where is this Jubilee that Jesus proclaimed? How am I bringing the Kingdom of God to bear in this world?

God implemented Jubilee, Sabbath and the Sabbath year to remind us of who we are and who HE is. The land is on loan to us. Food is a provision from God for all. God cares for the poor and oppressed. Exodus people must never return to a system of slavery. In Biblical Israel the cycle of poverty began when a family fell into debt, it deepened when they had to sell their land to pay the debt and reached it’s climax when they only had their labor to sell, becoming bond-servants. In the Sabbath year, God demanded not only that bond-servants were to be set free, but also that they were to be given enough resources to make it on their own. (Deuteronomy 15:12-17)

I am absolutely fascinated by the Old Testament. So often, we miss the beauty and power of the principles that God laid out for us. Will we continue to downgrade these scriptures as obscure snippets that have no meaning for us while we continue to add to our own pockets? Hunger, homelessness and systemic poverty can only be viewed as a lack of obedience on the Church’s part.

John Haughy, a Jesuit theologian said:

“We read the gospel as if we had no money, and we spend our money as if we know nothing of the gospel.”

Technorati Tags: poverty, social+justice, Exodus, Messiah, Jubilee+Year

I have often wondered if my theology is venturing into heresy. Then a friend sent me this quote from G.K. Chesterton’s book Orthodoxy. I must confess, I haven’t read the book, but I do love the quote.

“I am the fool of this story . . . I freely confess all the idiotic ambitions of the end of the nineteenth century. I did, like all the other solemn little boys, try to be in advance of the age. Like them I tried to be some ten minutes in advance of the age. And I found that I was eighteen hundred years behind it. I did strain my voice with a painfully juvenile exaggeration in uttering my truths. . . but I have discovered , not that they were not truths, but simply that they were not mine. When I fancied that I stood alone I was really in the ridiculous position of being backed up by all Christendom. It may be, Heaven forgive me, that I did try to be original; but I only succeeded in inventing all by myself an inferior copy of the existing traditions of civilized religion . . . I did try to found a heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy.

Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity.”