Septuagesima: Jesus comes home

In our gospel passage (Lk 4: 14-21), Jesus is back home and goes to the sabbath service with family and friends, just as in the old days. Any thirteen-year-old male could address the congregation in the synagogue. And Jesus does. But as usual he doesn't how to quit when he is ahead.  Initially folks are quite impressed by the grown-up Jesus.   He reads Isaiah's call to social justice:  how God wants good news for the poor, release for captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and liberation of the oppressed. Nice ideas on paper, as usual.

Jesus, however, talks about actually doing them, and in a radically open way.  He endorses Jubilee Year.  Here is what that means.  Every seventh day is a shabbat (sabbath) of rest from Friday night until Saturday night.  Every seventh year is shabbat ha-aretz, a sabbath for the earth when lands lie fallow.  After seven terms of seven years, the next year was to be Jubilee, when all debts would be cancelled, all slaves freed, and the land broken up and redistributed for the landless.  Back when the Hebrew People moved from the periphery of society into Establishment mode -- founding a capital at Jerusalem, centralizing worship in a temple, and adopting monarchy -- they became capitalists and then, of course, no one talked about Jubilee any more, so God raised up prophets to cry out against injustices.

Not only does Jesus want to recover Jubilee, but he wants to apply the principle, not just to Jews as God's drafted people, but to everyone.  He emphasizes the point by recounting stories in the Hebrew Scriptures in which God skips Jews and blesses gentiles.  That was the last straw, and the faithful then attempted to throw Jesus off the brow of a hill.  The lesson: some folk never let their religion interfere with their politics.  Fortunately, Jesus escaped.

It is easy for Christians to imagine that we are the chosen people and God doesn't love anyone else. Jesus' message puts paid to that notion.  God loves all people and wants justice done to all.

To liberate other people according to the vision of Isaiah and Jesus -- whether acting individually or through public policy --  we must first be liberated from our personal attachment to things, from our love of wealth and privilege, our self-centred orientation, from the addictions that enslave us, and from smallness of heart.  Only then we can we be liberators, the Jubilee people Jesus calls us to be.