“Proclaim the Jubilee” (Isaiah 61:1-11)

Some months ago I mentioned in a sermon that legal experts estimate that there are something between 10,000 and 300,000 federal regulations. When you add to that all the state, county and municipal regulations across the country, I can only imagine that you come up with a staggering figure. It occurred to me that some of these regulations must end up being forgotten, overlooked or buried under tons of sheets of legal paper. That in turn set me thinking what some of these regulations might be. Here is what I discovered:

In Texas it is illegal to sell your eyeballs. In North Carolina it is against the law to sing off-key. In Rhode Island you are not permitted to sell toothpaste and a toothbrush to the same customer on a Sunday. In Indiana you may not attend a public event or use public transport within four hours of eating an onions or garlic. In Wyoming you need an official permit to take a picture of a rabbit between January and April. In Quitman, Georgia, chickens are not allowed to cross the road. In Washington you can be fined for harassing Bigfoot. And did you know that in Minneapolis it is forbidden to drive a red car down Lake Street?[1]  

Perhaps it should come as no surprise to us that the same kind of thing was true in the ancient world as well. (At least they had an excuse. After all, they did not have computers or even books. All information was stored on long scrolls of papyrus.) A case in point is the law found in Leviticus 25:

You shall count off seven weeks of years, seven times seven years, so that the period of seven weeks of years gives forty-nine years. Then you shall have the trumpet sounded loud; on the tenth day of the seventh month—on the Day of Atonement—you shall have the trumpet sounded throughout all your land. And you shall hallow the fiftieth year and you shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you: you shall return, every one of you, to your property and every one of you to your family. That fiftieth year shall be a jubilee for you: you shall not sow, or reap the aftergrowth, or harvest the unpruned vines. For it is a jubilee; it shall be holy to you: you shall eat only what the field itself produces. In this year of jubilee you shall return, every one of you, to your property… The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants. Throughout the land that you hold, you shall provide for the redemption of the land. (Leviticus 25:8-13,23-24)

When you look at it, it is quite a remarkable law: that every fifty years all property reverts to its original ownership. There had been times in the ancient world when kings had seen the land in their realms being gobbled up by wealthy landowners and ordered a general return of property. But Israel was unique in having it as a statute written into its code of law and having it recur on a regular, predictable basis. It was called the year of Jubilee because it was announced with the sounding of the trumpet, or shofar, which in Hebrew is yobel—and hence our word “jubilee”.

Sadly, however, like the driving of red cars on Lake Street and singing off-key in North Carolina, as far as anyone can tell the law of Jubilee was never enacted in all the long history of ancient Israel. It simply sat in the books, or scrolls as it were, unobserved.

The Assurance of Jubilee

Now, suddenly, hundreds of years after Moses, in the prophet Isaiah, as we are bidden to look ahead to the coming messianic kingdom, what do we hear about once again? The Jubilee.

The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
because the Lord has anointed me;
he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed,
to bind up the broken-hearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and release to the prisoners;
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor,
and the day of vengeance of our God;
to comfort all who mourn;
to provide for those who mourn in Zion—
to give them a garland instead of ashes,
the oil of gladness instead of mourning,
the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit.

I suppose we could say that the Year of Jubilee had been something of a utopian dream. It was to have been a universal act of practical recognition that God and God alone is the giver of our land, our freedom and our sustenance. It was putting wheels under those words that we say at the offertory Sunday by Sunday:

Yours, Lord, is the greatness, the power,
the glory, the victory and the majesty.
For everything in heaven and on earth is yours.
All things come from you, O Lord,
and of your own do we give you. (1 Chronicles 29:11,14)

The distant echo of the long-forgotten Law of Jubilee rings clearly through the words of Isaiah. The day was coming when God’s justice would not just be a principle that we read about in the ancient texts of Scripture. Nor was the promise that Isaiah foresaw merely some wispy existence in a heavenly world. It was solid. It was real—a present, all-encompassing reality, a feature of the transformation of all creation to reflect the glory, the holiness, the compassion and the perfect justice of God.

So it is that the whole principle of Jubilee arises out of the character of God himself. We see this in verse 8: “For I the Lord love justice, I hate robbery and wrongdoing;” and again in verse 11: “As the earth brings forth its shoots, and as a garden causes what is sown in it to spring up, so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring up before all the nations.”

I don’t believe it is a coincidence, therefore, that in the ancient law in Leviticus the Year of Jubilee was to be announced on the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur. This was the single day in the year when the high priest could enter the Holy of Holies in the Temple. There he would call on the name of the Lord and offer a blood sacrifice on behalf of the people. It was on that holiest of days, after the passage of seven times seven years, that the Jubilee was to be proclaimed. The message was clear: Justice springs out of reconciliation with God—and conversely, reconciliation with God issues in justice.

The Bringer of Jubilee

We hear Isaiah’s foretelling of Jubilee once again in the New Testament, as a young man walks to the front of the synagogue in Nazareth, unrolls the scroll of Isaiah and scans down it until he comes to the point where it reads,

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. (Luke 3:18,19)

Clearly Jesus saw himself as the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy. Part of his messianic role is to be the herald of Jubilee, the bringer of God’s justice to the world. The disciples thought that this was going to happen at any minute as they strode through the streets of Jerusalem and people waved palm branches of victory and shouted choruses of “Hosanna!” “Save us!” Their hearts must have thumped even more loudly as he swept through the Temple, overturning the tables of the moneychangers, coins rolling across the stone floor, doves cooing and flapping their wings, sacrificial lambs scattering and bleating their plaintive baas.

Yet this was not how the Jubilee would be ushered in. Just as the Law had prescribed that it should begin with the Day of Atonement, so it would be as our Great High Priest offered his very self on the altar of the cross. There the Lamb of God took all the wrong and hurt, all the cruelty and brutality of this world upon himself. It is at Golgotha that we see the beginning of God’s justice being fulfilled on the earth.

Three days later, as the disciples talked with him in the garden, walked with him along the road, met with him in the upper room and ate with him at the seaside, they knew beyond any doubt that everything had changed: that even the final injustice, death itself, had been defeated on the cross of Jesus. And in the days and months following the resurrection we find people actually living the Jubilee. In the Acts of the Apostles Luke tells us,

All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. (Acts 2:44-47)

We read of Barnabas selling his field and laying the money he received at the apostles’ feet. A century and a half later Tertullian could write of how the pagans would look at Christians and exclaim, “Look… how they love one another!”

The Challenge of Jubilee

So what does all of this say to us today? I am not convinced that the Bible is telling us to duplicate what happened in the early church. But I am convinced that God calls us, like them, to be a Jubilee community. The Jubilee was inaugurated at the cross. It will come in all its fullness when Jesus returns and God reveals the new heaven and the new earth. Yet between this time and that, what are we to do?

The Year of Jubilee taught that all property belonged to the Lord who had created it and given it to Israel in the first place. So being a Jubilee people begins with the recognition that all that we “have” is in fact a trust from God, that we are not owners but stewards and servants.

The Year of Jubilee required two years of allowing the land to rest and not tilling the soil. The people had to depend on what the land provided throughout that time. So for us the Jubilee is a call to learn to depend meaningfully on the Lord.

The Jubilee meant release from slavery and freedom for debtors. So living it out means sharing God’s heart for the poor, the oppressed and the downtrodden. It will be reflected in how we use our resources of money, time and influence, and not least in how we vote when we have the opportunity.

The Jubilee was a time of giving back. And so we are to be a generous people. We recognize that all that we have is God’s gracious gift to us—and we seek to reflect God’s generosity in our own daily living.

The Jubilee was a time of celebration. So too, underlying all the characteristics of a Jubilee people is joy—a profound gratitude for everything that God so bountifully bestows upon us in our creation and above all in our costly redemption through the cross.

I pray that the Jubilee may not be a forgotten piece of Scripture for us today. Rather, in our actions as much as in our words may we be a people bringing the good news of God’s Jubilee in Christ to the world.

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[1]     http://justsomething.co/the-22-most-ridiculous-us-laws-still-in-effect-today-2/

Sermon – “No Room for Boasting” (Romans 3:19-28)

If you listened carefully to this morning’s New Testament reading, you may have noticed that there was one word that came up with amazing frequency: six times, in fact, in the first two verses, and then three more times in the last two. It was the word “law”. It is one of the key concepts in this letter to the Romans: key because the Roman church was made up of a mixture of Jews and non-Jews, and for Jews the law was something that was central to their identity as a nation. It marked them off as God’s people. And so the law, and its place within the Christian faith, became a crucial topic. Is it still in effect or do we disregard it altogether? What are we say about Jews who disobey the law, or about Gentiles who keep it?

Lest you think this interest in the law was a bit excessive, let me read you this excerpt from an article in the Wall Street Journal three years ago.

For decades, the task of counting the total number of federal criminal laws has bedeviled lawyers, academics and government officials. “You will have died and [been] resurrected three times,” and still be trying to figure out the answer, said Ronald Gainer, a retired Justice Department official. In 1982, while at the Justice Department, Mr Gainer oversaw what still stands as the most comprehensive attempt to tote up a number. The effort came as part of a long and ultimately failed campaign to persuade Congress to revise the criminal code, which by the 1980s was scattered among 50 titles and 23,000 pages of federal law. The project stretched two years. In the end, it produced only an educated estimate: about 3,000 criminal offenses. Since then, no one has tried anything nearly as extensive.

None of these studies broached the separate—and equally complex—question of crimes that stem from federal regulations, such as, for example, the rules written by a federal agency to enforce a given act of Congress. These rules can carry the force of federal criminal law. Estimates of the number of regulations range from 10,000 to 300,000. None of the legal groups who have studied the code have a firm number. “There is no one in the United States over the age of 18 who cannot be indicted for some federal crime,” said John Baker, a retired Louisiana State University law professor who has also tried counting the number of new federal crimes created in recent years. “That is not an exaggeration.”[1]

By contrast, the number of laws that Paul was referring to in the Old Testament can be counted. According to the rabbis there were 613 in all—365 negative ones and 248 positive. And all of them flowed from just ten commandments, which in turn Jesus summarized in two: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. It seems simple by comparison.

A Silence: The law makes us conscious of our sin (19-20)

Paul’s aim, as this morning’s passage opens, is to help his readers understand the basic purpose of the law itself. Sadly, there were those who saw the law as a kind of stick with which to beat those who lived outside its provisions. They took great pride in their possession of the law and in their knowledge of the law, but they were not necessarily all that careful about keeping the law. Or at best they were selective about it. While they were fastidious about circumcision, they may not have been entirely honest in their financial dealings. While they scrupulously obeyed the dietary laws, their sexual mores may have been questionable.

In this regard they were really no different from anyone else. We are quick to see others’ flaws and foibles. Yet we are blind to our own—or at best we try to minimize them or make excuses for them. Jesus brought that out when he asked, “Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbor, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ while the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye” (Matthew 7:3-5).

And so, Paul declares, God did not devise the law so that we could point an accusing finger at others. Rather (in the words of the New Living translation), “Its purpose is to keep people from having excuses… The law simply shows us how sinful we are.” The version of this passage in The Message puts it even more clearly:

Whatever is written in these Scriptures is not what God says about others but to us to whom these Scriptures were addressed in the first place! And it’s clear enough, isn’t it, that we’re sinners, every one of us, in the same sinking boat with everybody else? Our involvement with God’s revelation doesn’t put us right with God. What it does is force us to face our complicity in everyone else’s sin.

I try to get into the gym a few times each week, and there are a number of us who kvetch from time to time about people who don’t re-rack the weights, who don’t bother to aim when they throw away their paper towels, who don’t flush the toilets … and the list could go on and on. Yet I need to ask myself, what about the times when someone has tried to share something important with me and I haven’t bothered to listen? What about the times when I have promised to do something and promptly forgotten about it? What about the times when I have failed to control my tongue? Suddenly the paper towels seem trivial by comparison.

Paul’s whole purpose up to this point in the letter is to demonstrate beyond any doubt that no one stands outside the condemnation of the law. The law teaches us that we are all without excuse. We have no defense. We can only stand in silence before the Judge of all.

The principal point of the law [wrote Martin Luther] is to make men not better but worse; that is to say, it showeth unto them their sin, that by the knowledge thereof they may be humbled, terrified, bruised and broken, and by this means may be driven to seek comfort and so come to … Christ.”[2]  

A Sacrifice: The cost of reconciliation (21-26)

And this brings us to Paul’s next point. For here we come to one of the most important words in all of Scripture. It is the little word “but”. That little word is the fulcrum on which the whole of the gospel swings. It introduces us to what New Testament scholar C.K. Barrett has described as “perhaps the richest and most important paragraph in the whole letter”.[3]

The law condemns us all. It’s like one of those action-adventure flicks. Our hero is being chased by a band of murderous hooligans. He scrambles over a chain-link fence and into an alleyway. The he realizes that it is a dead end. There is no way out. The thugs move towards him, rolling up their sleeves, drooling at the thought that in a moment they will be beating him to a pulp. Then suddenly you hear the whirring of a helicopter overhead. A rope dangles in front of our hero and he is whisked off into safety as his attackers reach up in a last vain effort to grab him by his boots.

That is the effect of that one word “but”. In the words of the New Living Translation, “The more we know God’s law, the clearer it becomes that we aren’t obeying it. But now God has shown us a way to be made right with him without keeping the requirements of the law…”

How has he done this? In three words in verses 24 and 25 Paul gives us three vivid images. The first is “justification” and here Paul brings us into the courtroom. We stand before the judge, guilty as charged. Yet instead of imposing upon us the full force of the law and giving us the sentence we justly deserve, he grants us a pardon.

Paul’s second picture is of the slave market. It comes to us in the word “redemption”. In the ancient world captives of war were often paraded into the marketplace and auctioned off to the highest bidder to become slaves for the rest of their lives. The law teaches us (and rightly so) that we are captivated and enslaved by sin. Yet God has graciously released us and given us a new freedom. “If the Son sets you free,” Jesus promises us, “you shall be free indeed” (John 8:36).

The third place to which Paul brings us is the altar. Paul tells us of Jesus as being put forward as a “sacrifice of atonement”. In the Old Testament atonement always involves sacrifice. This was to underline the fact that reconciliation—true reconciliation, that is—never comes without a cost. It is not a question of just pretending that nothing is wrong. It is not as though we can just leave our sins behind as though nothing ever happened. “The righteous, loving, faithful God,” writes C.E.B. Cranfield, “does not mock or insult his creature man by pretending that his sin does not matter, but rather himself bears the full cost of forgiving it righteously—lovingly.”[4]

A Standing: Made right with God through faith (27-28)

Whether it is as Protestants or as products of the twenty-first century or a combination of both, we tend to shrink from the often gory depictions of past centuries of Jesus on the cross. We prefer our simple, sanitized versions, that work well as a decoration on a living room wall or on the covers of our prayer books. Someone has observed that Jesus died not on a silver cross between two candlesticks, but on a wooden cross between two thieves. Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ may be criticized at points but it does bring across the sheer brutality of the cross. There Jesus has taken the full brunt of our sin in all its ugliness upon himself.

Yet the point of all this is not to overwhelm us with guilt, but to draw us to faith. For on the cross we are confronted not only with the horror of our sin but even more with the wonder of God’s grace. There is a prayer in our Book of Common Prayer that begins, “Lord Jesus Christ, you stretched out your arms of love on the hard wood of the cross that everyone might come within the reach of your saving embrace…” The cross stands as the symbol of God’s condemnation of human sin. Yet it also stands as an invitation, in the words that we heard from Jesus in this morning’s Gospel: “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

Here is how Eugene Petersen puts the final verses of this morning’s passage in The Message: “What we’ve learned is this: God does not respond to what we do; we respond to what God does… Our lives get in step with God and all others by letting him set the pace, not by proudly or anxiously trying to run the parade.” In the cross of Christ God has taken the initiative to deal with sin, yours and mine, once and for all. All that is left for you and for me to do is to trust him.

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[1]     “Many Failed Efforts to Count Nation’s Federal Criminal Laws”, Wall Street Journal, 23 Jul 2011

[2]     Quoted by John Stott in Romans: God’s Good News for the World, 104

[3]     Reading Through Romans, 15

[4]     Romans, A Shorter Commentary, 68