Jubilees

Why concentrate on liberation, consolation, mercy, and justice? During the Francis pontificate, there’s been an increased amount of discussion about the relationship between justice and mercy. His opponents like to make fun of his emphasis on the latter (I’ve seen several ask versions of “where’s the room for justice?”). A well-catechized Christian, of course, knows that God’s justice and His mercy are inseparable. The Biblical idea of the Jubilee makes this very clear, most especially through its mixture of liberatory and consolatory language:

One ascertains with joy and with appreciation how faith in God also carries Israel’s culture, living in it a primacy in time, in work, in relationships. Some realities, which involve persons, tools and means to live, are not able to be subjected to unchecked egoism and the insatiable careerism of some people.

The believer may not tolerate the forms and the duration of a life of slavery, even as it was practiced by other peoples. Just so it is not tolerable that, because of debt or poverty, a family or a father be deprived of his land forever, since the land comes from God and is a fruitful gift for man.

From this, the detailed divine laws which idealistically intervene to promote justice and hope. The utopia consists precisely in the distance between one jubilee and another, and the difficulty of putting it into practice, but the orientation is clear: it questions, challenges, presses to accept the gift and to promote a culture of liberation. (vatican.va)

For one, slavery is not to be imposed upon the Hebrew people, and anything approximating service by an Israelite to another Israelite must be “humane” (for lack of a better word). This idea—that is, everything dealing with land restitution, liberation from debt, the ban on intra-religious slavery, etc—seems to show God as the father of mercy, but one that is expressed in terms of justice. Land can be bought and sold, redeemed, and so on, precisely because we belong to God and we are all merely His servants. We must be giving and forgiving precisely because nothing truly belongs to us.

And it is this idea that most especially permeates this short section from Leviticus—we belong to God, and thus, as Hadewijch of Brabant would write centuries later, we ought to “give all, for all is yours.” All things we own are ours by His mercy (or, perhaps, we might say, by His justice). That is the mystery: it is right and just for us to own things. But it is also right and just for us to be liberal with them, that is, to be merciful to others—to forgive debts, to treat others well (even when they have treated us wrongly), to live with love in our hearts, even when such seems impossible (for, of course, all things are possible with and in God).

This seems to me an important lesson for Christmas (really, perhaps, for all time). We see the prophecies; we read the scrolls; we know that He is coming. And he comes to redeem us, to do what is both just and merciful—to forgive what seems unforgivable, but in a way that is entirely in accord with His nature. Remembering this, we are to act in a similar way. The Jubilees of the Bible express just this idea—in a sense, they signify the Kingdom, the Kingdom that is already among us, that we are entreated to live out in a fallen world in both justice and mercy.