Saturday of the Seventeenth Week in Ordinary Time
Saturday, August 5, 2023
Today’s Readings:
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/080523.cfm
One in a series of 60 paintings by Jacob Lawrence which captures
the journeys of millions of African-Americans
who left the Jim Crow South
in search of better lives elsewhere.
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, Leviticus offers us a reading critical to our moral clarity.
This fiftieth year you shall make sacred
Leviticus 25:10
by proclaiming liberty in the land for all its inhabitants.
It shall be a jubilee for you,
when every one of you shall return to his own property,
every one to his own family estate.
Leviticus 25 is the account of Jubilee which, for the Mosaic community, was the quintessential practice of justice.
When the Israelites came to the Promised Land, they came as an emancipated people to share in the abundance to which God had delivered them. There was initial equity in the sharing. But over time, power, influence and wealth were hoarded – endangerments that threaten all communities.
In the proclamation of Jubilee, God directs the people to return to an original justice in which all persons are freed from indebtedness of any kind in order to live in communal harmony.
Consider the hypothetical example of an Israelite family that lost their land twelve years before the Jubilee Year. On the tenth day of the seventh month, the entire community participates in the Day of Atonement and its ritual purging of sin. On this very same day, the trumpet is blown and the Jubilee year is announced; in this year, both sins and debts are forgiven, and the family that had been forced to live and work in another’s household for more than a decade regain possession of their land.
Imagine the joy of this moment! Imagine the dreams and desires! After having served as hired hands for a generation, now to be restored to a position of social and economic strength!
Michael J. Rhodes – Jubilee Formation: Cultivating Desire and Dependence in Leviticus 25
The concept of this type of justice is alien to our capitalist and consumerist orientations. We may have heard the attitude expressed, or we may hold it ourselves, that some people have and some people don’t. And the ones who “have” earned it and deserve it.
“Jubilee” instructs us that this is a false context for fulfilling God’s Will for the wholeness of Creation. In such a false context, reward ensues from avarice, dominance, possessiveness, and aggression, yielding a continually deeper gap between those who have and those who do not, between those who influence and those who cannot, between those who thrive and those who do not.
“Jubilee” resets the game board and in so doing resets attitudes about who owns what and how they must use it to enact the Reign of God.
I recently heard a story which speaks of forgetting to whom things belong. A very proper lady went to a tea shop. She sat at a table for two, ordered a pot of tea, and prepared to eat some cookies which she had in her purse. Because the tea shop was crowded, a man took the other chair and also ordered tea. As it happened, he was a Jamaican black, though that is not essential to the story. The woman was prepared for a leisurely time, so she began to read her paper. As she did so, she took a cookie from the package. As she read, she noticed that the man across also took a cookie from the package. This upset her greatly, but she ignored it and kept reading. After a while she took another cookie. And so did he. This unnerved her and she glared at the man. While she glared, he reached for the fifth and last cookie, smiled and offered her half of it. She was indignant. She paid her money and left in a great hurry, enraged at such a presumptuous man. She hurried to her bus stop just ouside. She opened her purse to get a coin for her bus ticket. And then she saw, much to her distress, that in her purse was her package of cookies unopened. The lady is not different from all of us. Sometimes we possess things so long that do not really belong to us that we come to think they are ours. Sometimes, by the mercy of God, we have occasion to see to whom these things in fact belong.
Walter Brueggemann, “Voices of the Night—Against Justice,” in To Act Justly, Love Tenderly, Walk Humbly: An Agenda for Ministers
The applications are abundant, obvious, and profound for our own lives in the various communites in which we live. But they are not easy applications to confront or practice. They pose the ultimate question to us: where do we place our security? The answer determines how fully we understand “Jubilee”.
You have two meaningful prose passages to consider today so let’s just add a little music for your prayer time.
Gabriel’s Oboe – Ennio Morricone played by Henrik Chaim Goldschmidt
Lavish Mercy 