Daily Lesson for February 21, 2020

Today’s Daily Lesson comes from Leviticus chapter 25 verses 10 through 17:

10 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. 11 That fiftieth year shall be a jubilee for you: you shall not sow, or reap the aftergrowth, or harvest the unpruned vines. 12 For it is a jubilee; it shall be holy to you: you shall eat only what the field itself produces.
13 In this year of jubilee you shall return, every one of you, to your property. 14 When you make a sale to your neighbor or buy from your neighbor, you shall not cheat one another. 15 When you buy from your neighbor, you shall pay only for the number of years since the jubilee; the seller shall charge you only for the remaining crop years. 16 If the years are more, you shall increase the price, and if the years are fewer, you shall diminish the price; for it is a certain number of harvests that are being sold to you. 17 You shall not cheat one another, but you shall fear your God; for I am the Lord your God.

The original vision for the Israelites coming into the Promised Land was for there to be an assurance that the land could never fall into the hands of only a few into perpetuity, nor could an Israelite fall into perpetual slavery either. What was prescribed to ensure was the act of Jubilee, an every-50-year release of the land back to its original clan ownership, and emancipation of the citizen slaves back to a state of freedom. Jubilee therefore ensured that wealth would remain relatively distributive throughout the tribes and that no family would fall into permanent poverty and/or slave bondage.

There is no record of the Israelites ever have actually practiced Jubilee. And it was one law in the Bible I never hear the Fundamentalists say we need to get back to. Maybe that’s because the Fundamentalists owned so much land. Though in an increasingly-less agrarian society it’s hard to say how this could practically work anyhow. And maybe that’s why the Israelites apparently never tried it. It was too hard.

But nevertheless the Law is still there, set as a kind of judgment upon us as a people, while our divide between the haves and the have nots widens.

There is the increasingly mass-conglomeration of land, and farms, and wealth in the world and the prospect of permanent generational poverty of so many; and there is also the Jubilee, a vision of equity for all generations to come, and the ultimate grounding conviction that both the land and the people belong to God and no one else.

And the vision remains . . .

NOTE: We’re reading the whole Bible this year. This weekend we finish out Leviticus and start Numbers.  Monday’s Lesson will be from Numbers chapters 1 through 4.