Declaring 2020 a Year of Jubilee
By: Kellie Brown
Tags: Bible, Pandemic, 2020, Jubilee

I have heard the year 2020 described in so many ways by friends, colleagues, pundits, and memes. Not surprisingly, none has offered it as a Jubilee year, a “favorable year of our Lord.”

I have always been interested in the concept of Jubilee that the Old Testament outlines. Leviticus, the center book of the Pentateuch, provides a detailed prescriptive of how the Israelites were to live and interact with the land, their animals, each other, and God. The passage of time and the seasons figure prominently in these instructions, including periods of sabbath (rest). God’s people are told to observe a complete sabbath from tilling and planting every seven years and are promised that there will be abundance in the crops of the sixth year to sustain them through the fallow time, a pause that will allow the land to rest so its fertility can be revived and restored. But the divine law does not stop with just that. Leviticus 25 defines another special period of sabbath to occur every 50 years, the Year of Jubilee.

It feels significant that Jesus chose the words that referenced Jubilee for his “opening statement” in the synagogue of his hometown of Nazareth. Jesus entered there on the Sabbath, which the gospel writer Luke informs us was his custom. We do not know all of the details about how he came to be the reader of scripture that day, but we do know that Jesus stood up to read and was handed a scroll containing the words of the prophet Isaiah. I wonder what it was like as the other men sat in that room and watched Jesus unroll the sacred scroll. Was there anticipation? Was there disinterest? Was there skepticism? Luke says that Jesus intentionally chose the passage we know as the first two verses of Isaiah 61. “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 brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor…”

Jesus chose to deliver a message of freedom from all that oppresses and weighs us down: debts, heartaches, and the many forms of imprisonment. With these words, Jesus offered a gospel of deliverance and set the priority of his public ministry toward those marginalized by society and religious institutions. I think my own interest in the idea of Jubilee has come from imagining that kind of relief, a reprieve from all that binds us. What would it be like to have mortgages, medical bills, and student loans forgiven as an act of sabbath and restoration? What would it be like for those who are imprisoned unjustly to be released? How would our society look were it shed of hatred, racism, jealousy, and selfishness?

But proclaiming 2020 as a liberating year of Jubilee, a “favorable year of our Lord,” while we have sequestered ourselves from a relentless virus, probably seems off the mark. Or is it? Since our spring lockdown, I have been thinking and praying about how I could claim that. Could God’s Spirit enable me to live out a Jubilee year even as I remained cloistered from the activities and people I love? I believed that, if possible, this would be a most miraculous kind of journey. The idea reminded me of the words of the great American poet Wendell Berry: “Be joyful/though you have considered all the facts.”¹

In the Old Testament, the occurrence of Jubilee was associated with a specific time, the 50th year. It represented a set calendar event in the rhythms and cycles of their lives. Today, our society has never been more aware of or tied to time. We have devices in our homes, in our pockets, and on our wrists that keep us informed, minute by minute, as to our progress through time. But then 2020 rolled in, drastically altering the rhythms of our lives. Our calendars, with their glaringly empty spaces, no longer held our undivided attention. Even the feel of seconds, minutes, and hours changed. One of the words so many have used is that this year feels surreal. It feels “out of time.” In musical terms, if a performer is out of time, it means that they have lost touch with the beat and the rhythmic integrity of the music. It also means that they have gotten lost in that all-important space between the beats, the most critical element in unifying and syncing. I believe that has happened to us this past year. The beat has changed in unexpected ways and has grown faint at times; and as a result, we have felt adrift, unable to latch on to the security of that strong, regular pulse, unable to make sense of that space between the beats.

Recently, I heard Rev. Dr. Joan Prentice speak on the concept of sacred rhythm. She is the Founder, Executive Director, and Pastor of The Ephesus Project, a nonprofit community ministry in Pittsburgh. She also serves God as a contemplative, meaning that she devotes her days to prayer and worship, and deliberately tracks her time around moments of prayers, Lectio divina, and other spiritual practices. She has learned from the ancient mystics and contemplatives of the early Church that our lives must be governed by a sacred rhythm. God has given us limitations and living beyond these puts us out of harmony and fellowship with God. Dr. Prentice has written a poem about this concept called “Holy Dance.” In it, she equates our lives as being in step with the divine beat and those space between the beats. Her words also describe what happens when we get out of balance, when we fall out of holy time, and the dance becomes clumsy and stilted.

And so as a meditation on the keeping of sacred time and the disrupting forces that interfere with the divine dance, I again revisit the calendar, which now shows only a few more days of 2020 remaining. Collectively, we grieve over the incredible loss and suffering rendered by the pandemic and its resulting collateral damage to livelihoods and relationships. We have no words to truly express that and will have to rely on the power of music to truly lament it, as “Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent.”² But even amid this, though we have considered the facts, I invite us to retroactively declare 2020 a Year of Jubilee, a year where we each have been given an opportunity to be emancipated from old ways of thinking and being that have not served us, or our neighbors, or our Lord.

Prayer: Loving God, as we mourn for losses due to the virus and feel anger over injustices, help us to also see 2020 as “a favorable year,” a Year of Jubilee, where you have offered to rescue us from binding beliefs and actions, so that we can walk into 2021 with new freedoms through you. “The old things have passed away. Behold, all things have become new.” Amen

¹from the poem “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front”

²quote of the 19th century French novelist Victor Hugo