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| The Great Isaiah Scroll. Wrong chapter, but you get the general idea ... |
“Thank you — what a beautiful interpretation of that
passage,” gushed one reader. “I love the sense of Judaism and Christianity out
of which Bess operates. It immediately recommends itself to me as wholesome and
authentic,” enthuses another.
But despite the alleged aura of wholesomeness and authenticity, it seems to me that Bess doesn’t so
much reinterpret Luke 4 as miss its real meaning as completely as did the citizens of the Lord’s hometown of Nazareth, his original audience.
Missing the Point
Bess says:
“According to Luke’s gospel, the beginning of the ministry of Jesus as a reputational rabbi was marked by his public reading of a passage from the Isaiah scroll. His declaration was that a year special to God had arrived, a Jubilee Year that would redistribute wealth and end the economic persecution of the poor.”— Howard Bess, Jesus: Redistributionist-in-Chief
He is referring to a passage in which the Lord quotes from the Old Testament, terminating his recitation of Isaiah’s prophecy before its climactic phrase (the prophecy actually ends not with “the year of the Lord’s
favor”, but with “and the day of vengeance of our God”):
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives
and recovering of sight to the blind,
to set at liberty those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
The Year of Jubilee
Howard Bess is not necessarily incorrect about the very limited
way in which most (if not all) of the Lord’s listeners initially understood what
Isaiah had written, especially the sense in which it applied to them. Almost surely the poor filling the synagogues of his day were
looking for good news in its most practical form: debt relief, relief from Roman oppression,
relief from the burdens placed on them by their own religious leaders and many
other things.
In that context, any gracious or favorable word was
enthusiastically received.
So far so good. But the problem is that after 2,000 years
and the testimony of all the rest of the New Testament, Bess seems to have
learned no more about what the Lord meant than was generally understood on the
day he first said it. His assumption is that a literal reading of Isaiah’s
prophecy is its most significant level of meaning and that its fulfillment is
primarily an earthly one.
Bess goes on to say:
“Jesus lived at a time of a concentration of wealth when working farmers had completely lost control of their land, which was owned by very wealthy men who lived in large cities some miles away. Under the prevailing economic system, the farmers became poorer and poorer.
Often, the farmers had to leave the farm and became day-laborers who worked at the mercy of absentee owners and their local enforcers. The greed of absentee land owners and the plight of poverty-stricken farmers form the backdrop of the entire ministry of Jesus.
When Jesus — at the beginning of his public ministry as a reputational rabbi — read the particular passage from Isaiah, his entire audience understood what he was saying. He was calling for the celebration of the Year of Jubilee.”
The Levitical “Economic Reboot”
Leviticus 25 details the rules for the national observance of Israel’s Year of Jubilee. It was to be celebrated every fiftieth year,
after seven cycles of seven years each. It was essentially an economic reboot
for the nation. Those who had become indebted and had been forced by
circumstances to sell themselves as hired laborers were to be released. Houses, property and land that had been sold as a result of poverty were to be
returned to their original owners. And
the land itself was to be given a year of Sabbath rest. Though its produce
could be eaten as needed, it was not to be sown or tilled during the Year of
Jubilee.
Had the Jubilee been observed, excessive and ongoing poverty
in Israel would have been impossible. But so far as we can tell from the Old
Testament, it appears that Israel never kept the Jubilee. The reason is
obvious: for every poor man and family it relieved from economic oppression, there would have been a
commensurate economic loss to every employer and purchaser of property. As we see today and throughout history, those who have their hands
on the wheel of the economy are uniformly disinclined to relinquish that control in the
interests of bettering the lot of their impoverished brothers.
The Spiritual Significance of the Jubilee
Of course no literal celebration of the Year of Jubilee in the Lord’s day could possibly bring about liberty
to the captives and the oppressed — apart from some kind of revolution against
Roman occupation. And it is only by making the unlikely supposition that no Jews other than the poor and downtrodden were present in that Nazareth synagogue that Bess can propose that they would suddenly choose
to embrace something they had, to all appearances, consistently declined to celebrate ever since its institution by God. And it is utterly baffling to consider how any merely literal celebration might bring about the “recovery of sight to the blind”.
Surely the spiritual in Israel were looking for much more than a call to
reluctant observance of ancient Jewish Law. (The unspiritual, of course, were looking for something involving considerably less self-examination and repentance.)
Like so many things in the Law of Moses, the Jubilee was no more than a real-world illustration of an exceedingly more important spiritual truth. While keeping the Jubilee would have blessed Israel in a very practical way throughout its history, its significance is far, far greater than debt relief, liberty and the return of property. It points to a vastly greater celebration, to release from a much more significant debt, to the relief of spiritual poverty and to the blessings of an eternal inheritance that never spoils, wears out or fades away.
No, a mere literal, earthly Jubilee was not what the Lord
had in mind. Both the Jews of the Lord’s time and Howard Bess have equally missed
his true meaning.
The Social Justice Jubilee
But the magnitude of Bess’s misunderstanding of the Lord’s
words in Luke is even greater. He goes on to fantasize that the Lord is
seeking a semi-literal fulfillment of a national Jewish holiday through the forced
implementation by Western governments of a policy of economic redistributionism a full two thousand years after Christ. “Jubilee,” Bess says, “is any and every day
when justice triumphs.”
Are we done? Oh no, we’re not. Bess’s mangling of the Lord’s
message proceeds unabated. Having literalized the Jubilee and missed its
spiritual significance entirely, he suddenly begins to allegorize the moment it
becomes convenient to his real agenda:
“And the message of justice is not restricted to issues of economic injustice or the excessive power of the rich. It also applies to social justice.
It has been more than four decades since the Stonewall riots started the revolution for gay acceptance in America …”
For Bess, the real significance of the Jubilee is that, to
his mind, it proclaims acceptance for gays, in his words, “a persecuted and
down-trodden group of people”.
The Real Jubilee
Hindsight is 20-20. Of course, for those of us who know
Jesus as Savior, the meaning of the Jubilee seems obvious. We who had been enslaved by sin, stripped of our earthly inheritance by the sin of Adam, and spiritually blinded and oppressed by the world, the flesh and
the devil have, in the death and resurrection of Christ, been liberated. We celebrate the true Year of Jubilee.
And the greatest Jubilee of all remains to be realized,
because the freedom we have been given will one day be extended to all of
creation. The “land” and everything in it will truly have its Sabbath rest and
will enter into the freedom we have already been granted in Christ. Paul says:
“For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.”
Caring for the genuinely poor and oppressed is something about which all believers ought to be concerned. But to miss the real significance of the Jubilee is to be every bit as blind and obtuse as the Jews who in one moment celebrated the Lord’s gracious words and in the next, drove him out of town and tried to throw him off a cliff.
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