Jubilee: God's Answer to Poverty?

By Regnum Books International

What is Jubilee? How could it transform our understanding of the world today — and of how God calls us to live in it? At the heart of Old Testament law is a revolutionary concept that, if applied today, could transform our economy and world. Jesus himself claimed that his ministry would bring its fulfilment, transforming the world. Uniting social justice, creation care, equality and worship, jubilee remains a radical challenge, thousands of years later. This exciting collection engages with this challenge and offers ideas and inspiration for disciples today. It brings together rigorous theological thought and practical experience from voices from around the world. Its chapters reflect on issues of poverty in its different dimensions and discuss some of the challenges that face churches, Christian organisations and individual Christians in responding to them. The authors each bring their unique context and perspectives which challenge us to go beyond viewing the jubilee ordinances as simple rules and help us to begin to understand the redemptive and restorative power of the jubilee principles for us today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Regnum Books International
• Release date: Jan 24, 2020
• ISBN: 9781913363291

Book preview

Introduction

Seeing Poverty through the Lens of Jubilee

Hannah J. Swithinbank and Emmanuel Murangira

In a meeting a while ago I (Hannah) commented that – after a few years in my current job – my Bible automatically fell open at Leviticus 25.

‘What, really?’

‘Yes, really.’

‘Not Micah 6, or Luke 4?’

‘No, Leviticus 25.’

‘Wow. I would not have expected that.’

Perhaps I wouldn’t have either, when I first started in a job carrying out theological research on issues of poverty and justice for a Christian relief and development agency – but it is no longer a surprise (and never was, to many of my international colleagues). After all, in Leviticus 25 and the description of the year of jubilee, you can find almost everything you need to understand what God is doing in his world.

God’s Jubilee

‘Count seven sabbath years – seven times seven years – so that the seven sabbath years amount to a period of forty-nine years. Then sound the trumpet everywhere on the tenth day of the seventh month; on the Day of Atonement sound the trumpet throughout your land. Consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you; each of you is to return to your family property and to your own clan. The fiftieth year shall be a jubilee for you; do not sow and do not reap what grows of itself or harvest the untended vines. For it is a jubilee and is to be holy for you; eat only what is taken directly from the fields.’ (Lev. 25:8 -12)

This is the opening of the jubilee ordinances, and it defines Israel’s post-deliverance relationship with God. This newly liberated, restored nation was to be rooted in a relationship with God, declared annually on the Day of Atonement. And this was a relationship with consequences: it demanded that the Israelites, understanding themselves as God’s people, should pay attention to the nature and quality of their relationships with each other and with the land in which God had placed them. The jubilee gave them the opportunity to do this in a radical way every 50 years, essentially hitting a reset button on their society; recognising the realities of sin and poverty, God provided a means for everyone to be given – again and again – restoration and the opportunity to flourish.

The assumptions that the jubilee laws make about what is good within the society are rooted in an understanding of Yahweh’s character and desires for his people and creation. The key principles that jubilee gives to Israel here can be summarised as follows:¹

•The land on which Israel lived was God’s land (Lev. 25:23) and they were his tenants and the stewards of his creation. This ‘stewardship’ is a part of humanity’s original mandate for creation (Gen. 1:26-28; 2:15). Israel’s residence in this promised land demonstrated their identity as God’s chosen people, living in a place to which he had led them (Lev. 25:38).

•Life was to be lived within communities. Israel’s socio-economic structure was built on kinship principles: everyone belonged to a tribe, a clan and a household. Each household unit was to have its own piece of the land on which to live (Lev. 25:15) with roughly equitable access to the resources and security that land provided and thus have equal opportunity to flourish.

•The Israelites had equality and personal dignity in their shared identity as God’s people and as people made in God’s image (Gen. 1:27) – and each was equally worthy of redemption.

Life has a rhythm of worship, work and rest. While work is good and an essential part of God’s mandate for humans in his creation, rest is also essential – and worship pre-eminent.

•Sabbath days and years, as well as the jubilee, provided time for both people and the land they lived on to rest and to be restored. The laws emphasised that the relationship with God was the heart of their lives in order for all other relationships to be healthy and restored within a Godly society. And life was to be lived like this, because Yahweh was God and Israel was his people.

By mandating the return of people to their households and land, the jubilee provided a counter to natural successes and failures, to greed and exploitation and other sin, that led to growing inequality and poverty. Jubilee demanded more than generosity of the Israelites; it was the way their society was repaired, as God reminded his people that, ultimately, all things belonged to him. Jubilee enabled liberation from poverty and injustice and the restoration of Israel as a just society in which all creation could flourish, under God. Thus, Leviticus 25 reminds us that God has not abandoned his creation to its brokenness after the fall, and that God did not simply establish Israel in the Promised Land and leave them to get on with life: God is interested and involved in the life of his people, and provides what they need to live in a way that shows the wider world what it means to be God’s people. Leviticus 25 shows us that this involves worship, and care for the wellbeing of individuals, families and wider society that encompasses the equality, economics and ecology of the community.

Of course, Leviticus 25 is not the only passage of the Bible we should attend to in learning about the nature and mission of God, or about God’s concern with poverty and injustice. As the opening chapters of this collection describe, the whole Bible tells us this story. And, of course, it is vitally important that our consideration of jubilee, as a part of God’s mission of redemption and restoration, is centred in the person of Jesus Christ.

As a number of our authors point out, Luke describes Jesus as opening his ministry with reference to jubilee, describing himself as fulfilling the promise of Isaiah to ‘proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour’ (Luke 4:19; Isa. 61:2).² Just as the Old Testament jubilee essentially linked atonement with a way of life and society that pursued justice, Jesus’ life, death and resurrection show that salvation and the good news are for all areas of life and the whole of creation. Chris Wright explains this: ‘A full biblical understanding of the atoning work of Christ on the cross goes far beyond (though of course it includes) the matter of personal guilt and individual forgiveness. God’s mission has wider redemptive dimensions and the gospel is good news for all creation. The cross is important across the whole of mission, because the whole of mission confronts the powers of evil and kingdom of Satan. If Christ is king, he is king of everything.’³

We are liberated by Jesus’ death and resurrection, an event that becomes the foundation of our hope for the future: the new creation that we are promised (Rom. 8:18-25; Rev. 21). This salvation and hope place an ethical demand on Jesus’ followers in their present time: both in the first century and in the twenty-first. In Romans 8, Paul explores what it means for humans to be saved and set free by Christ. He reminds his readers that living in the spirit has an effect that is seen in people who pursue life (zoe – the full life inspired and sustained by God) and peace (Eirene – the New Testament Greek equivalent of the Old Testament’s Hebrew shalom), rather than continuing in sin towards death. Life and peace exemplify the liberation, restoration and flourishing made possible in jubilee. And Paul is clear in Romans 8 that this liberation and restoration of life and peace are not just for humans, but for all of creation. However, this life is not easy: Jesus’ life – and death – show us the lengths to which the son of God went in order to secure our liberation. We are called to take up our cross (Matt. 16:24) and follow him in obedience. This sacrifice, again, is more than generosity: it is a willingness to honour God’s sovereignty and to make reparations for sin in order to end injustice and enable restoration and flourishing.

International development is not always easy to define and incorporates a broad range of disciplines as it endeavours to improve the quality of life of people around the world. At the same time, there is – inevitably – discussion about what it means for a society to develop or become developed: in all communities and cultures people have different ideas about what a developed society would look like, and what it would take to create and sustain one. For Tearfund, the goal is whole-life transformation – or the life in all its fullness that Jesus offers (John 10:10) – and this is held with a recognition that the transformation is needed and that results will be different across the different communities and countries in which Tearfund and its partners work. Jubilee provides a critical, biblical lens for this work, as it enables Tearfund and other Christian organisations and churches to look at poverty alleviation and development work and ask how it is contributing to the restoration of relationships and to the ability of people to flourish with and in the world that God has made.

Exploring Jubilee in Rwanda

This collection is a result of deliberation by scholars and church leaders in the Global Forum on Church and Poverty held in Rwanda in July 2018. It is a country that has been working towards a very particular restoration for the past 25 years, since the devastation of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi. In Rwanda, 39.1% of the population live below the poverty line, and 16.3% are classified as living in extreme poverty. Among the common issues facing the country are high numbers of vulnerable people, including women, orphans and the elderly, who have lost the children who would have cared for them in old age; there are high numbers of genocide survivors, most of whom have physical disabilities or permanent injuries, as well as experiencing trauma. Transformation in this context needs to consider personal restoration (spiritual, mental and emotional, and physical), the restoration of relationships with families, between neighbours and communities, and with the land, in which all these people live and sustain life together – and which is itself at risk from climate change and extreme weather. Jubilee is very pertinent here.

Having the opportunity to reflect on jubilee and God’s heart for restoration in this country – where the church has been a massive part of the ongoing work of healing and restoration – provided a rich grounding for our conversations at the Global Forum on Church and Poverty. On the second day of our gathering, Rwanda’s Liberation Day, those of us visiting the country were privileged to spend the afternoon at the Genocide Museum and Memorial. It was a profound experience that shaped our conversations about how God might use the ideas of jubilee as a response to poverty and injustice today, and provoked us to experience and reflect upon that tension between the brokenness of the world and our need to lament and repent, and the hope that we have in Christ.

About this Collection

In worship, prayer and discussions during the Global Forum on Church and Poverty, we explored the themes of lament and repentance for the role that the church and Christians have played in the causes of poverty and injustice in the course of history. As Antoine Rutayisire points out in his opening chapter, while God always has a compassionate heart for the poor, God’s people often do not emulate this. At the forum, we acknowledged that this needs to be recognised as a part of the liberation and restoration – the healing of a world – that is the essence of jubilee in order to help us step into the hope and future that Christ offers in the kingdom of God. If we are to respond positively to the call jubilee places upon churches and Christians, and their organisations, it is important to honestly reflect on where and why we have failed so far, in order that we can seek restoration of relationships in these areas as a part of our wider pursuit of restoration and transformation.

In chapters two and three of this collection, Aiah Foday-Khabenje, and Lucie Woolley and Anna Ling discuss the ways that brokenness and sin affect us as individuals and our societies’ systems and structures: this is always at the root of our failures to live in God’s ways and pursue jubilee – and as such, at the root of poverty. However, they also remind us that this was not God’s original intention for creation and point the way forward, encouraging us to look to the church as the Body of Christ, as a community and institution with the role of continuing to pursue the jubilee that Christ proclaimed.

In chapter four, James E. Read examines jubilee to ask if it is God’s answer to poverty for Israel and for the contemporary world. He focuses on the themes of liberty and return and argues that the church needs to ensure that freedom from oppression and freedom to act in the world, to reflect on the importance of place as an aspect of identity and flourishing, may need to be returned in some way as a part of the restoration made in jubilee. At the same time, Read – along with Foday-Khabenje, Woolley and Ling, and Sas Conradie in later chapters – acknowledges that while the jubilee is a God-given answer to poverty, it is not one that lasts forever: indeed, the original jubilee acknowledged the need to repeat the process, generationally, in the understanding that poverty will not be fully ended until Christ returns and the new creation is established, and that our work towards jubilee should recognise this.

In chapter five, Jocabed Reina Solano Miselis provides an indigenous perspective on the idea that jubilee can be a solution to poverty. She presents the Guna concept of the nega (house or home) and the story of the Balu Wala to see flourishing and poverty in the light of humanity’s relationship with creation, offering this as a way to explore jubilee as an invitation to restore our home.

Following on from these wider perspectives, chapters six to ten focus on a number of different topics through the lens of jubilee in order to explore how this might help the church respond both to particular areas of life and to poverty broadly. In chapter six, David Lim describes the way that the structure and theology of Asian House Church Networks enables them to pursue a theology of integral mission and jubilee, challenging the reader to think about how our organisations and structures may impede our ability to pursue jubilee as the church. Conradie (chapter seven) looks at the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through the lens of jubilee, suggesting that jubilee – in its understanding of transformation as holistic – can enrich the SDGs’ understanding that engaging culture and values are important to poverty alleviation by helping development actors, including churches, shift behaviours and practices by engaging with people’s religious beliefs. In chapters eight and nine, Alfonso Wieland and Carol Ng’ang’a look at the challenges of violence and exclusion and their relationship to poverty, drawing ideas from jubilee to help churches respond. Wieland finds jubilee particularly important in helping the church to engage on both micro- and macro-levels: dealing with individual cases and immediate needs and engaging with corruptions present in systems and structures. N’gang’a looks particularly at the ideas of gleaning and communion in the light of jubilee to explore how the church can respond to poverty in ways that are inclusive and uphold the dignity of those in need. Finally in this section, Yenny Delgado looks at the relationship between jubilee and the prophetic voice, calling the church today to prophetic advocacy on behalf of those living in poverty.

In our final section, three chapters explore how we, as churches and Christians, can become the kind of disciples who pursue jubilee in the world today. Sheryl Haw draws on her experiences of engaging churches around the world in integral mission and community transformation to explain the vital importance of biblical literacy: if we don’t know what the Bible is telling us about jubilee, how can we pursue it? In chapter 12, John Mark Bowers talks about the importance of learning to practise sabbath. He argues that this is a matter of learning to walk before we can run, allowing the practice of sabbath to rewire the way we see life and flourishing and readying us to pursue jubilee.

In chapter 13, Hannah Swithinbank explores the importance of being rooted in Christ and formed as disciples in order to become people who pursue jubilee in our individual lives as well as through our churches. Jubilee is about justice: redemption and restoration; liberation and renewal. It is radical and counter-cultural – both in the ancient world and today – and prophetic. It provides a model for an ancient community living well according to God’s will for his creation so that they can flourish and thrive as individuals and as a community, and so that they can be an example, or light, to the rest of the world, and it is a model we can explore in relation to our contexts and challenges today.

In the final chapter, Emmanuel Murangira examines the key ideas and thoughts in this collection to discern what the spirit is saying to the church on poverty. He delves through the ideas and thoughts presented and finds that the spirit of God is sending a specific message to his people in this season. He concludes that jubilee ordinances are very relevant to today’s church as a contemporary expression of God’s covenantal community. He avers that jubilee ordinances are timeless and transverse generations and contexts, thus relevant in every season and space. Their applicability is as relevant to the New Testament church as was with the Old Testament covenantal community.

Because of their timelessness and cross-cultural applicability, they are perhaps the best principles available to the church in the fight against poverty, which makes them relevant to the church today. The final chapter concludes that jubilee ordinances resonate with the mission of Jesus Christ, as illustrated in Luke 4:18: His command to his Disciples in the Gospel of Matthew to feed the hungry, feed the sick and cast out demons. Jubilee is not only about celebration of God’s goodness and respite but also a kairos moment for the church as a contemporary expression of God’s covenantal community.

¹ Wright, C. J. H. (2006). The mission of God: unlocking the Bible’s grand narrative. Nottingham, Inter-Varsity Press, 289-323.

² Luke’s gospel is particularly concerned to show how Jesus’ service of the poor is linked to the themes of repentance and salvation (Bosch, D. J. (1991). Transforming mission: paradigm shifts in theology of mission. Maryknoll, N.Y., Orbis Books, 107-108).

³ Wright, C. J. H. (2006). The mission of God: unlocking the Bible’s grand narrative. Nottingham, Inter-Varsity Press. 314. Cf. Bosch, D. J. (1991). Transforming mission: paradigm shifts in theology of mission. Maryknoll, N.Y., Orbis Books, 143-147.

God’s Heart for the Poor

Antoine Rutayisire

Introduction

I once told a wealthy businessperson in our church that we have families in our congregation who feed their children only one meal a day, in turns: those who eat lunch do not eat dinner. It took him time to believe the story and he eventually concluded: ‘You know, you may be right! I wake up in the morning, eat my breakfast and drive to my work. I do not meet those people. You know, I have never stepped inside their houses here in the city.’ The poor, the destitute, the underprivileged, the marginalised – categories of people who are voiceless, invisible and forgotten, by us, but not by God. God tells us, the poor will always be there, with us, near us, among us. ‘You will always have the poor among you’ (John 12:7), but this does not mean we should ignore them.

Some people say the poor are closer to the heart of God than the wealthy, but they are mistaken. All, rich or poor, are equally close to the heart of the Father: he loves them without distinction. If God speaks so much of and on behalf of the poor, it is because we forget to speak for them. We push them to the periphery and then, when God speaks for them, we assume he loves them more than he loves those endowed with material wealth. It is, however, not so much about them as it is about us!

Our marginalisation of the poor comes not because we hate them: we simply ignore them or reject them, because it is easy to do so. Like the story of Lazarus and the wealthy man (Luke 16:19-31), we simply do not see them; they are out of our sphere of focus, on the periphery of our field of vision. In the story of Lazarus and the wealthy man, there is no evidence to suggest that the man has been actively unkind or mistreated Lazarus, and it is unclear if Lazarus asked for anything from the man and it was denied. Lazarus came, hoping to eat the crumbs from the table when the man and his company had left; most likely, the man never saw him and did not know his plight. There was simply no interaction between them, perhaps because Lazarus did not even imagine that he could go into the presence of the rich man, perhaps because he thought himself unwelcome and unworthy. Poverty dehumanises people and deprives them of their sense of self-worth; they are made invisible and excluded, and unfortunately they become unwilling participants in their own exclusion.

The Bible is full of similar stories of blind disciples walking among invisible people, with Jesus quickening their hearts and opening their eyes to do something about the plight of the poor! This chapter uses one story, a real event found in the gospel of Matthew 14:13-21. It is the story of Jesus pushing his disciples out of their comfort zone to feed a crowd of more than 10,000¹ people with only two fish and loaves of bread! The Bible mentions 5,000 men – and I hasten to point out they had not counted the women and children! The women and the children were invisible: they were not counted because they did not count! From this text, I will draw and expand on three major lessons about God’s heart for the poor. First, there is strong evidence in the scripture that God is immeasurably compassionate for the poor. Second, in contrast to God’s heart and compassionate character, those who say they are God’s people are less compassionate and generally do not have a heart for the poor and those on the margins of society. Third, I argue that a holistic theology for poverty eradication is needed now, more than at any other time in history

God and His Compassionate Heart for the Poor

‘When Jesus landed and saw a large crowd, he had compassion on them and healed those who were ill.’ (Matt. 14:14)

Throughout the four gospels, we notice a recurring pattern in Jesus’ behaviour and ministry: he always had compassion for people and acted decisively to remedy their situation or resolve their problems. He healed the sick, opened the eyes of the blind, raised the dead, fed the hungry, comforted the grieving, restored the rejected and the marginalised, and all was done out of compassion. His compassionate heart directed the programme he presented as the main agenda of his ministry on earth:

‘The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim the good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour’ (Luke 4:18-19)

Jesus was always touched by the plight of people; he saw what others did not seem to see. On many occasions, he reminded and encouraged his disciples to ‘lift up their eyes and see’, and his expectation was always that they would do something about the situation (Matt. 9:36-38). Jesus spoke for the marginalised. He praised a woman considered of low moral standards in the community, who was washing his feet with her tears and drying them with her hair, while all those with him were shocked and contemptuous (Luke 7:36-50). The Pharisees and the scribes of his time were scandalised to see him in fellowship with tax collectors, eating in the homes of two tax collectors: Matthew (Luke 5:27-32) and Zacchaeus (Luke 19:1-9). His disciples rebuked Bartimaeus the blind man, trying to silence him, until Jesus personally heard his pleading, called him and restored his sight (Mark 10:46-52). Scripture is awash with examples to prove that Jesus tended to live with those on the margins of society and was always drawn by compassion to respond to their plight.

Throughout the texts of the Bible we see the heart of God for the poor manifested in five distinctive ways:

(a) Deliverance from oppression and exploitation

When Jesus presented himself as the messiah to the nation of Israel, at a time of Roman hegemony and oppression, the Jewish people expected the kind of deliverance akin to that of the exodus from Egypt. They expected the Messiah to be a fighting king, reminiscent of deliverers of the past, such as Gedeon, Deborah, Samson and David. They expected Jesus to fight the Romans to bring about political and social deliverance. However, to do this would have been a cure for the symptoms of Israel’s pain, whereas Jesus’ intention was to eradicate the root cause of all forms of poverty – sin. On many occasions in the past, Israel had been rescued from foreign oppression, but the people and their kings would take themselves back into deeper slavery because of their sinful behaviours. Deliverance from Roman oppression without deliverance from sin would not have led to real freedom.²

(b) Advocacy for justice and equitable distribution of resources

As we see through the loud voices of the prophets, through the testimony of Job (Job 31), the wisdom of the book of Proverbs – for example verses Proverbs 31:9: ‘open your mouth, judge righteously, defend the rights of the poor and the needy’ – the teachings of John the Baptist (Luke 3:10-14) and the practice of the early church in the book of Acts, God encourages advocacy for justice and equity. Jesus affirmatively links his followers’ personal engagement with the plight of those who are thirsty and hungry to the ultimate righteousness and the prospects of eternity, the kingdom prepared for believers before creation (Matt. 25:34-40).

(c) Miraculous provision for different needs

The Old Testament includes several examples of this, such as the manna provided during the 40 years in the desert on the journey to the promised land; the provision for Elijah, when God sends him to lodge with a widow, Zarephath (1 Kings 17:7-16); or the purifying and healing of a source of water and the land (2 Kings 2:19-22). It can also be seen in the different miracles performed by Jesus, including feeding 4,000 and 5,000 people on two separate occasions. Where ingenuity and human abilities would be terribly inadequate, God often provided by miraculous intervention.

(d) Jubilee ordinances

When God establishes Israel as a nation, he enacts intricate land tenure laws that protect productive assets in a way that would be bitterly contested in today’s time and age. The jubilee ordinances definitely redefine land ownership for the people of Israel; they are – in essence – a clear statement that there is no such thing as purchase of land, rather a leasehold that accrues for 49 years with the land reverting to the owner in the fiftieth year. The ordinances also abolish perpetual servitude; in other words, slavery is outlawed notwithstanding the slave owner’s claim.

(e) Development of working skills

God not only recognises skills but also imparts skills for his people to become creative and productive, as manifested in the building of the tabernacle, the ark of the covenant, as well as the building of God’s temple by Solomon. God’s encouragement of skills can be seen in the story of Elisha and the widow