BLOG 11/22/16. THE CHURCH AS A JUBILEE COMMUNITY?
It is fascinating to observe that the earthly ministry of Jesus and his message of the in-breaking Kingdom of God … is bracketed, in the gospel accounts, between references that make quite clear that this reality was a fulfillment of the Jubilee year provision of the Jewish Torah, … by which land and freedom and wealth were periodically redistributed, and that the inhabitants of the land who were imprisoned for debts were set free, and debts forgiven. It was a reality which would cause the poor of the land to rejoice. Jesus initiates his public ministry by reading the Isaiah 61 passage on this reality in his home synagogue, … and declaring that the Jubilee was fulfilled in himself. Then at the other end of his public ministry he makes those very same Jubilee goals the criteria for the final judgement, when he names his own passion for the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, and the inhabitants of the debtors prisons. Somehow God’s design in inaugurating his New Creation / Kingdom has Jubilee goals written all over it.
There is always that proclivity in this fallen world for the obsession with economic power, political power, and religious power, and to create social institutions to foster that obsession. That indifference to those at the margins becomes, pretty much, the dominant social order time and again – and the institutional church falls into that trap. It is so easy to hide ourselves from the hopelessness, poverty, marginal living, and our resistance to the strangers and the needy … those who make us uncomfortable. We create church institutions that are focused on becoming comfort zone religious institutions for the empowered who need to meet weekly to’ tip our hats’ to God … and then ignore the Jubilee message of its founder.
When I was a young student in Davidson College (in the ancient of days) that college existed in a small semi-rural town (this was long before Duke Power Co. created Lake Norman and made the town of Davidson a fashionable resort community). The town consisted primarily of this proud old liberal arts college, but it also was inhabited by three small marginal industries: a pitiful textile plant, an asbestos plant (before asbestos was outlawed), and a cottonseed processing plant. But these industries, with their minimum wage workers, along with the black community which supplied the underpaid housekeeping and cooking staff for the town and college, were hidden behind pleasant Main Street with its stores, and was across the railroad track, and so was hidden from the inhabitants of what was, ostensibly, a strong and moral Presbyterian academic community. Until … One Sunday morning during the pleasant worship service at the college church, the village fire alarm sounded, and since it was a volunteer fire department, immediately many in the congregation hastily departed, and the service was terminated so the worshipers could satisfy their curiosity. What they saw (many for the first time) were the deplorable living conditions and the sheer wretchedness to which they had never given a thought because they were hidden from them. But it awakened the social consciousness of college and community. The pastor of the church was eloquent on the next Sunday in explaining the contradiction of such conditions existing almost in the shadow of their very place of worship. These seventy years later, there is a very keen and creative social consciousness in that village and college. But that is rare.
Church institutions too easily become obsessed with their own prestige, and become only the religious dimension of the dominant social order that refuses to see its Jubilee calling to bring good news to the poor, to look for where the darkness is greatest, to move into the areas of need, to create-initiate ministries of reconciliation and humanitarian concern, to expend its resources of skills and wealth to enable the poor, the sick, the strangers, those trapped by debts, etc. to have hope, and meaningful lives—to see behind those walls we build to hide ourselves from the weak, the poor, the lowly born, and to create Jubilee communities. Is this too utopian? Or is it the Biblical pattern for the church? Its Founder’s intent?
