This Sunday’s gospel (Luke 1:1-4; 4:12-21) lays down the New Testament fulfillment of the jubilee year which was first commanded by God in the Old Testament (Leviticus 25). Celebrated after the passage of seven Sabbath years (49 years), the Bible describes explicitly how it is to be observed. “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. In this year of jubilee everyone is to return to their own property. If you sell land to any of your own people or buy land from them, do not take advantage of each other. You are to buy from your own people on the basis of the number of years since the jubilee. And they are to sell to you on the basis of the number of years left for harvesting crops. When the years are many, you are to increase the price, and when the years are few, you are to decrease the price, because what is really being sold to you is the number of crops. Do not take advantage of each other, but fear your God. I am the Lord your God” (verses 10-17). In other words, therefore, the jubilee is a year of rest, both for the people from their work, and for their land. It is also a year of liberty when slaves are set free, and when people buy or get back the piece of property (land) that they have sold in the past, in most cases due to poverty, thus also setting them free from indebtedness.
In the gospel, Jesus put a deeper meaning to this jubilee. Being handed a scroll in the synagogue, he read passages from the book of Isaiah, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord” (Luke 4:18-19). After reading these, he rolled up the scroll and said, “Today, this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.” Jesus is thus the fulfillment of the jubilee. In him, one experiences true rest, freedom, and restoration.
Only in Jesus can we find genuine rest. He said, “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart; and you will find rest for yourselves. For my yoke is easy, and my burden light” (Matthew 11:28-30). Among other things, the Sabbath of the Old Testament was just a shadow of things to come; its realization is no other than the Lord Jesus Christ, himself.
Only in Jesus can we also find authentic freedom. He sets us free not only from the physical and temporal entanglements in this earthly life, but also from sin that left unpardoned, can bring us to the fires of hell. John 8:36 declares, “If the Son sets you free, you are free indeed,” while Paul writes, “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery” (Galatians 5:1).
Finally, only in Jesus can we find fullness of restoration. To the Israelites God said, ”When all these blessings and curses I have set before you come on you and you take them to heart wherever the Lord your God disperses you among the nations, and when you and your children return to the Lord your God and obey him with all your heart and with all your soul according to everything I command you today, then the Lord your God will restore your fortunes and have compassion on you and gather you again from all the nations where he scattered you” (Deuteronomy 30:1-3). Same promise of restoration is being offered to us today, and much more. Through Jesus, and only in Jesus, is our relationship with God, broken by sin, restored (2 Corinthians 5:19). In Colossians 1:21-23, the same writer writes, “You who once were alienated and hostile in mind because of evil deeds he has now reconciled in his fleshly body through his death, to present you holy, without blemish, and irreproachable before him, provided that you persevere in the faith, firmly grounded, stable, and not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard, which has been preached to every creature under heaven, of which I, Paul, am a minister.”
This jubilee year, let us put our hope in Jesus, the source of ultimate rest, freedom, and restoration. “He who did not spare his own Son but handed him over for us all, how will he not also give us everything else along with him” (Romans 8:32)?”