Saturday
of the Seventeenth Week in Ordinary Time
(Leviticus 25:1.8-17;
Matthew 14:1-12)
Today’s
first reading describes part of the great Jubilee tradition of Israel. The Jubilee Year marked the year after seven
cycles of sabbatical years, each seven years long, were completed – the fiftieth
year. As a means of achieving social
justice, the tradition prescribed three forms of liberty. First, it proclaimed liberty to those who were
dispossessed of their family land. In
the Jubilee Year they could reclaim that land according to the rates
established in the Law. Second, during
the Jubilee Year Hebrew slaves could leave their masters to return to their families. Finally, the Jubilee Year gave freedom from
toil as all work on the land was prohibited. The people were to store food from
the previous harvest and would scavenge food grown on the fallow land.
How much these laws and traditions were actually
practiced is a debated issue. There are
few references to them in the Old Testament.
But the Gospels tell of Jesus proclaiming a Jubilee Year as he begins to
preach in Israel. Luke describes his
entering the synagogue of Nazareth, taking a scroll of the prophet Isaiah,
reading the script saying how the Spirit of the Lord was upon him to proclaim glad
tidings to the poor, liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind.
freedom to the oppressed, and a year acceptable to the Lord. The “acceptable year” refers the Jubilee Year
tradition.
The Jubilee
Year was a mechanism of social justice.
Mistakenly, this term has become demonized. People associate it with socialism and
consider its proponents in the Church as ignorant of the workings of
grace. But it may be finding a
comeback. Pope Leo says he chose his
name because Leo XIII authored the first social encyclical. Really, how can we not give social justice more
than lip service when our Savior proclaimed himself its agent?
