Living with a Different Set of Signals
The ancient memory of Jubilee is very odd. The term “Jubilee” is from the Hebrew YBL, “trumpet.” When the “trumpet sounds,” debts are forgiven and property is returned. These actions are not undertaken out of an emotional “rush,” but “on signal,” under discipline, in response to a regular communal expectation.
The hard work of interpretation and practice for us is to transpose that ancient signal into a contemporary marker that redefines our life together. The signal is a religious one that evokes an economic act. Thus Jubilee is an occasion when spirituality and ethics converge in a daring act of neighborly rehabilitation. It is all done “on signal,”a signal that is fundamentally alien in a culture that separates spirituality from ethics and that can scarcely entertain any daring act of neighborly rehabilitation.
1. Jubilee is the extreme enactment of the rhythms of neighborly, evangelical time. That is, Jubilee is not an act that sits by itself as an isolated risk, but must be understood in terms of other, lesser acts that all together constitute a different notion of time, a fundamental rhythm that gives all of life a different cadence.
This rhythm is constituted in ancient Israel by Sabbath—Year of Release — Jubilee, each of which in turn makes the rhythm more radical and demanding than the previous marker, but each of which depends upon the previous marker as context. Thus most elementally, neighborly, evangelical time is marked by Sabbath, a disciplined work-stoppage by all parties every seven days for the sake of the neighborhood. The Year of Release every seven years is a compounding of Sabbath and provides for the willing cancellation of debts by Exodus-inspired creditors (Deut 15:1-18). The purpose of the practice is to curb and preclude the formation of a permanent under-class. The Jubilee every 50 years (after seven times seven) is Sabbath and Year of Release writ large (Lev 25). Only regular engagement in Sabbath and Year of Release prepares the way for the wonder and demand of Jubilee.
2. This rhythm is a concrete way in the world with profound policy implications, rooted in the defining conviction of God’s generosity. Jubilee is a concrete practice; it is something done bodily, regularly, on signal, with discipline, toward neighbor. It is so regular and disciplined that, like jogging, if we do not do it we miss it.
This rhythm has profound policy implications. It is a public event, not a private inclination. It signifies the mobilization of public, political will for neighborly solidarity and comes to concern policies about taxes, debts, mortgage and interest rates, and spins off in terms of neighborly entitlement for education, health, housing, and a generous minimum wage. The rhythm provides a large vision of public, institutional life, vouchsafed by daily gestures of solidarity.
Such a public practice depends not simply upon “love of neighbor.” Rather, the divestment of self for the otheris rooted in a deep conviction about the creator God who gives, blesses, and guarantees more than we want or ask or need. Just as the acquisitive practice of private property is powered by scarcity, so this rhythm is energized by the certainty that there is more than enough given by God.
That abundance is the ground for regular work stoppage on Sabbath; it is equally the ground for debt cancellation. There will be enough, more than enough, so that I can stop work for a day. There will be more than enough for creditors without squeezing debtors. There will be more than enough of land, of goods, and of property, so that I need not keep what belongs to my neighbor. The entire rhythm is a festival of creation, a concrete acknowledgment of the generosity of the God who gives more than enough.
3. The rhythms of neighborly, evangelical time are acutely subversive of dominant practices of anti-neighborly time. Sabbath, Year of Release, and Jubilee constitute a practice that stands in deep solidarity with neighbors who are God-noticed, entitled members of the community. The neighbor is not a threat, nor an inconvenience, nor a distraction, but a fully valued partner in the covenantal enterprise of community.
Dominant ideology regards the neighbor as a threat to my property, as a competitor for limited goods, as a rival in a world of scarcity. As the contemporary world proceeds on an anxious assumption of scarcity, so this rhythm challenges it by a conviction of abundance rooted
in God’s self-giving. This rhythm declares that scarcity is an unexamined, phoney idea in a world where the creator God governs.
Each time we commit these acts of neighborly, evangelical time, we bear witness among ourselves, to our children, and to any who see us, that we do not subscribe to the atheism that fosters scarcity. We declare that scarcity is a frightened conclusion drawn without reference to the creator God. It follows that these acts of deliberate and inescapable subversion appear as foolishness to the world of scarcity, for such evangelical subversion is characteristically seen as foolish, if not dangerous. We may expect such evangelical subversiveness to be doubted and resisted by those who live outside the orbit of the creator God.
4. Jubilee is a durable strategy and part of an on-going neighborly rhythm (not a one-time spree) and cannot be practiced in any sustained way when our lives, our fortunes, our sacred honor, and our imagination are deeply set in the dominant practices of anti-neighborly time. The dominant practices of anti-neighborly time are exhibited whenever the self is an autonomous agent who protects private privilege at the expense of others, who is willing to act against the neighborhood for self gain (as in capital gains?).
This anti-neighborly practice of time is powerfully reenforced by “liturgies of scarcity” that are all around us, e.g., professional sports, much of conventional entertainment and television (perhaps especially mean-spirited sit-coms). These “liturgies of scarcity” are characteristically focused on money, sex, wealth, technology, and one-upsmanship. All of these acts of greedy imagination culminate in “shopping,” the enactment of the vocation of a “consumer.” Such shopping, based outside need, thins the memory, evaporates hope, reduces everything to image, and eventuates in rootless, visionless people on the make, who are rootless and visionless enough to accept easy practices of social violence as normal. Those who regularly engage in such liturgies are not easily attuned to the rhythms of Sabbath, Year of Release, and Jubilee.
5. The pastoral task is to summon and invite out of an anti-neighborly liturgy of scarcity in order to relocate in a subversive rhythm of generosity and neighborly obedience. The old-fashioned term for such relocation is “conversion” or “repentance.” Such conversion from an anti-neighborly way in the world that is widely perceived as “normal” to an alternative practice that is neighbor-aimed and generosity-based is as urgent among us as it is difficult.
Such pastoral nurture into alternative is urgent not only because individual persons in our consumer society are shriveling in despair, but because a conventional way of greed and acquisitiveness will surely destroy us all. Jubilee, as a pastoral reference, is characteristically an invitation to rechoose at elemental levels of life, between “life and death” (Deut 20:15-20), between God and “mammon” (Matt 6:24).
Jubilee is not an after-thought in biblical faith. It is rather the defining core of a life of glad, generous obedience. The trumpet does indeed sound. The ancient memory affirms that acting differently “on signal” is expected and is possible.
