Jubilee.
“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.”
Leviticus 25:10
Have you ever wondered why the Jubilee is so seismic? Beyond it’s infrequency and often happening only once in the span of someone’s natural life, it is one of the massive and tangible ways God reaches into the throes of His children’s oppression, death and utter barrenness and carves over all of our lives, over every account, “FREE."
When all you have known is oppression, barrenness feels like a life sentence. And before the stage of hopelessness and numb acceptance, the only response to barrenness is to weep.
Hannah poured herself out to the Lord in sheer grief and Sarah laughed to mask hers. The woman of Shunem couldn’t even hear such a prophecy from Elisha, because the pain of hoping for life in her womb felt too much to bear.
Barrenness often parades as death and the only response when we see it coming is to weep.
I often wonder if Abraham wept on his way to Moriah. The man who stopped tribal wars between kings with his own militia, who spared his nephew from judgement and now, he cannot save his own promise.
Yet no matter who it is or what was done, in every one of those lives Yahweh shows up. And those of us who impatiently flip to the end of these sagas to see how it concludes are always reassured that our Hero comes in and redeems it all. But we forget that a few verses for us, a few pages, a few chapters are years of unknown for the one the story speaks about.
They didn’t always know.
Just like you didn’t know. I didn’t know. We didn’t know.
And inevitably there is always this moment we clay vessels crash into. This convergence where long-suffering stares down the blaspheming giant of doubt. The war is over the truth of His faithfulness, the willingness of the One we know saves the day. The desperation and the pain that barrenness produces brings us to the bottom of our well, the end of ourselves and it seems so many of us have the same conclusion once we hit it…Lord I don’t trust you. I don't actually think you will save me.
To even say such a thing and land here after decades of faith is so shocking. We wouldn’t even be in the Valley of Elah if we didn’t believe, but it’s here where our lack of trust is exposed. Lord, I have been here before. Where I had such faith and threw the stone, but it was me who got taken out.
We begin to realize that pain is the root system of everything we are forced to confront at our Jabbok and that pain breeds distrust. We think this revelation will shock the Most High and somehow put Him out of sorts. Completely unmoved, Christ lovingly looks at each of us, piercing our inmost place with those fiery eyes of sapphire and says, “I know.”
You mean, He knows?
He knows and He still loves me, chooses me? He knows and He is still patient through every season of my life? He knows and still entrusts things to my hand? He knows and still yearns for me? He knows and still answers when I cry? He knows and still…
It reminds me of this verse where Paul describes the nature of God to Timothy,
“If we are faithless, he remains faithful—for he cannot deny himself.”
2 Timothy 2:13
So that means Christ knows I will succumb to this moment of faithlessness, maybe many moments, and still He handpicks me for the Jubilee?
Like the woman of Shunem, I have had my fair shares of accusing God of dangling carrots. Of taking me up the garden path with breadcrumbs that led to nothing. False hope. Suffering for the sake of and nothing more. Simply put here to survive this life, while all promise is only for the next one. Even painfully wailing, “I never asked you to create me.” I have felt it and said it all. Begrudgingly laying on His chest, when it felt like a betrayal to be comforted by the very One I felt abandoned by.
And just as the shame begins to cloak me for even admitting I could think, let alone say those things about a perfect Baba - He extends His divine providence over this too. Jesus gives us language for the frailty of this very human moment, explaining that the more desperate we are, the more in pain we are, the more we have lost, the more the Jubilee matters.
“Whoever has been forgiven little loves little.”
another translation says it like this, “If the forgiveness is minimal, the gratitude is minimal.”
Luke 7:47
The ones who freely dance when the Jubilee bell rings are often the ones who have lost the most.
Imagine how much more extravagantly Abraham showed his love for Isaac and for the Most High, after God saved his promise. Or how redemptive it was for Sarah’s laugh to well up from a place of joy instead of pain, as she watched Isaac grow. How Hannah went from being too depressed to eat, to naming her first child after her crushing at the altar; no longer afraid to look at that memory because it was when her Jubilee showed up. And what of the Shunammite woman? To finally have her son and then to later see him resurrected. Imagine the love that poured out of her, the gratitude, the joy…taking no day or mundane moment with her child for granted.
You see there are some things we will never feel in life, never express, if we don’t first persevere through barrenness…through death.
The Jubilee reassures us that even in the darkest of nights, wait for the bell. Freedom has a sound and that sound commands breath. And where there is breath, there is life - and where there is life, hope.
Brothers and sisters, the Lord has declared the Jubilee and our altar stones are shaking. The smell of smoke is coming from the tents of Salem - and that smell is the fragrance of the Lord receiving our sacrifices, our tear-stained prayers, even our unbelief, our debts, our oppression, our barrenness, our pain, our suffering…devouring it all with Himself and declaring, “FREE!”
This is Jubilee. And oh child, He is here. The bell rings at midnight, wait for it. Like the father of the prodigal, watch for it - and then run out to receive it!
