The
political parties know this, as is demonstrated by this quote from a post
entitled Why manifestos still matter (even if nobody reads them) from Labour List:
“Given the amount of time and effort that goes into producing election manifestos, the number of people who actually read them is frighteningly small. Every campaign, parties make determined efforts to get them onto shelves but their sales hardly threaten JK Rowling or even the authors of well-known political diaries (still available in all good book shops) ….
But for the millions of voters who decide the election outcome … well for the overwhelming majority, life’s too short.”
The
passage that Jesus read in the synagogue at Nazareth (Luke 4. 16 - 24) was the manifesto for his ministry and for the kingdom of God. We
would do well not to ignore this manifesto because what Jesus spoke about here
he actually did in the course of his ministry. He did exactly what it says on
the tin, as the advert goes.
Jesus’
manifesto was taken from Isaiah 61 and is all about release. Release from
poverty, imprisonment, blindness and oppression. What Jesus is proclaiming
would have been recognised by his hearers as the announcement of the Year of
Jubilee – “the time when the Lord shall come to save his people.”
The
word ‘jubilee’ stems from the Hebrew word ‘Yobel’, which refers to the ram or
ram’s horn with which jubilee years were proclaimed. In Leviticus it states
that such a horn or trumpet is to be blown on the tenth day of the seventh
month after the lapse of ‘seven Sabbaths of years’ (49 years) as a proclamation
of liberty throughout the land of the tribes of Israel. The year of jubilee was
a consecrated year of ‘Sabbath-rest’ and liberty. During this year all debts
were cancelled, lands were restored to their original owners and family members
were restored to one another.
The people listening to Jesus knew about Jubilee but had never
heard anything like his statement before. What Jesus was saying and how he was
saying it was astonishing. They had heard teachers talk of the law before but
this was something so amazing that they were in awe. Jesus was in another
league because he claimed to be the fulfilment of Isaiah’s prophecy in Isaiah
61:1–2.
Jesus stated that he had come to ‘proclaim freedom for the
prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind, to set the oppressed free, to
proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour’ (Luke 4:18–19). That is the year of
jubilee and so Jesus
proclaimed his coming and the coming of God’s kingdom as the time of Jubilee –
a time of release for all people from those things that enslave us and trap us.
Each
one of us is a slave to sin and blind to the truth about God because we have
chosen to live selfish lives turning our backs on God and the way of life that
he had created for human beings to live. In turning away from God’s ways we do
not do away with gods altogether instead our desires run riot and we become
slaves to them worshipping other gods; whether they come in the form of money,
sex, celebrity or whatever.
Jesus
comes to free us from all of these enslavements and to open our eyes to the way
in which God created human beings to live; loving God with all our being and
loving our neighbours as ourselves.
This
isn’t something that is just for us as individuals however. It is also
something which can impact all of society. After all, the Old Testament Jubilee
was intended for the nation of Israel, not simply individuals within it. A
contemporary example of this happening in practice is the Jubilee Debt Campaign, which is part of a global movement demanding
freedom from the slavery of unjust debts and a new financial system that puts
people first. Inspired by the ancient concept of ‘jubilee’, the Jubilee Debt
Campaign works for a world where debt is no longer used as a form of power by
which the rich exploit the poor. Freedom from debt slavery is a necessary step
towards a world in which our common resources are used to realise equality,
justice and human dignity. It is particularly important that we think about
such things at the end of One World Week where people from
diverse backgrounds have been coming together to learn about global justice, to
spread that learning and to use it to take action for justice locally and
globally.
We
can see from all this that, in order to understand what our release means, we
need to be people who know and understand the Bible. Chapter 4 of Luke’s gospel
shows us clearly that Jesus was immersed in the Hebrew scriptures and saw them
as speaking about himself. When he was tempted by the Devil at the beginning of
Chapter 4 he defended himself by quoting from the Bible. In that passage he used
the Bible to tell the Devil what he will not be like and here, in the
synagogue, he used the Bible to tell everyone what he will be like. We can do
the same if we read and understand what God is saying to us in the Bible both
about those things from which our lives need to be freed and those things to
which we need to dedicate our lives, talents and time.
The
people who heard Jesus were, initially, impressed by what he said but as they
realised that Jesus intended this Jubilee to be for all people they rejected
him and tried to kill him. What will our response to Jesus’ manifesto be? Will
it be the rejection that he experienced from the people of Nazareth ?
Will it be the apathy and disbelief that we accord to most political
manifestos? Will it be the cynicism or distrust that some feel towards events
like One World Week? Or will it be acceptance of the release from slavery to
sin that Jesus offers to us and involvement in his work of releasing others
from sin and from debt?
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U2 - Beautiful Day.
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