Manifestos do matter

Here's the sermon I preached yesterday at St Catherine’s Wickford:

When we have a General or Local Election I wonder whether you read the manifestos of the candidates that you are able to vote for. I guess that most of us don’t. Often they are quite wordy and many people don’t believe a word that is written in them. 

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.” 

However, manifestos do matter, as has been proved this week when Suella Braverman’s resignation letter stating: “I have concerns about the direction of this government. Not only have we broken key pledges that were promised to our voters, but I have had serious concerns about this Government's commitment to honouring manifesto commitments” was one of several factors leading to the resignation of Liz Truss as Prime Minister.

The passage from Isaiah that Jesus read in the synagogue at Nazareth, as we heard in our Gospel reading (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. In contrast to many, or perhaps most, politicians, 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, the inability to see clearly, and oppression. What Jesus was 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. In other words, the whole of society had a restart and those who had lost out in the previous 49 were enable to begin again with a clean slate and their lost resources.

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.

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 in practice 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 created for human beings to live. In turning away from God’s ways, we do not do away with God or 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. One example of this happening in practice was the Jubilee 2000 campaign which was a movement that took the issue of debt to the forefront of mainstream politics in the years leading up to the millennium and after. Inspired by the ancient concept of ‘jubilee’, Jubilee 2000 worked 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. The global Jubilee 2000 campaign won $130 billion of debt cancellation for lower income countries which led to significant improvements to public services such as healthcare and education. Though this was an important victory, the structural causes that keep debt crises happening again and again, remained in place and so Debt Justice continue to campaign for systemic change today.

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 would not be like and here, in the synagogue, he used the Bible to tell everyone what he would be like. This Bible Sunday 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 campaigns like that for Debt Justice? 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?

Last Wednesday the Church remembered Henry Martyn, Translator of the Scriptures. Born in Truro in 1781, Henry Martyn went up to Cambridge at the age of sixteen. He became an avowed evangelical and his friendship with Charles Simeon led to his interest in missionary work. In 1805, he left for Calcutta as a chaplain to the East India Company. The expectation was that he would minister to the British expatriate community, not to the indigenous peoples; in fact, there was a constant fear of insurrection and even the recitation of Magnificat at Evensong was forbidden, lest 'putting down the mighty from their seats' should incite the indigenous peoples. Henry set about learning the local languages and then supervised the translation of the New Testament first into Hindi and then into Persian and Arabic, as well as preaching and teaching in mission schools. He understood that Jesus’ manifesto, like the Magnificat, meant freedom and release for all people everywhere. May we realise and live out that same truth too. Amen.  

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Iain Archer - Everything I've Got.