c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Robert M. Parham is the executive director of the Nashville-based Baptist Center for Ethics.)

UNDATED _ An almost forgotten biblical ideal is being resurrected, thanks partly to the fast-approaching new millennium. After years of neglect, the word jubilee is resurfacing in the substantive religious discourse and the practice of jubilee is being taken seriously.

When Moses led the Hebrews out of slavery in Egypt, he gave them an economic blueprint that included the observance of the year of jubilee, from a word”yobhel,”meaning ram’s horn. At the sound of the ram’s horn, jubilee was launched, a 50-year cycle at the end of which land remained fallow, debts were cancelled, slaves were freed and property reverted to the original owner.

The purpose of jubilee was to remind the Hebrews that creation really belonged to God and to recommit them to trusting God for their well-being and to justice for the weak in the land. The intended result was economic transformation.

Today, even groups outside the mainstream Judeo-Christian tradition have latched on to the idea of jubilee.

On the New Age front, The Jubilee 2000 Web site promises the creation of”a virtual global society in cyberspace to demonstrate the superiority of cooperation over competition as a guiding social principle.”The site’s motto quotes a line from the Beatles’ 1968 double white album:”You say you got a real solution. Well, you know, we’d all love to see the plan.” Well, Jubilee 2000’s plan is to jump-start the human race’s next spiritual, evolutionary leap forward. Project organizers hope to awaken long dormant ’60s activism and push toward utopia.

Writing to members of the World Council of Churches about the organization’s 50th anniversary meeting in Harare, Zimbabwe, General Secretary Konrad Raiser offered a more substantive jubilee agenda. He wrote,”The jubilee is the symbol of reconciliation and the re-establishment of right relationships”between separate churches. He advocated an ecumenical jubilee.

The National Council of Catholic Bishops identified deepened Christian unity as one of the goals in its jubilee plan. The bishops created the Office for the Third Millennium and the Jubilee Year 2000, an initiative to implement the papal exhortation to celebrate the new millennium with religious renewal. They challenged Catholics to intensify their spiritual journey through repentance and forgiveness.

Quoting Pope John Paul II, the bishops encouraged Catholics not to be afraid”to build in the next century a civilization worthy of the human person.” A mainline Christian coalition also has a jubilee 2000 agenda. Some 40 American Catholic and Protestant organizations are campaigning to get wealthy nations by the year 2000 to cancel the unpayable debts owed by the world’s poorest countries. Jubilee2000/USA sees such debt as a cause of poverty and environmental harm. Sponsoring organizations include Bread for the World, Church World Services of the National Council of Churches, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Presbyterian Church (USA) and the United Methodist Church Board for Church and Society.

With the word jubilee hitched to so many religious initiatives, people of faith and others deserve some talking points on the revolutionary nature of this transformation.

Jesus spoke of the jubilee agenda in his first recorded synagogue sermon. He said that he had been commissioned to proclaim liberty to captives and to set those in bondage free. He closed with the proclamation of the acceptable year of the lord, an allusion to the year of jubilee.

As soon as the hearers realized his agenda, they”were filled with wrath.”They rose up to destroy him, not an uncommon reaction when moral commitments and economic interests butt heads.

The jubilee theme resurfaced in Jesus’ teachings. In his model prayer, he taught his followers to ask for debt forgiveness even as they had forgiven their own debtors. The New Testament account of this prayer renders the Greek word debt as monetary debt, despite the contemporary interpretation that it relates to interpersonal forgiveness.

In a story widely known as the parable of the unforgiving servant, Jesus told of a king who called for the payment of an enormous debt. Unable to pay, the king ordered that the deeply indebted man and his family be sold into slavery and their property seized. After the man pleaded for more time to repay, the king practiced jubilee and forgave the man’s debt.

The debt-free man, however, did not extend similar forgiveness when he encountered a man who owed him a slight amount. Hearing of the injustice, the king arrested the debt-free man and demanded repayment in full.

Clearly, a number of Christian bodies are faithfully seeking a contemporary implementation of the biblical concept of jubilee. Yet the response of individual Christians to its radical socio-economic agenda is far from certain.

Interpersonal forgiveness and ecumenical unity may be more knotty problems than international debt cancellation. The ongoing intricacies of human relationships can be even more complex than a series of public policy decisions. Nevertheless, the goals of jubilee deserve the best efforts of all Christians. Indeed, the ram’s horn has sounded.

IR END PARHAM