Luke 4:14-22

1 John 4:19-5:4

Psalm 72:1-2, 14 and 15bc, 17

Luke 4:14-22

Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit,

and news of him spread throughout the whole region. 

He taught in their synagogues and was praised by all.

He came to Nazareth, where he had grown up,

and went according to his custom

into the synagogue on the sabbath day. 

He stood up to read and was handed a scroll of the prophet Isaiah. 

He unrolled the scroll and found the passage where it was written:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

    because he has anointed me

        to bring glad tidings to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives

    and recovery of sight to the blind,

        to let the oppressed go free,

and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.

Rolling up the scroll, he handed it back to the attendant and sat down,

and the eyes of all in the synagogue looked intently at him.

He said to them,

“Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.”

And all spoke highly of him

and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.

Opening Prayer: Lord God, you have prepared your people to experience your merciful love. Your Son inaugurated the perpetual Jubilee of mercy and grace. I love you and thank you for all that you have done to bring me into your family and save me from the slavery of sin and curse of eternal death.

Encountering the Word of God

1. Freedom and the Jubilee Year: Every seven years, the people of Israel were to celebrate a Sabbath year of rest. Every fifty years, after seven cycles of Sabbath years, the people of Israel were supposed to celebrate the Jubilee Year (Leviticus 25:8-55). It began with the spiritual liberation from sin on the Day of Atonement: “The removal of sin and evil allowed reconciliation of God with his people and a restoration of the family bond of the covenant” (Bergsma, Jesus and the Jubilee, 45). The blood of the lamb on the Day of Atonement accomplished redemption, the payment of the debt incurred by sin. Financial debts were also forgiven in the Jubilee Year, and the ancestral land that was sold to pay any financial debts was released or returned to the family that sold it. The Jubilee Year enabled the people of God to experience rest with God. The people were freed from debt, freed from slavery, and freed from agricultural obligations. They were freed to worship and enjoy covenant communion with the Lord God.

2. The Exile and the Jubilee: We can gather from the Bible that the people of Israel were negligent in obeying the prescriptions of the Sabbath years and Jubilee Years. In fact, the 70 years of the Babylonian Exile were a punishment for not following the laws about the Sabbath and Jubilee years (2 Chronicles 36:20-21). The prophets of Israel realized that the Jubilee year would truly be observed only when the Messiah or “anointed one” came (Bergsma, Jesus and the Jubilee, 55). Isaiah 61, which Jesus read in today’s Gospel, looks forward to the day when God’s anointed servant would proclaim liberty to the captives and a Jubilee year of favor. The other prophets, like Daniel and Ezekiel, both looked forward to the great Jubilee that the Messiah would inaugurate. Daniel spoke of seventy weeks of years (490 years) and Ezekiel used the number 500 (ten jubilee cycles) in connection to the New Temple. “Ezekiel meant to symbolize that, in the future, Israel’s temple would also be her source of jubilee – forgiveness, freedom, family, and fullness. And from this jubilean temple, the river of life would flow east, watering and rejuvenating the land wherever it reached (Ezek 47:1-12) (Bergsma,Jesus and the Jubilee, 57).

3. Nazareth and the Inauguration of the Great Jubilee: When Jesus read from Isaiah 61 in the synagogue at Nazareth, he proclaimed that he was the Messiah and was inaugurating the Jubilee Year of favor. He likened himself to the prophets Elijah and Elisha. After his preaching, Jesus does things that evidence he is the long-awaited Messiah and priestly king like Melchizedek. Not only does Jesus proclaim liberty and announce the year of the Lord’s favor, but he also releases people from their debt of sin, delivers them from the power of the devil, and atones for sin through his sacrificial death on the cross (see Bergsma, Jesus and the Jubilee, 75-76). We experience the perpetual jubilee inaugurated by Jesus every single day in the Sacraments of the Church. “All the goals of the jubilee are fulfilled by the gift of the Spirit. The Spirit forgives our sins, grants us freedom from the tyranny of Satan, institutes us as children of God and members of his family, and initiates us into the fullness of God so that we become ‘partakers of the divine nature’ (2 Peter 1:4)” (Bergsma, Jesus and the Jubilee, 111).

Conversing with Christ: Lord Jesus, I have heard your preaching in Nazareth and fully welcome the Jubilee you have inaugurated. Help me, during this year of Jubilee, to be freed from the slavery of sin and enter into my heavenly home.

Living the Word of God: Can I spend time this Jubilee Year 2025 learning about the Jubilee Year and its merciful indulgences? Can I read John Bergsma’s Jesus and the Jubilee (Emmaus Road, 2024) to deepen my knowledge of what the Jubilee was and is?