Jubilee Shout or Indistinct Sound?
If the bugle gives an indistinct sound, who will get ready for battle? (1 Cor 14:8)
Ernest Renan remarked that “every country is founded upon a lie.” Perhaps “half-truth, half-lie” would be a more accurate way of pointing to what
we all remember about our past and what we forget.
Take, for example, the famous Liberty Bell in Philadelphia. Because they were Bible readers, the designers of this one-ton sonorous object chiseled a verse from Leviticus 25:10 around its rim: “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.” One irony in this inscription is that the bell—authorized by the colonial legislature of Pennsylvania—was cast, noting Philadelphia in 1776, but in London in 1752. Almost immediately, upon being tested in Philadelphia, the bell suffered a crack. Then, in 1776, sure enough, its tolling announced the signing of a declaration of independence from the bell’s country of origin. Some 60 years later, it again suffered a crack while tolling the funeral of Chief Justice John Marshall. Cracked, and cracked again, is the American version of “liberty.”
There is, however, a second, more serious irony about that Liberty Bell. If there were a case against abstracting a single verse of scripture from its context, this is it. Read Leviticus 25 , and you find there a version of ” liberty ” that little entered the minds of the patriots who signed the great Declaration. They were, for the most part, a body of landowners. Did they plan eventually to return these lands to the “Indians” who were the original inhabitants? Leviticus 25:23 commands as much.
Did their agricultural practices include a restriction of land use consisting of one fallow year in seven? Ecologically wise, Leviticus 25:4 commands it. Did they swear to free every slave on their farms at some specified future date? No, though, in the compromising Constitution that many would help design in 1787, they would forbid American participation in the international slave trade by the year 1808. Finally, did they promise a law in their new government that would forbid the taking of interest on loans by the rich to the poor? Not at all—they were budding capitalists. Leviticus 25:35 defines such interest taking as a sin.
One might say that Leviticus 25 is a supreme example of a law which became a dead letter. There is no historical proof that, over a thousand year history, any tribe of Israel observed the great Jubilee law of Leviticus 25. The trumpet of Jubilee (Lev 25:9) blew softly if at all. Its voice, like the bell, would be seriously compromised and cracked. In the time of Jesus, for example, rich farmers were reducing poor neighbors to debt slavery and avoiding all traces of obedience to the Jubilee tradition by buying exceptions to the law from a compliant priesthood in Jerusalem. Just so, Jesus noted how children could avoid financial help to their poor parents by declaring their money corban, dedicated to God (Mark 7: I 1). Piety masking injustice—an old story.
There are ways not only to explain but also to justify modern inattention to Leviticus 25. One can say: “Those Old Testament law codes are simply out of date. We no longer burn witches (Exod 22:18), nor do we execute the owners of animals who kill a human (Exod 21:29). Nobody should treat Leviticus 25 as authoritative for a modern society. Not even Israel took it seriously.” Or, one can say: “It’s a very high ideal of justice to the poor, but it’s just impractical. Human nature won’t stand for it: once we work hard to buy and improve our property, what’s the justice in giving it back to some original owner? Might as well think ofgiving Manhattan back to the Indians.”
Or, one can say: “Modern capitalism has a better way to look out for the poor and the oppressed. We give them access to markets, and markets offer the chance for the poor to become rich.” The latter claim, of course, we hear these days around the world. Capitalism works, they say, because interest on loans gives enterprisers money to produce things to sell at prices which reward investors (interest and dividends) and reward the producers as well (profit). As Adam Smith recommended, this system arouses self-interests, disciplines them by competition, and produces goods which, in tow, make a whole society richer than any other system in history.
If one wants to claim an identity as a Christian or Jew, there is yet another way to get around the principles writ large in Leviticus 25: forget that similar principles suffuse the teachings of Jesus and opt for a dualism that permits these high religious standards to survive in one half of one’s brain while permitting other standards to hold sway in the other half. Psychologist Robert Lifton calls this “doubling.” My guess is that this latter way of avoiding the plain meanings of the Bible is ordinary for most of us religious folk.
In her fine recent article on “The Biblical Jubilee,” New Testament scholar Sharon H. Ringe begins with the confession: “As often as I have spoken about the biblical Jubilee, I still do so with trepidation, because I realize that I am first and foremost speaking to myself in indictment of the life I live by a combination of the good fortune of my birth and the choices I continue to make…” She goes on to document in both Testaments the overriding test of a just society: the effect of all its systems upon the welfare of its poorest members.
In this so-called post-communist era, we Christian preachers should ask ourselves and our congregations how, if at all, two sets of rules are to be reconciled: “Pay what you owe.” “Keep all that you earn.” “Pay the least possible taxes.” “God helps those who help themselves.” These are the ordinary rules of everyday economic ethics in America. Here is another set: “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors” (Matt 6:12). “Your abundance at the present time should supply their want” (2 Cor 8:14). “Sell all you have and distribute to the poor” (Luke 18:22). “By grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God” (Eph 2:8).
Reinhold Niebuhr spoke once about “the relevance of an impossible ideal.” In their thinking about ethics, economics, and politics, Christians are apt to admit to the”impossibility” more readily than to the “relevance.” One of the great modern embarrassments of Christianity is our easy dismissal of the Marxist rule: “From each according to ability, to each according to need.” This, too, sounds like an impossible ideal. Certainly modern communists have not lived up to it. Who, however, can fault this rule on the basis of the Bible? To be sure, there are no easy translations of ancient economic ethics to modern capitalistic societies.
But a struggle to make some hard translations should belong to any disciplined Christian life and to the witness of Christians and Jews in every society. A “bias for the poor” is no invention of communists or liberation theologians. It is old as Amos, Exodus, and Jesus of Nazareth.
The Marshall Plan of the late 1940s had some American self-interest in it, but it was at least an approximate translation of the ‘biblical idea of dealing mercifully with one’s enemies. It was a great improvement, in fact, on the vengeful Versailles Treaty. As a precedent, it was also a great improvement over current U.S. government international economic aid, now at a postwar low of one tenth of one per cent of our national budget. (That is one thousandth of the budget.) Back in the ’40s, the figure was 2%. When polled, the average American thinks that the figure is around 15%!
If we cannot make a smooth, literal translation of Leviticus 25 into rules for modern economic systems, we can at least celbrate and imitate efforts now afoot to break the spell of what billionaire George Soros criticizes as “Market fundamentalism.” Here are some of those efforts:
- In 1993 two Englishmen, Martin Dent and Bill Peters, co-founded the movement, “Jubilee 2000,” for forgiving debts of some $100 billion owed by 51 poor countries around the world, principally in Africa. Crushed by the AIDS epidemic, minimal access to the global economy, and corrupt political leadership, the people of these countries are seeing half of their governments’ budgets going to pay just the interest on their World Bank Loans. Dent and Peters called for treating the year 2000 as a Jubilee year. Millions of us around the rich world have petitioned our governments to let us (through our taxes) bear the cost of this debt-forgiveness. The U.S. congress has now offered almost (but only) half a billion as contribution to this debt relief. Martin Dent says that around this issue “the mobilization of people has been as great as that of the anti-slavery campaign in Britain in the 1820s and 1830s.””Market fundamentalism” means that markets are supposed to solve all economic needs. But what if one has no money to put into the market? That is the condition of those one billion humans on earth who live on less than $1 a day. “Globalization” leaves out these people, presenting us with a 21st century specter that while, three fourths of the human community becomes richer, one fourth becomes yet poorer. Is it not time, for example, that Europe and the United States designed a Marshall Plan for Africa?
- Making markets work for the poor requires ingenuity. One bright example of such ingenuity is Oikocredit, an outgrowth of the World Council of Churches,which offers small loans, at low interest, to village-level people for business and basic survival needs. Like the Grameen banks, this program depends upon capital loaned by individuals and churches who are willing to accept less-than-market returns—a slight concession, one might say, to the spirit of Leviticus 25 that is better than no concession at all. So far, these villagers’ record for repaying these loans exceeds that of customers of most commercial banks.
- To all these encouraging examples, Christians in the United States, at this beginning of the third millennium, should ponder the meaning of Leviticus 25 and Luke 18:22 for how we write our last will and testament. Collectively we Americans are the richest human generation in history. Economists estimate that, before all of us die, we will make private decisions about handing on between ten and twelve trillion dollars of assets to somebody in the upcoming generation . Markets have served many of us very well indeed,
When our survivors read our disposition of our assets, will they recognize that we “have been with Jesus” (Acts 14:13)? Will they see that this Christian, in life and in death,underwent “pocket book conversion” in favor of the world’s poor? If they do not, they will know that for us Leviticus 25 really is a dead letter.
