Jubilee

on being soft and reconciled

It’s sometimes said that grief unites. Perhaps it can, but not always. I’ve been in enough funerals to know it can paper over the cracks but it’s tissue thin. An uneasy truce cannot finally hold because it cannot truly heal. Something far deeper is needed — a step of tentative faith, cautious and trembling; a hand extended in mercy, a heart open to seek it. But how hard it is to enter that kind of space on a day of deepest emotional discord, when disparate memories converge and unrelated conflicts merge into one unyielding whole?

And what if the final goodbye is not to a person but to a larger shared life? A whole family torn to shreds by a politics harder than steel and impervious to sanity’s balm. A church that can no longer connect as family, can no longer find its centre in the love so radical it endured a cross, clothing all in the priority of grace, in the unity of the Spirit? A whole society whose sense of place and shared history is contested, every stitch dropped and the garment unwound, offering no warmth, no covering.

We can’t pretend such scenes don’t come before our eyes. They cloud our vision and shroud our hearts in a grief whose web has been spun in the shadows.

In her song, Deal Breaker, Sara Groves offers hope through the lens of an Old Testament festival — the year of Jubilee. Her words no doubt emerged in a context both personal and cultural but the brushstrokes are laid on a broader canvas.

There is, she observes, “detritus and wreckage far and wide” and between the parties there is a no man’s land, the unmistakable portent of a war for the ages. The song’s protagonists are both deciding what they can abide, holding their tongues and yet speaking their minds, living out their daily liturgies and praying-in their different dreams.

So far, far apart. The voice of the singer acknowledges,

I always thought with you and me
Though it’s not on paper
There would never be
A deal breaker

And yet it seems that the deal has been broken. Sides have been taken. Hostilities hold.

And there’s grief like a blackbird
Ever present in the sky
And I can feel all our distance
And the hidden reasons why

Being honest, it feels completely hopeless. The lines that have been drawn have been laid down in indelible ink. Human hearts and even whole communities have been canyoned. And yet there remains a hope that the warring parties could one day be “soft and reconciled.” Where does that hope spring from?

Last night I dreamt we walked the riverbed
Listened closely for what’s not been said
Last night I dreamt of jubilee
New beginnings as far as the eye can see

Jubilee — debts being cancelled and people being set free. What had been lost through life’s terrors being restored, reconciliation embraced, life renewed.

The Bible’s picture of Jubilee, laid down in Leviticus 25, is ultimately fulfilled in and by Jesus of Nazareth. When he began his public ministry he read from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah (what we know as chapter 61), ending the quotation with the climactic-sounding words, “to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”¹ The year of Jubilee.

And, he said, it was coming true, it was being enacted right there, right then. Through him. Now was and is the day of salvation. The lifting of the heaviest loads from shoulders that could never bear the weight of unrelieved, unforgiven sin and shame.²

Jubilee has nothing at all to do with human achievement or deliberation or agreement. It was simply set in God’s calendar, a gift given and waiting to be received. And yet its performance clearly is related to people being responsive to the grace that God has determined will reign.

The impetus for communal embrace of jubilee may well have lain with those who were the community leaders but at the very local level it was down to the individual to ensure they did so. Forgiveness and reconciliation cannot be demanded, cannot be legislated for. They have to be personally enacted. I’ll admit that is not easy, nor is it instantaneous. Yet it remains stubbornly possible.

And the onus for it remains on those who have tasted and seen that the Lord is good, who have been the recipients of the most wonderful grace. It is our calling to pray for and to attempt that reconciliation, in all humility and kindness, never forgetting that it is the kindness of the Lord that leads to repentance and that kindness is to be felt at the hands of his people. To make, wherever possible, the first move towards healing.

Is that not costly? Yes, for sure. In the book of Ruth the one who was unwilling to pay the price of redemption, because it endangered his hopes and plans for his own family, removed his sandal to signify that unwillingness and thereafter being known for that reluctance. The transfer put into the hands of the willing the opportunity and the responsibility for embracing the cost of redemption.³

Those who stand against all manner of evil, as followers of Jesus and as part of his one, united family, are called to be “sandalled with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace.”⁴ Ready to kneel in prayer and to take the first steps towards the healing of Jubilee — new beginnings as far as the eye can see.

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1. Luke 4:19

2. Psalm 38:4; Leviticus 26:12,13

3. Ruth 4:1-8; Deuteronomy 25:10

4. Ephesians 6:15