We are experiencing a once in a generation moment in the Church: A jubilee year. It’s a big deal. It’s worth getting excited about. An invitation to hope has been extended to you. God is inviting you to hope. Your life, your situation, your future: all these fit nicely within the purview of this Jubilee. Like so many things in our faith, the concept of a jubilee has a rich history. The concept goes back thousands of years to our Hebrew forefathers. God’s instruction to them in their dessert wanderings is where we first encounter jubilee. Jubilee thus finds its ultimate source in The Father. We see this in Leviticus 25:
"You shall count seven weeks of years—seven times seven years—such that the seven weeks of years amount to forty-nine years. Then, on the tenth day of the seventh month let the ram’s horn resound; on this, the Day of Atonement, the ram’s horn blast shall resound throughout your land. You shall treat this fiftieth year as sacred. You shall proclaim liberty in the land for all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you, when each of you shall return to your own property, each of you to your own family. This fiftieth year is your year of jubilee; you shall not sow, nor shall you reap the aftergrowth or pick the untrimmed vines, since this is the jubilee. It shall be sacred for you. You may only eat what the field yields of itself. In this year of jubilee, then, each of you shall return to your own property."
What strikes me is how all-encompassing this jubilee year was. Their property, commerce, their families, their very food supply- all these elements were effected by the jubilee year. Here we see an important notion that there was no distinction between “faith life” and “real life” in the lives for the Hebrew people. The renewal the Father desired was, yes, primarily a spiritual one, yet not a compartmentalized one that changed only their spiritual lives. No, this spiritual gift and renewal necessarily redounded to every aspect of their lives.
The staples of the jubilee were: Rest, forgiveness of debts, freedom from bondage, and going home. These features beautifully reveal what The Father desires for us. They are good indicators as to what our experience of his salvation should and will include. The Father desires rest for us. He desires us to experience forgiveness and forgive in turn. He wants us to be free from slavery and bondage. Mostly, he wants us home- at home with Him.
Jubilee starts as a desire from the Father communicated through ritual prescription, but then something unexpected happens. God actually comes. Listen to what He says as He inaugurates His earthly ministry in Luke’s gospel:
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.
This is not a ritual prescription anymore… This is God Himself coming to us and personally extending this offer of radical freedom. Jesus’ presence and redeeming work are the ultimate fulfillment of the dream of the Jubilee. Jesus’ words beautifully echo those of His Father so many years ago. I invite you to reflect for a few moments on Jesus’ earthly ministry, and just how beautifully they accomplish the aforementioned staples of the jubilee. People were freed from the dominion of satan, their food miraculously provided for, the whole world’s sins were forgiven in the blood of the lamb, and man was reconciled to God and the gates of our eternal home in Heaven rendered open by his resurrection. It seems today that every big corporation to even mom and pop shops have these carefully crafted lofty mission statements that promise that their product will change the world. What is so beautiful is that Jesus actually gets things done. We hear not only this beautiful mission statement, but we see these initiatives fulfilled beyond anyone’s wildest imaginings.
Now, let us turn to our present situation.
Through the Church, we find ourselves in the same position as those lucky few in that synagogue in Galilee 2,000 years ago. We find in front of us the same declaration of jubilee by the same saving God. Holy Mother Church, The Body through which God works, addresses the entire people of God around the world and institutes in 2025 another jubilee year.
I’d like to pause here and consider who is declaring 2025 a jubilee year. This is not just a personal initiative of Pope Francis, but an initiative of The Church. That has a special gravitas that is worth considering. I think it beneficial to pause and consider what the Church is. No one does this more eloquently than Pius XII in his encyclical on the body of Christ, Mystici Corporis. Our Savior shares prerogatives peculiarly His own with the Church in such a way that she may portray, in her whole life, both exterior and interior, a most faithful image of Christ. For in virtue of the juridical mission by which our Divine Redeemer sent His Apostles into the world, as He had been sent by the Father, it is He who through the Church baptizes, teaches, rules, looses, binds, offers, sacrifices.
Here we see the Church not as an invention and instrument of man trying to appease God (as many think the Church to be), but rather God is the active agent. It is God who works through His Church to effect his ministry in the world. Thus in the actions of the church we see yes the work of men, but in the work of men we see that it is primarily God working. This is the beauty of the Church and the beauty of our God. He works through us and with us in His governance of the world. The document continues:
This communication of the Spirit of Christ is the channel through which all the gifts, powers, and extra-ordinary graces found superabundantly in the Head as in their source flow into all the members of the Church, and are perfected daily in them according to the place they hold in the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ. Thus the Church becomes, as it were, the filling out and the complement of the Redeemer, while Christ in a sense attains through the Church a fullness in all things.
We are not used to thinking like this. I think for many of us, our conception of the Church is more in line with a protestant conception, which has a much lesser ecclesiology than we do. We are comfortable thinking of the church as simply the community of believers who live discipleship together. While this is certainly true, this is a woefully insufficient conception of what the Church is. As Catholics, we claim something much bolder, that in fact the Church is not something of our own invention, but rather the very mystical body of Christ- in which Christ is the head and we the members. Thus Christ as head communicates his salvation to his members in the his mystical body which subsists in the Catholic Church. In the Catholic faith, there is no distinction between Christ and The Church. They are one in the same reality. We accept that divine authority has been given to the Church not just to continue Christ’s mission, but so that Christ Himself can continue his saving work and mediate divine life to the members in this mystical body of which He is head. This ought to change how we hear the declaration of jubilee. It’s not just a program that comes from a bunch of church officials, it’s the Church authoritatively re-presenting the riches of Christ’s salvation. It’s a reoffering in the Holy Spirit of what came from the son’s lips 2,000 years ago and what came from the Father still many more years ago.
So with this renewed sense of what the Church is, What does this actually mean for us today?
If you go to Rome this year, and walk through the holy door, you will receive an plenary indulgence- a full remission of sin and all the temporal punishment for sin, and in this outpouring of grace enter into the joy of eternal life now on earth. Put plainly, the doors of Heaven are quite literally being opened to you. Again, The Church can do this. The introduction to indulgences reads:
The infinitely precious merits of Jesus, Divine Redeemer of the human race, and their abundant progeny, the merits of the Blessed Virgin Mary and all the saints, have been entrusted to Christ’s Church as an unfailing treasury, that they may be applied to the remission of sins and of the consequences of sin, by virtue of the power of binding and loosing which the Founder of the Church himself conferred on Peter and the other Apostles, and through them on their successors, the Supreme Pontiffs and Bishops.
The theme of the jubilee is hope. The Church is not merely telling us to be hopeful. The Church is telling us to be hopeful and then opening the doors of Heaven to us. The Church, which has the authority to forgive sins and confer the salvific grace of eternal life in the sacraments, is inviting you to hope. Not only this, but She is also providing the means for the realization of that our ultimate hope.
It’s not so much an invitation to hope as it is a bestowing the realization of all hope. While many of us will not go to Rome this year, the invitation of the Jubilee still remains. We may not walk through the official Holy door and receive an extraordinary outpouring of grace in an indulgence, but we do have beautifully restored “holy doors” of our own. Doors which of course open to our Church- where we find the altar, the tabernacle, the confessional. In short, we come in and encounter the life of the Church: the saving work of God in the sacraments. When we walk through those beautiful doors of our little parish in humble Edenton, we find the source of our hope. As our pastor has encouraged us: Enter in and allow yourself to be loved. He wants you home. He wants you rejoicing.
