A Squandered Jubilee

It seems God has given us what could be a Jubilee year. But we are squandering it. 

“You will make the fiftieth year holy, proclaiming freedom throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It will be a Jubilee year for you: each of you must return to your family property and to your extended family. The fiftieth year will be a Jubilee year for you. Do not plant, do not harvest the secondary growth, and do not gather from the freely growing vines... The land will give its fruit so that you can eat your fill and live securely on it... The LORD says: The land must not be permanently sold because the land is mine. You are just immigrants and foreign guests of mine.” (Leviticus 25:10–11, 19, 23) 

The concept of the Jubilee Year— the Sabbath Year of Rest and Restoration— is not just a religious ritual. It is smart economics and healthy social practice. Imagine a society that has such forethought that it saves its resources, and apportions them so that everyone has daily bread, so that it can halt economic activity for an entire year every 50 years, and yet every citizen can still live healthy and secure lives. That society would be prepared to handle any kind of pandemic, drought, ecological disaster, or economic downturn. For instance, in our society right now, instead of scrambling and fumbling this pandemic, our attitude would be “No problem, we will just activate the procedures and processes we have in place for the Jubilee year”. 

Yet our society doesn’t think past the next quarter’s earnings report, and runs such razor thin margins to maximize profit that it cannot handle any serious shocks to the system. Unlike our resilient economy and society during the WWII era, it seems we have gutted the system to make it as cheap and fragile as possible to generate revenue. The same logic that a shoddy appliance manufacturer uses to make cheap products to siphon more money into profits is the logic that runs our entire system. The drive to short term gains and immediate gratification sabotages long term health and sustainability, both for individual persons and for nations. Perhaps some ancient wisdom might help us find a better way forward into the future.