Scripture: Leviticus 25:10 – “And you shall hallow the fiftieth year and you shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you: you shall return, every one of you, to your property and every one of you to your family.” (NRSV)
I was born in 1977, which makes me a younger member of “Generation X”. Millennials are defined by knowing the internet from their childhood, but I can still remember a time when encyclopedias and almanacs were the only way to easily grab information. But on the other hand, I was young enough to always have computers and video games in my life.
One of the things that video game consoles have is a reset button. Perhaps this was originally designed to reset the program after a crash or error, but it also allowed the player to just stop the game and start over. Over the years, the reset became a standard part of any game. If you make a mistake, or even if you do not like your performance, just press the reset button and start again.
Of course, life if not like that. If you make a mistake, you cannot just go back and do it over again. What life does afford us is the ability to try to fix the mistakes we do make, something video games rarely allow. At the heart of this are things like repentance and forgiveness, which are modeled by our faith in Jesus Christ. Throughout Lent, we examine the sacrifice that Jesus made so that we might be reconciled to God and to each other. Jesus presses the reset button on our souls so that we might try again.
But God does not stop at resetting our personal mistakes, but our social ones as well. In real life, this is more difficult, as societal forces tend to accelerate along their courses rather than return to an equilibrium. The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. Life seems more and more divided and extreme, and there seems to be no way to return to a life of relative peace. Any attempt at a reset seems more and more impossible.
But the ancient Israelites had an ideal of a reset for their society. It was called the Jubilee. It was an extra “super-sabbath” year based around that idea that if one should rest their fields once every seven years to restore the soil, then once every fifty years (7 x 7 + 1), the people should be restored. All the land that was traded or lost over the previous years would be returned. Debts would be forgiven, and the people would be allowed to return to a more equitable state. The reset prevented some from gaining all the power and others from losing everything forever.
Life being what it is, it seems like the Jubilee was always more of an ideal than an actual practice, but its inclusion in the laws of Moses indicates that this is the way God wants things to be. God wants us to live in a society where we do forgive each other, where there is restorative justice, and where we take a break from our quest for wealth and power to live peaceably with each other, even if it is only twice a century.
When you are feeling overwhelmed by injustices large and small, you may not be able to press that reset button like in a video game, but God will restore everything to your soul through faith and prayer.
Prayer: Dear God, bless us and bring us ever into the peace and justice of your Kingdom. Amen.
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