God, Economics, and the Year of Jubilee

In my political science class, we debate a lot about the best form of economics. Isn’t capitalism more efficient and therefore the best? But what about socialism? Doesn’t that provide everyone with a share of basic human dignity? While I personally tend to lean more towards free markets, as a Christian I’ve always wondered what Jesus had to say about economics. C.S. Lewis claimed that socialism is the most consistent system with Christianity. John Stott seems to think that both capitalism and socialism have their own Biblical flaws (and I tend to agree with him). Countless other conservative Christians have, in the marriage of the religious right and evangelicalism, given full endorsement to capitalism. But what does God have to say?

My humble opinion is that God is less concerned with the system and more concerned with our own heart and social justice. In Leviticus 25, I think we find some economic truth that, if we grasped it fully, would change our lives. Speaking about the Year of Jubilee, Moses writes:

“If your brother becomes poor and sells part of his property, then his nearest redeemer shall come and redeem what his brother has sold. If a man has no one to redeem it and then himself becomes prosperous and finds sufficient means to redeem it, let him calculate the years since he sold it and pay back the balance to the man to whom he sold it, and then return to his property. But if he has not sufficient means to recover it, then what he sold shall remain in the hand of the buyer until the year of jubilee. In the jubilee it shall be released, and he shall return to his property”(Lev. 25:25-28, ESV).

The Year of Jubilee institutes a very interesting economy. For 49 years, the Israelites would work the land, gain money, lose profits, sell and buy. But on the 50th year, all of this would be reversed. Someone who was poor and sold their property to someone well off would get their property back. That loss would again become gain. On the flip side, a man who, doing good business, bought someone’s farm land, would have to give it back free of charge (if it could not otherwise be paid). Now not everything went back to normal, and not all profits and losses were leveled, so this wasn’t a full reversion to the status quo every 50 years, but it does tell us at least, in my brief and inadequate study, two important things.

First, God is a God who is in the business of restoration. In Revelation 21:5, Christ proclaims “Behold, I am making all things new.” The entire purpose of the covenantal work of God throughout the ages has been, from Abraham to the end of time, to restore things back to the way they were in Eden, and even to make those things better and new. By allowing the Israelites to reclaim lost land every 50 years, God was dramatizing His future promise of bringing things back to the way they were supposed to be. Today, Jesus does this, first, in our own lives by giving us a heart to love him, and second, at the end of time when this process is complete in the New Heavens and Earth.

Second, it shows us the value of material possessions. Imagine today that President Obama signed a bill creating an American Year of Jubilee. After 50 years, all property bought over the last five decades from poor people would be returned to them. After fifty years of hard work on Wall Street or in the law firm, you’d have to give over most of your wealth and return more or less of your wealth to those from whom you’d got it. All debts would be canceled, and you’d be at about as rich as you were as a fresh college graduate (now this is a little bit of an exaggeration). How would this change our outlook on wealth, prosperity, success, and the purpose of life? Would we center ourselves around being rich and making money if we knew that by the time we were 50 or 70, it would all be gone. Entire industries in America today are built around retirement planning! How would we think about career choices in college? Would we all still line up for the majors and degrees that will give us the best standard of living? Now this is certainly not to say that making money is a bad thing. But it is to say that it’s not the only important thing in life.

Well, we do live in America, and we don’t certainly don’t have an official Year of Jubilee here, and maybe there are reasons for that. But the haunting truth of the matter is that, while we aren’t ancient Israelites, we are all still universally under the dominion of the Year of Jubilee. For most of us, it won’t come every fifty years. For some of us, it’s only 5 or 10 years down the road, or maybe tomorrow. For many, it’s still 30 or 40 years away. For college graduates, it’s probably about 50 years away. And for a newborn in the United States, it’s approximately 77.7 years away. The fact of the matter is that we all face our own personal Jubilee year, and we commonly refer to that as death. One day, every single one of us will die, and we will lose all our material possessions, no matter what the quantity or quality, or how hard we worked to earn them. In that “year,” we will return all that we have, and we won’t be able to keep one penny of it. If the Year of Jubilee was legislation, then maybe we’d orient our lives around it, but in the light of death, we still fail to live lives with purpose and meaning for our King. Perhaps we should start living our lives in the reality of death and of our own finitude and start living as “living sacrifice[s], holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship” (Rom. 12:1, ESV). We would do well to remember that.