“You will consecrate that year, the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty in all the land and to everyone who dwells in it. A Jubilee year it will be for you, and you will return everyone’s possessions. And everyone will return to their family. A Jubilee will that year, that fiftieth year be for you. You will not sow from the ground or harvest any untrimmed vine. Because it’s a Jubilee year, and it must be sacred to you. You will eat of what grows wild in the fields” (Leviticus 25.10-11).
After chapters of detailed instructions about the way to live your everyday life, Leviticus concludes a vision of a moment where all debts are forgiven, property is returned, and anyone who’s had to sell themselves into servitude is set free. It’s beautiful, and a total dream.
Let’s just put aside for a moment how much this depends on people acting honestly and honorably. Remember, before you even get to the fiftieth year, there’s an expectation that people will sell things for a fair price—even knocking down the price depending how close you are to the Jubilee year. Because we all know everyone’s willing to take less than a piece of property is worth.
And how about this idea of setting servants free? Think about it, a few bad breaks have put you so far into the hole that your only recourse is to offer yourself up as free labor to work off the debts. Come year fifty, does anyone think someone’s going to give that up? There’s jobs that don’t want to pay ten dollars an hour now, what do you think would happen if they could get work for free?
No, there is absolutely, positively no way this ever happened once the Children of Israel made it to the Promised Land. Their little nation would have collapsed. People would have starved and the poor would have ended up poorer and the rich would have become richer. All that returned land would have been reacquired for a song. And those years of servitude you were just freed from? Well, tack on double to that now.
I mean, it’s absurd. It’s nothing but a wild dream. It’s the work of a very good imagination.
In the movie Miracle on 34th Street, Edmund Gwynne’s Kris Kringle asks Natalie Wood’s Susan if she knows what imagination is. “Oh sure,” she says, “that’s when you see things that aren’t there.” She’s right, of course. Growing up, my backyard wasn’t an alien landscape just the same as my bedroom wasn’t a starship. I didn’t believe either really was one of these things, it was fun to pretend. It was exciting to imagine what it might be to be somewhere else, experiencing a world very different from the one around me.
God’s no fool. I don’t think there was any illusion that the Children of Israel would put the instructions for Jubilee years into practice. But that wasn’t the point. I think the modus behind it was to plant the seed, to open their minds to the possibility of what could be. Sure, no one would probably ever try and put them into action, but the thought would be there. The dream, you could say, would be present. For them and their children.
It’s why the words are recorded, to keep planting the seed of the idea. Even in us, as unrealistic as it sounds to our world today. To spark our imagination into thinking about the things we can’t see.
In hopes that one day we will.
Holy One, give us the courage to dream as creatively as you.