The second is a little more difficult to see unless you spend some time thinking about the early Church. If Jesus was, in fact, preaching social justice in His use of the Jubilee year, then why didn’t the Church act like this was so? For instance, Paul didn’t cry out for social justice when he was arrested at Jerusalem. He staked his claim on unfair treatment on his Roman citizenship, not some type of “universal justice.” In Acts 16:25, in fact, we see the opposite at work; an earthquake frees Paul and Silas from a jail in Thesselonica. A perfect illustration of releasing the captives, right? And yet Paul and Silas didn’t leave. They stayed in the jail. If they had understood the teachings of Jesus to be what we consider modern social justice, they would have left the jail, and used their rescue as a platform to teach about how the jails should be emptied. The earthquake would have been the perfect sign on which to preach just such a message.
Finally, the context itself argues against the modern notion of social justice.
And if you make a sale to your neighbor or buy from your neighbor, you shall not wrong one another. You shall pay your neighbor according to the number of years after the jubilee, and he shall sell to you according to the number of years for crops. If the years are many, you shall increase the price, and if the years are few, you shall reduce the price, for it is the number of the crops that he is selling to you. Leviticus 25:14-16
So let’s say you lived under the Levitical law, and wanted to sell a piece of property to someone. You’d first figure out how many years it would be until the next Jubilee. Then you’d figure out the value of the crops or other goods that would come from the land for that many years, and you’d figure out the amount of work it would take to make those crops come to fruit, and the amount of money it would take to plant and manage the land. Then you’d “sell” the land for that amount of money. At the next Jubilee, the land would be returned to your family.
So, in reality, what the year of Jubilee really underlies is the idea of permanent family ownership of a piece of land. You couldn’t really sell your land, you could only “lease” it for 49 years. It’s much like when you buy a used car; you’re paying for the mileage you’ll get out of the car, not the total value. You’re betting that you can get more miles out of it than the current owner is; the current owner either just wants something new, or is betting the car is going to cost more than its worth in the long run.
Now it is true that the Jubilee somewhat reset expectations. If you sold your land, and lost the money you sold it for, your children would get the land back. But, in reality, this is what would always happen under a lease, isn’t it? Everyone sold and bought under the expectation that the land would be returned at the Jubilee. There was justice because you knew, when you bought a piece of land, that you would really only keep it until the next Jubilee. There was no expectation of permanence.
In the modern concept of a “Jubilee year,” this entire idea is turned on its head. Instead, people who promote a modern Jubilee want creditors to forgive debts they anticipated would be fully repaid. If the creditors had anticipated a Jubilee, they would have priced the event into their thinking—just as God told Israel to do in the case of the price of land.
The idea of the Jubilee year doesn’t support the modern notion of social justice at all. Instead, it really supports the Biblical idea of just plain justice. Everyone buys and sells knowing full well what they are getting in to. Everyone is treated equally before the law, rather than the law being used to create equal outcomes.
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