The Jubilee and Our Pockets Pope Francis' Wednesday Catechesis, February 10, 2016

By: Jennifer E. Miller, S.T.D., Professor of Moral Theology

NDS Blog Feature

This is a continuing feature on the NDS Blog. Dr. Jennifer E. Miller translates and offers commentary on the Pope’s General Audience every Wednesday.

This catechesis continues the catecheses on the Jubilee Year of Mercy which began on December 8, 2015. These catecheses are intended to help the faithful in living and witnessing well to the mercy of our Lord during this Extraordinary Jubilee.

Dr. Miller’s comments can be found in the blue boxes as you read her translation.

7.  The Jubilee in the Bible. Justice and Dividing with Others

Dear brothers and sisters, good morning and good Lenten journey!

It is beautiful and also meaningful to have this audience precisely during this Ash Wednesday. We begin our Lenten journey, and today we pause to reflect upon the ancient institution of the “Jubilee”; it is an an ancient thing, attested to in the Sacred Scriptures. We find it in particular in the Book of Leviticus, which presents it as a culminating moment of the religious and social life of the people of Israel.

Every 50 years, “on the day of expiation” (Lev 25:9), when the mercy of the Lord was being invoked upon all the people, the sounding of the horn announced a great event of liberation. We read in fact in the book of Leviticus: “You will declare holy the fiftieth year and you will proclaim liberation throughout the land for all of its inhabitants. It will be for you a jubilee; each of you will return to his property and to his family […] In this year of the jubilee each will return to his property” (25:10, 13). According to these regulations, if someone was constricted to sell his land or his house, during the jubilee he was able to retake possession of these; and if someone had contracted debits and, having been found impossible to pay them, was constricted to put himself into the service of his creditor, he could return free to his family and have all of his property once more.

As Pope Francis reminded us in his 2014 Lenten message: “Let us not forget that real poverty hurts: no self-denial is real without this dimension of penance. I distrust a charity that costs nothing and does not hurt.” Does our charity hurt?

With the jubilee, he who had become poor could once more have that which is necessary for living, and he who had become rich restituted to the poor that which he had taken from him. The goal was a society based on equality and solidarity, where liberty, the land, and money would become once more a good for everyone and not only for some, as occurs now, if I do not err…More or less, the numbers are not certain, but eighty percent of the wealth of humanity is in the hands of less than twenty percent of the population. It is a jubilee – and this I say remembering our story of salvation – by which to be converted, so that our hearts may become larger, more generous, more son of God, with more love. I will tell you something: if this desire, if this jubilee does not arrive in our pockets, it is not a true jubilee. Have you understood? And this is in the Bible! The Pope doesn’t invent this: it is in the Bible. The goal – as I said – was a society based on equality and solidarity, where liberty, the land, and money would become a good for everyone and not only for some. In fact, the jubilee had the function of helping the people to live a concrete fraternity, made of reciprocal aid. We can say that the biblical jubilee was a “jubilee of mercy”, because it was lived in the sincere search for the good for the needy brother.

Remember the call of St. John Paul II during the 2000 Year of Jubilee: “In the spirit of the Book of Leviticus (25:8-12), Christians will have to raise their voice on behalf of all the poor of the world, proposing the Jubilee as an appropriate time to give thought, among other things, to reducing substantially, if not cancelling outright, the international debt which seriously threatens the future of many nations.” Tertio millennio adveniente, 51.

There was also the law concerning the “first fruits”. What is this? The first part of the harvest, the most precious part, had to be shared with the Levites and foreigners (cfr. Deut 18:4-5; 26,1-11), who did not possess fields, such that for them also the land would be a source of nourishment and of life. “The land is mine, and you are close to me like foreigners and guests”, says the Lord (Lev 25,23). We are all guests of the Lord, in expectation of our heavenly homeland (cfr. Heb 11:13-16; 1 Peter 2:11), called to make the world that we inhabit habitable and human. And how many “first fruits” he who is more fortunate could give to he who is in difficulty! How many first fruits! Fruits not only of the fruit of the fields, but of every other product of work, of salaries, of savings, of many things that are possessed and sometimes wasted. This occurs also today. In the Office of Papal Charities many letters with a little bit of money arrive: “This is a part of my salary to help others”. And this is beautiful; to help others, the institutes of charity, hospitals, nursing homes…; give also to foreigners, those who are strangers and who are here passing through briefly. Jesus was only passing through briefly in Egypt.

One of the great gifts of Pope Francis to Catholic social teaching is his continuous use of Sacred Scripture, as found in Laudato Si’, 65-75. It allows us to ask whether our lives are being measured by the Gospel, or whether we are measuring the Gospel by our lives.

Dear brothers and sisters, the Biblical message is very clear: to open oneself with courage dividing with others, or sharing, and this is mercy! And if we want mercy from God, we begin to give it ourselves. It is this: to begin to do it ourselves between our fellow citizens, between families, between peoples, between continents. Contributing to realize a land without the poor means to construct a society without discrimination, based upon the solidarity that leads to dividing with others, or sharing, as much as one possesses, in a distribution of resources founded on fraternity and justice. Thank you.

IN DEPTH: A beautiful reflection on Christ’s poverty, and the need of every Christian to examine his heart in this regard, can be found in Pope Francis’ 2014 Lenten message, focused on the words of St. Paul: “By making himself poor, Jesus did not seek poverty for its own sake but, as Saint Paul says “that by his poverty you might become rich”… So what is this poverty by which Christ frees us and enriches us? It is his way of loving us, his way of being our neighbour, just as the Good Samaritan was neighbour to the man left half dead by the side of the road (cf. Lk 10:25ff ). What gives us true freedom, true salvation and true happiness is the compassion, tenderness and solidarity of his love. Christ’s poverty which enriches us is his taking flesh and bearing our weaknesses and sins as an expression of God’s infinite mercy to us… In the poor and outcast we see Christ’s face; by loving and helping the poor, we love and serve Christ…Our consciences thus need to be converted to justice, equality, simplicity and sharing.”

About the Author: Jennifer E. Miller, S.T.D., Professor of Moral Theology

Cajun by birth, Dr. Jennifer E. Miller comes from the Lafayette area. She earned her BA in theology from the Franciscan University of Steubenville in 2002, after which she worked for two years in youth ministry in the Ville Platte area of southern Louisiana.

Travelling to Rome to complete her studies, she earned an STB at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in 2007 and an STL in moral theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University in 2009. After a year of postgraduate studies at the John Paul II Pontifical Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family, Dr. Miller began work on a doctorate in Catholic Social Doctrine at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross. During this time, she also worked as assistant to Msgr. Martin Schlag, consultor to the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, and as the Directress of Studies at the Markets, Culture and Ethics Research Centre, an interdisciplinary research center between philosophy, theology, and economics that seeks to encourage and promote the virtuous culture necessary for an ethical economic system. Her STD was completed in 2013, with a thesis critiquing and reformulating Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach in light of the principle of subsidiarity and the family.

Dr. Miller has previously taught moral theology at the Aquinas Institute in Lafayette, Louisiana and was involved in teaching at Christendom College’s Rome Campus and at the Institute of Higher Religious Studies at the Apollinare (ISSRA), located at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross. She has taught and published both in English and in Italian. Dr. Miller believes that the moral life is best lived when it is understood as the call to holiness, to the beauty of the virtuous life in Christ directed towards beatitude, rather than as a system of exterior rules and obligations; she seeks to impart this understanding and this way of living the moral life to her students.

Jennifer E. Miller, S.T.D.
Office Location
St. Joseph Hall – Room 109

Contact
Email: jmiller@nds.edu