“ ‘Count off seven sabbath years—seven times seven years—so that the seven sabbath years amount to a period of forty-nine years. Then have the trumpet sounded everywhere on the tenth day of the seventh month; on the Day of Atonement sound the trumpet throughout your land. Consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you; each of you is to return to your family property and to your own clan...“ ‘The land must not be sold permanently, because the land is mine and you reside in my land as foreigners and strangers.Throughout the land that you hold as a possession, you must provide for the redemption of the land.
“ ‘If anyone among you becomes poor and sells some of their property, their nearest relative is to come and redeem what they have sold If, however, there is no one to redeem it for them but later on they prosper and acquire sufficient means to redeem it themselves they are to determine the value for the years since they sold it and refund the balance to the one to whom they sold it; they can then go back to their own property.But if they do not acquire the means to repay, what was sold will remain in the possession of the buyer until the Year of Jubilee. It will be returned in the Jubilee, and they can then go back to their property.
“ ‘Anyone who sells a house in a walled city retains the right of redemption a full year after its sale. During that time the seller may redeem it If it is not redeemed before a full year has passed, the house in the walled city shall belong permanently to the buyer and the buyer’s descendants. It is not to be returned in the Jubilee.But houses in villages without walls around them are to be considered as belonging to the open country. They can be redeemed, and they are to be returned in the Jubilee. -Leviticus 25 (Excerpts)
I am sure you are wondering why I am starting off with such a huge passage from the exciting book of Leviticus but it came up in my reading plan today and something in it caught my eye.
Leviticus is a book full of many of the laws that God wanted the Jews to follow and this passage is looking at a thing called Jubilee. It occurred every 50 years and debts were overlooked and homes were returned to their owners. At least that was my understanding until I looked a little closer.
It says that if a poor person sells his property and cannot find someone to purchase it back for him it should be returned to him at Jubilee. The basic idea behind this is that we rent the land from God so no one of us should own it. And property was really about what the land was used for. So instead of purchasing the land a person would purchase the right to use the land, live on the land, until the next Jubilee. Then it was returned to the original family.
EXCEPT, homes that were sold in walled in cities. These could be redeemed (bought to give back to the original owner) within one year but after that the property was not to be transferred back, not even at Jubilee.
Why this difference?
I think it has something to do with opportunity and wealth. See, I don't think God is against wealth, just an uneven distribution of it. Many people point to Jubilee as an example of how God wanted a very equitable society but I think more than monetary equality what God really wants is opportunity equality.
Homes in walled in cities were just places to live, not opportunities to take care of yourself and family like a plot of land outside of a city. Outside of cities people still lived on the land and grew crops. So what I think this passage is really getting at is that God wants everyone to have the opportunity to take care of themselves. It seems He doesn't really care about the property itself, or He'd want the walled in cities to be included in Jubilee, but the opportunity.
We live in a time of great income inequality. Take for example The Waltons, the family behind Walmart. Their net worth is somewhere around $90 billion. The bottom 40% of Americans, all 120 million of them, have a network around $95 billion. The top 1% of our country controls roughly 1/3 of the nations wealth, more than the bottom 90% combined.
This income inequality is not the only problem though. The real problem is that this income inequality has lead to opportunity inequality.
I think we could all agree that a white kid from Lake Forest has very different opportunities than a Latino youth on the West side of Chicago. Wealth redistribution alone will not solve that problem but I believe that the reason God wanted some redistribution was to provide for opportunity redistribution.
A family who had their property returned to them at Jubilee still needed to work it to gain anything, it wasn't a handout. We need to help provide opportunities for all people to succeed. We need to support equal education opportunities, small business loans, and laws that prevent discrimination.
What God intended was not to deplete the wealthy in one big handout to the poor, what He intended was to ensure that everyone had an opportunity to better themselves, provide for their family, and in turn ensure that the poor were taken care of.
The problem of income inequality in this country is great but the greater problem is one of opportunity inequality.
