The Jubilee: A Time of Restitution, Liberation, and Conversion
Reflections by Don Gian Luca Carrega
What does it mean to celebrate the Jubilee in the spirit of Jesus? Is it merely a religious tradition, or a deeper invitation to rethink justice, community, and freedom?
In this profound biblical reflection, Don Gian Luca Carrega, priest and biblical scholar, guides us through the theological roots and New Testament reimagining of the Jubilee. Moving from Leviticus to the Gospel of Luke, from ancient laws to the prophetic actions of Christ, this text explores how the Jubilee speaks not only to social structures but also to the personal heart.
First presented in Italian during a theological formation event, this English translation—accompanied by a LIS-friendly version for sign language interpretation—offers a resource for reflection, prayer, and dialogue across communities of faith. It reminds us that the Jubilee is not just a return to the past, but a courageous step toward a future of restored relationships and living hope.
This meeting was an official part of the Jubilee Pilgrimage “La Tenda di Gionata e Altre Associazioni”, organized by the Jubilee Pilgrimage coordinating team. GNRC is publishing this full text in friendship with La Tenda di Gionata.
Let me begin with a provocation. We celebrate the Jubilee as a joyful occasion, and therefore a positive experience—but in truth, the Jubilee signals the admission of a failure, or at the very least, of a limit. We should not forget that the Bible presents it as a corrective, a tool intended to fix certain injustices that are, in fact, allowed by God’s own law.
The Torah—the law handed down by God to Moses—permits an Israelite to reduce a fellow Israelite to slavery because of a debt. But the Jubilee places a limit on this servitude and declares that it must come to an end after a certain time. The law doesn’t stop the rich from expanding their estates at the expense of the poor, but it does state that, eventually, the land must be returned to its original owners. In other words, the Jubilee is telling us that the law on its own is not just enough—that an extraordinary intervention is needed to restore balance. Law by itself cannot establish justice. That alone is enough to make every legalist in the universe wince—especially the religious ones. And the irony is, the Jubilee is itself part of the Law: it’s the Law declaring its own limitations—long before Saint Paul ever pointed them out. As Christians, we might recall Jesus’ words about divorce: “Because of the hardness of your hearts, Moses wrote this law for you” (Mark 10:5). There are laws, then, that are openly imperfect, but they’re given as temporary measures to contain the spread of harm (we might think of the so-called law of retaliation). An imperfect law is sometimes better than no law at all. But God’s plan for humanity and creation is not tied to rules—not even the ones that come from Him.
Of course, the Jubilee is not the Bible’s only take on social justice. In Deuteronomy 15, we find directives that are perhaps even more radical than those in Leviticus 25. because the Jubilee does not explicitly call for the cancellation of all debts, but Deuteronomy does. The issue is that this leveling out is conditional: Deut. 15:4–5 says there will be no poor among the Israelites—but only if they faithfully follow all of the Lord’s commandments. And, with stark realism, Moses concedes just a few verses later that “the poor will never cease to be in the land” (15:11). So at the very least, generosity becomes necessary.
To me, it’s important that the Bible moves between a lofty—if rarely attainable—ideal and a kind of grounded realism that still tries to achieve something.
The functioning of the Jubilee is a bit like a board game where, at a certain point, the cards are reshuffled and dealt again. It’s like when a safety car enters the track in a Formula 1 race, erasing all gaps between drivers. True, this might allow more overtaking—but the car with the fastest engine usually still wins. Because the Jubilee doesn’t really dismantle the structures of inequality; it just gives those at the bottom a chance to breathe. It’s based on the idea that the ideal state lies in the past, and the goal is not to design a new and more just order, but to restore the original one. It’s a rather conservative outlook—and that needs to be said. And it’s based on some pretty shaky assumptions. For instance, it assumes that people will act against their own self-interest, even though we know that those who’ve gained privilege usually go to great lengths to keep it.
Today, many scholars think the Jubilee laws were written by a priestly class with somewhat naïve expectations about how they’d work in the real world—and that those working in finance had long figured out how to work around them to protect their profits. After all, Jesus himself says: “The children of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than are the children of light” (Luke 16:8)—and he says it specifically about financial dealings.
It’s quite reasonable to imagine that, as the 50th year approached, land sales would stall. Who would be foolish enough to buy a field they’d have to return for free the next year?
That’s why many scholars wonder whether Jubilee laws were ever actually implemented. The truth is, we simply don’t know. But that’s not the point I want to focus on. What really matters is the kind of justice that the Jubilee assumes.
At its core, the Jubilee laws aren’t based on an economic principle, but a theological one. Property and people do not ultimately belong to humans—they belong to God. No one can dispose of them however they want, forever. Those who cross certain lines act against God, and He will act in response. If the Israelites follow God’s will, the land will cooperate and yield its harvest. If they rebel, the land will rebel too—and they will lose it.
These laws aren’t framed impersonally. They speak in the second person—“you,” “you all”—addressing each Israelite directly in their relationship with God and with their neighbor. Unlike the laws in our legal systems today, these don’t carry binding force: there’s no penalty if someone fails to follow them.
That might seem like a major weakness to us. If a law can’t be enforced, who will actually obey it? But the goal of these laws isn’t to impose something—it’s to convince the people that this is the right thing to do.
It’s the difference between a traffic officer who forces you to obey the speed limit by threatening a fine, and a grandmother who tries to get her grandchild to eat his soup.
The criticism that these laws are unworkable fades once we accept that their aim is not detailed regulation, but teaching justice. If that doesn’t happen, then no system—however ingenious—will ever produce a just society.
Because what makes something unworkable is not physics, but willpower. If everyone agrees on a principle, very few will dare to defy it purely for personal gain.
In the biblical vision of fundamental equality among Israelites, there is a kind of social pressure to act according to shared values. Prophets often condemned abuse—“they sell the righteous for silver, and the poor for a pair of sandals” (Amos 2:6)—but the very fact they said it aloud implies they hoped for some shared agreement among their listeners.
It is evident that this whole framework only works if real life reflects the imagined world behind the laws: a cohesive society where people see themselves as part of a community, and a rural setting where land is the primary means of survival. In that world, justice could mean something more than fairness—it could mean shared submission to a higher truth: the idea that everything belongs to God.
This is why it is important to understand that the rationale behind the Jubilee laws is not abstract fairness but theology.
The motivations are anchored in a shared story: they are not just any people, but those God freed from Egypt—they are “his servants” (Leviticus 23:55). So it makes no sense for one servant to act like a tyrant over another.
That brings to mind Jesus’ parable of the servant left in charge while the master is away:
“Who then is the faithful and wise manager, whom the master will set over his household to give them their portion of food at the proper time? Blessed is that servant whom his master will find so doing when he comes. Truly, I say to you, he will set him over all his possessions. But if that servant says to himself, ‘My master is delayed in coming,’ and begins to beat the male and female servants, and to eat and drink and get drunk, the master of that servant will come on a day he does not expect and at an hour he does not know, and will cut him in pieces and assign him a place with the unfaithful.” (Luke 12:42–46)
Responsibility and care for one’s brothers and sisters are also assumed within the people of Israel. The temptation to dominate others is strong, because economic and social power can put some people in a position of superiority where they feel they are accountable to no one. But thinking this way means usurping a right that belongs to God—the God who redeemed the Israelites from slavery in Egypt so that they would become His servants. This language can be unsettling, because we tend to say that if the Lord frees us from bondage, it’s so that we can be free—not so that we can serve a different master. But we need to remember that the ancient Mediterranean world was different from our own: there was a chain of relationships in which, in some form, everyone was under someone’s authority.
In fact, we see this same ambiguity in Paul. On the one hand, he tells the Galatians: “Christ has set us free for freedom! Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery” (Galatians 5:1). But in Romans 6:18, he also says: “Having been set free from sin, you became slaves of righteousness.” The idea of absolute freedom and self-determination is a modern concept that does not appear in the Bible. There, the choice is not between service and independence, but between masters: “No one can serve two masters. For either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other” (Matthew 6:24).
Because the Jubilee year, like the sabbatical year, requires that the land rest and not be cultivated during that time, a certain level of trust in providence is needed. It is written that in the year preceding the rest, the land “will yield a harvest sufficient for three years” (Leviticus 25:21), according to the Lord’s provision for His faithful. This clearly demands that the Israelites trust in the Lord’s care for them, since it’s far from intuitive to think the land will produce more fruit just before it’s left fallow.
The Jubilee according to Jesus
When we move into the New Testament, the major scene that immediately comes to mind is Jesus’ inaugural sermon in the synagogue of Nazareth in the Gospel of Luke (Luke 4:16–31). The reference to the Jubilee here is not directed at Leviticus 25, but at Isaiah 61:1.
Sharon Ringe (xiv–xv) notes that the shift into the New Testament brings significant changes:
First, the images that originally emerged from social, political, or economic contexts are now associated with the eschatological reign of God. Just as that reign is both physical and spiritual, social and individual, political and personal, so too the Jubilee, declared at its beginning, touches every dimension of human life.
Second, the Jubilee traditions become sources for the language of both Christology and ethics. Jesus, as God’s Anointed (Christ/Messiah), is presented as the herald announcing the arrival of God’s new reign and proclaiming liberty to all who enter it. To present Jesus as the herald of God’s reign is to emphasize his closeness to God—because a royal messenger carries the dignity of the sovereign who sends him.
In Jesus’ preaching, the themes of liberation and the coming of the Kingdom overlap—and this is quite clear in the Greek text of Luke. In the synagogue, Jesus reads from Isaiah, and in the Greek version, the verb used is *kēryssō*, which means to proclaim, to announce, to preach. Later, in Luke 8:1, the evangelist offers a summary of Jesus’ ministry, saying he went about “through cities and villages, preaching (*kēryssōn*) and bringing the good news of the Kingdom of God.” So we can reasonably conclude that the Kingdom of God is the concrete reality in which this liberation takes place.
But who are the people meant to be liberated? As we’ve seen earlier, the Jubilee year was a time when land was to be returned to its original owners, and slaves were to return to their homes. But Jesus’ ministry did not involve social emancipation in this sense: he didn’t actually free any slaves. So it’s clear that we have to understand his mission from a different perspective.
Let’s return to the passage Jesus reads in the synagogue.
Most Bibles note that it is taken from Isaiah 61:1–2, but that’s not entirely accurate. That’s the base, yes—but at the end of Luke 4:18, a line is inserted from another passage of Isaiah, Isaiah 58:6: “to set the oppressed free.” So first, he says that the divine envoy is sent to proclaim liberty to the captives, and then, to set the oppressed free.
Captives are those taken in war or held in slavery—but the oppressed is a much broader category. Literally, it refers to those crushed by life—those broken by hardship, who seem unable to rise again. Jesus met many such people.
One group consists of those under the power of the devil. Today we tend to downplay this, but being dominated by evil is a deeply unbearable condition—and a top priority for Jesus.
It’s telling that Jesus shares this brief parable on the subject: “When a strong man, fully armed, guards his palace, his goods are safe. But when someone stronger than he attacks and overcomes him, he takes away the armor in which the man trusted and distributes the spoils” (Luke 11:21–22). At first glance, it might seem cryptic—but if the strong, armed man is Satan, and Jesus is the one stronger than him who takes away his captives—healing the demon-possessed—then the meaning becomes clear.
When Peter enters the house of Cornelius the centurion and needs to summarize Jesus’ ministry, he says: “God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power, and he went about doing good and healing all who were under the power of the devil” (Acts 10:38).
This category is not limited to those possessed. When Jesus heals a woman bent over and unable to stand straight, he refers to her as “this daughter of Abraham, whom Satan kept bound for eighteen years” (Luke 13:16). The boundary between demonic possession and illness was not always clear in the ancient world, but in any case, it opens the door to a second group of people liberated by Jesus: the sick.
When John the Baptist begins to doubt and sends messengers to ask whether Jesus is the one to come or if they should expect someone else, Jesus’ response is backed up—and preceded—by the healings he performs at the very moment the messengers arrive (Luke 7:21). These acts of liberation serve as evidence that Jesus truly is the one sent by God. These acts of liberation serve as evidence that Jesus truly is the one sent by God.
Finally, liberation is often associated with the forgiveness of sins. The risen Jesus in Luke 24:47 announces that the forgiveness of sins will be the central message preached by the apostles after the descent of the Holy Spirit—but in truth, he had already begun that work himself.
There is also a Jubilee resonance in the Lord’s Prayer: “Forgive us our sins, for we also forgive everyone who is indebted to us” (Luke 11:4). In Luke’s version, the link between sin and debt is clearer, and so is the reference to Jubilee practice.
Another significant novelty concerns the recipients of the Jubilee. The Jubilee laws in Leviticus 25 applied (if they were ever truly enforced) only to Jews. The land to be returned was land that had passed from one Jew to another—because that land was holy and belonged to the God of Israel. The slave to be freed was a Jew regaining freedom from another Jew, because their ancestors had been slaves in Egypt.
In the Jubilee proclamation of Luke 4, this ethnic framework is blown wide open. Jesus has no intention of limiting the benefits of his ministry to his fellow Jews. He cites, as examples of God’s kindness extending beyond the borders of Palestine, the widow of Zarephath and Naaman the Syrian. His hometown crowd reacts with hostility and violence, to the point of wanting to throw him off a cliff.
Throughout his ministry, Jesus redefines the concept of “neighbor”—no longer the fellow countryman, as Leviticus implied, but anyone who crosses your path. See the parable of the Good Samaritan. Good is to be done for everyone, without distinction.
Later, when Jesus heals ten lepers, he makes no inquiries about their origin. One of them—the only one who returns to thank him—is a Samaritan, prompting Jesus to say: “Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” (Luke 17:18). Being a foreigner didn’t prevent him from being healed, nor did it stop him from coming back to give thanks.
And we should also note that Jesus’ kindness extends even to the ungrateful. Nowhere does it say that the nine who went off on their own later became lepers again. The benefit makes no distinctions. It is the act of giving thanks that allows some to receive salvation as well, because that depends on the response.
In summary, we can say that in Luke’s portrayal of Jesus, the Jubilee becomes a central interpretive key for understanding his ministry. The social justice assumed by the Jubilee laws continues in Jesus’ prophetic teaching, which echoes themes from the ancient prophets—“Woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your consolation” (Luke 6:24).
Yet the theme is expanded: it’s no longer about restoring an ideal past, but about opening toward the future realization of the Kingdom. Here I find an echo of Pope Francis’s message in the Jubilee Bull *Spes non confundit*: “May the witness of believers be in the world a leaven of genuine hope, an announcement of new heavens and a new earth (cf. 2 Peter 3:13), where justice and harmony dwell among peoples, all moving toward the fulfillment of the Lord’s promise.”
The idea is that the renewal of relationships allows us to anticipate that new and definitive reality which awaits us with Christ’s return. As you can see, this is not about going back to an idealized original state, but about tasting something that has not yet been fully realized. Our gaze is not nostalgic—it’s turned toward the future that awaits us.
Moreover, the exceptional nature of the Jubilee—once every fifty years—now gives way to a permanent Jubilee time. In a sense, the extraordinary becomes the norm. In Jesus’ vision, it is no longer just a corrective, but a complete overturning of how we think and act.
To use political language, I would say that Jesus’ disciples are not called to be reformers—but revolutionaries.
There are several expressions in Jesus’ teaching that convey this idea, but the one I find most powerful is the image of new wine in new wineskins. A Jubilee mindset, as Jesus intends it, cannot be contained in old vessels—containers that are incapable of holding it and would inevitably burst.
This new Jubilee calls for a total conversion: of heart, of mind, of spirit. If we remain tied to human frameworks, we won’t withstand the pressure—we’ll shatter. That’s why Jesus’ Jubilee message must be handled with care. And we have to ask ourselves: will I be able to accept all of this?
And finally, a word about the title of this reflection: In what sense is the Jubilee a festival of restitution?
In the Old Testament, there’s a strong social element to restitution: land that had passed into other hands was to be returned to its previous owner, and anyone who had fallen under someone else’s control was to regain their freedom. In Jesus’ ministry, this aspect becomes secondary. The real restitution is the restoration of relationships to truth.
The Sabbath law is one of the clearest examples of a rule originally meant for human benefit that became an obsession.
Before the scribes and Pharisees—who were watching him to find a reason to accuse him—Jesus calls a man with a withered hand to step forward, and then asks: “I ask you, is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to destroy it?” (Luke 6:9).
It’s not a rhetorical question. Jesus truly believes that the Sabbath is meant to help people do good. And if doing good means breaking another law—like the law of rest—so be it.
It would be a beautiful thing if 21st-century Christian Pharisees could begin to think this way. Doesn’t the well-being of a person give more glory to God than refraining from work?
So yes, I believe the Jubilee can be a fruitful time—if it brings us back to this dimension, if it helps us to place at the center again the work of God’s hands rather than religious performance.
If the Jubilee is just one more practice through which we try to appease God’s demands, it can disappear without too many regrets.
But if it becomes a subversive tool to shake us out of our comforts and our good intentions, then it can truly do some good. First to us—and then to those who may one day benefit from our conversion.