Jesus and the Jubilee:
The Biblical Roots of the Year of God’s Favor
John Bergsma
ISBN 9781645854050
eISBN 9781645854067
ASIN B0D5J3GVL7
Wow this was an absolutely fascinating read. I have read a few volumes for the Jubilee of Hope in 2025 and this is an excellent offering. Once I started reading I could hardly put this book down. The description of this volume states:
“Jubilee means joy—a joy that’s not fleeting, a joy that lasts.
In biblical times, a jubilee was a time to rejoice. And this is still the case when the Church announces a jubilee.
In Jesus and the Jubilee, biblical scholar John Bergsma gets to the roots of the jubilee, showing how this practice was established in order to preserve freedom, family, and the fullness of God’s blessing for the ancient Israelites.
But what the Israelites were promised by God—and experienced partially—was truly fulfilled by Jesus. As Jesus and the Jubilee reveals, the Catholic Church is the perpetual jubilee, offering redemption, release from spiritual bondage, return to our true home and family, and rest in God’s fullness.
Discover how the jubilee is the very center of Jesus’s mission and how we can fully participate in this ongoing “year of favor.””
The chapters in this book are:
Introduction Our Need for Jubilee
1 Back to the Garden:
Creation as the Model of the Jubilee
2 The First Jubilee:
Israel’s Exodus from Egypt
3 Laws of Liberation:
The Structure 7at Sustains Freedom
4 Liberty Lost and Regained (Forever):
The Calf and the Jubilee Laws
5 Jubilee in Theory . . . and Practice:
Did the Israelites Actually Observe the Jubilee?
6 Miracle at Qumran:
Hard Evidence for the Jubilee
7 A Year of Favor:
The Coming of Christ, the New Melchizedek
8 Freedom from Sin:
The Liberating Power of Confession
9 Perpetual Jubilee:
A Spirit-Led Lifestyle of Liberty and Liturgy
Conclusion:
Conversion: The Heart of Jubilee
Epilogue
The Jubilee and Me
I highlighted a number of passages while working through this book, some of them are:
“God never stops offering us the gift of grace and promises us a kind of freedom that can never be taken away.”
“In the wake of the golden calf debacle, God gave Moses a liturgy and a lifestyle to implement that would institutionalize freedom for his people. The sacrifices, laws, and especially the liturgical patterns—the cycle of Sabbaths and Sabbath years—culminated in the Sabbath of Sabbaths, the year of rest, where the sins of Israel were atoned for and forgiven, the family was fully restored, debt was erased, slaves were released, and ancestral land was returned to its rightful owners. Everything reverted back to its pristine beginning. Deliverance flowed from God, and this divine liberty was reflected in the natural liberties of his creation.”
“Through the coming of Jesus, all that had been promised is fulfilled. The purpose of the jubilee, and its celebration, can be fully realized now that the Spirit of jubilee is given to the Church. The power to proclaim forgiveness of spiritual debt and freedom from slavery live on through Christ’s bishops and priests and the sacraments they perform. At long last, the people of God—each of us—can enjoy the superabundance provided for us by our loving Creator.”
“Throughout this book, we will highlight the jubilee throughlines in Scripture and, if we open our hearts to the Spirit of jubilee, I believe God can and will speak powerful truths to each of us about the freedom he deems to bring about.”
“The cycles of sin, oppression, infidelity, and ambivalence that the Israelites found themselves entrenched in bear striking resemblance to the societal ills of today. We are in constant need of the jubilee and all that it brings.”
“Let’s go back and take a closer look at God’s grand finale, his masterpiece: man, created on the sixth day. When we look more closely at the creation of man, we recognize that God gave him five roles.
The first role was sonship.
The second role was kingship.
The third role was priesthood.
The fourth role was prophethood.
The fifth and final role that God gave to man was that of a bridegroom.”
“Everybody remembers the Exodus as the great act of liberation in the Bible, but the Exodus has a backstory. As we saw in the last chapter, the patriarchs gave rise to a whole nation: Israel. The patriarchs sought the jubilee goods of forgiveness, freedom, family, and fullness, but only partially achieved these goals in their lifetimes.”
“We remember the Exodus as an event in which God delivered Israel from physical slavery to the Egyptians. But in reflecting on the ten plagues, we realize that God first freed Israel—and any Egyptians who were paying attention—from their spiritual slavery to the Egyptian gods. The plagues were a trouncing of the Egyptian deities, a kind of exorcism of the land of Egypt. This is so closely connected to the idea of jubilee, because we will later see that spiritual freedom always precedes physical freedom in jubilee thought. Indeed, in late Jewish thought, the jubilee becomes associated with the exorcistic power of the Messiah.”
“But God used the journey through the desert (the Exodus) to show Israel, over and over, that spiritual and natural freedom are attained only through him.”
“There is a paradox in the human condition: we feel like boundaries (laws) restrict our freedom, but if we fail to observe good boundaries (laws), we end up losing our freedom to sin and addiction—and this is true of both individuals and societies.”
“Every seven days, Israel observed the Sabbath to commemorate God’s completion of creation. Every seven years, they were to observe a Sabbath year, resting from their labor and enjoying God’s abundance. And, climactically, at the end of every seven weeks of years (seven times seven, a total of forty-nine years), they were to observe a jubilee year, a kind of super-Sabbath.”
“In the year of jubilee the Israelites shall rest, as in a Sabbath year, but the jubilee had many unique features that distinguished it even from other holy years. We can arrange these unique features around four major actions: redemption, release, return, and rest, and these actions are aimed at the four goods we have mentioned already in the introduction to this book: Forgiveness, freedom, family, and fullness. Let’s work through these four actions, step by step.”
“But the real jubilee began with the purging and driving out of sin and evil from Israel—including evil spirits, for the Day of Atonement was like a great general exorcism. The removal of sin and evil allowed reconciliation of God with his people and a restoration of the family bond of the covenant.”
“I’ve spent several years of my life studying the jubilee laws, and I’m not that pessimistic. Although I can’t prove it, I suspect the jubilee was observed the first time it came around, after they had settled the land under Joshua—and maybe the second time it cycled around, as well. After that, it seems to have fallen into disuse, becoming a so-called blue law—still on the books, but ignored.”
“I scarcely need to mention that early Christian interpreters saw this as speaking of Jesus: he is the Prince Messiah who showed up at the end of the five hundred years, was cut off, and made a “strong covenant”—the New Covenant—with many. But it is important that we see that the whole chronology is based on the jubilee cycles. “Seventy weeks of years” is 490 years, or ten jubilee cycles, each lasting forty-nine years between jubilees. Ten was a perfect number. At the end of ten jubilees, the Messiah would arrive to proclaim the final jubilee of history—indeed, to open up a jubilee era.”
“Every feature of the jubilee, promised so long ago, was about to come to startling fruition. And as is so often the case when our heavenly Father makes good on his word, our expectations are exceeded by orders of magnitude.”
“Christ created the mystical body of his Church and appointed ministers with the power of the Holy Spirit to be prophets and priests of the order of Melchizedek: to proclaim liberty and free people from slavery to Satan and debt to sin. This was the order of Melchizedek, not the order of the Levites.”
“Through his Church, Christ established his sacraments for us and by them sin is vanquished. Death is conquered through the gift of eternal life. Jesus passed on his Melchizedekian, jubilean powers to the chosen Twelve. He worked through them, by the power and authority of the Holy Spirit. He gave them his authority and responsibility, which they passed down to their descendants—bishops and priests today.”
“In a way, he was saying, “As many times as God has forgiven Israel, so you should forgive others.” But there was also a sacramental, liturgical aspect to Jesus’s statement to Peter, because Peter was going to be the first pope. He was going to be the head of the Church and the head of those in Holy Orders. And those in Holy Orders—the priests and bishops—are God’s chief forgivers. One could almost say their chief duty is to forgive sins and to free people from slavery to Belial. Thus, when Peter asked Jesus how many times he should forgive, Jesus’s “seventy times seven” response meant: be generous as your Father in heaven was generous. Jesus commissioned Peter and his successors to be the living embodiment of jubilee, to perpetuate the age of the Messiah.”
“And as high priest, Jesus performed the greatest exorcism on the Cross, purging all of God’s people from the defilement of evil. He cried, “It is finished,” and gave up his spirit (John 19: 30). And God tore the curtain wall of the temple into two (cf. Matt 27: 51). The Old Covenant was shattered. The New Covenant was here. With those words, the chains of sin were broken, the power of Satan was destroyed.”
“So the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of freedom (2 Cor 3: 17), the Spirit of jubilee, flows from the Passion of Christ that John sees as blood and water, which are signs of the sacraments: the Eucharist and Baptism. And the sacraments are the usual way in which we experience jubilee, which flows from Christ through this body, the Church.”
“How much more liberating is Confession, since it is a direct path to reconciliation with God and freedom from slavery to sin? It is a sacrament of jubilee! Together let’s examine this tremendous gift of the new jubilee.”
“I’ll use an analogy. Most of us are probably familiar with the process of “accepting cookies” on our laptop, tablet, or phone. When we visit a new website, often a dialogue box will open that asks if we will accept “cookies” from the website or remote server—in other words, if we will consent to the remote site making modifications to our operating system and the software on our device. By clicking “Yes,” we consent to give this alien agent—this remote server—authority to act in our machines. Most servers and sites are legitimate and trustworthy and don’t take advantage of everything they could do to and with our local device. But not all are legitimate and trustworthy! Therefore, cybersecurity experts recommend that we periodically “flush the cookies” by going into our settings and denying all the permissions we have granted to remote servers. Confession works like this: when we make a good confession, we “flush the cookies” and revoke all the permissions we granted to Satan and his evil spirits. They are driven out through Reconciliation—and afterward, they might be able to harass us externally, but they cannot work inside us.”
“My experiences prepared me to think about the Sacrament of Confession very differently than most people, whether Catholic or Protestant. I never saw the confessional as a judgment chamber, or like walking into a court room. It never occurred to me to be afraid of it. Rather, I looked at Confession as a way to obey the Bible and as a means of spiritual warfare and deliverance from Satan and other evil spirits. This would end up playing an important role in my conversion to the Catholic Church.”
“St. Josemaría Escrivá also recommended and practiced weekly confession. His philosophy was “keep short books.” This is accounting terminology. Bookkeepers and accountants try not to let expenditures pile up before reconciling and balancing the books—and this is a great philosophy for reconciliation. We should go when our sins are fresh in our mind, so they don’t pile up and dull our senses (see Matt 13: 15–17). That way we will receive more grace from the sacrament, which will help break Satan’s grasp and strengthen us to stop committing any habitual sins permanently.”
“Confession is the most direct means to victory in spiritual warfare and the most direct path to spiritual freedom and jubilee. It helps break habitual sins and addictions; it helps us receive Our Lord worthily in the Eucharist—our daily bread, Communion of everlasting life. Why wouldn’t we want to confess often?”
“By all appearances, Confession is the dullest of the sacraments! To celebrate almost any other sacrament, people get dressed up, and the priest has magnificent vestments. In the other sacraments, we get the “smells” and “bells”: we get oil, we get water, we get the crucifix, we get readings, we get processions, we get hoopla. With a confession, what do we get? Twelve people standing in line on a Saturday afternoon for an hour, and the most exciting thing that happens is, every five minutes, we shuffle forward.”
“At any time, on any day of the week, we can be forgiven from our debt of sin and freed from slavery to the evil one. At any time, we can drink from the salvation flowing from his divine side. At any time we can receive his jubilean mercy, and we can live.”
“All the goals of the jubilee are fulfilled by the gift of the Spirit. The Spirit forgives our sins, grants us freedom from the tyranny of Satan, institutes us as children of God and members of his family, and initiates us into the fullness of God so that we become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1: 4). For that reason, the Jubilee 2025 is a highly appropriate time for individuals and communities to enter more deeply into the life of the Holy Spirit.”
“Yet devotion to the Spirit, of course, is not limited to one group or movement within the Church. All baptized Catholics should seek to grow in their devotion to and experience of the Spirit in their lives during the jubilee year. I would urge both a return to and a renewed appreciation of traditional devotions as well as openness to contemporary ones.”
“I urge every Catholic to choose at least one book to read or one devotion to practice related to the Holy Spirit for this jubilee year, because life in the Spirit is the fulfillment of jubilee.”
“Now that we know what jubilee is, where it came from, and how it exists today, how can we enter into it? What are some practical steps to bring jubilee into our hearts? How do we embrace the Spirit of jubilee and not the letter of jubilee? How do we make good use of 2025 and the years following? How do we make jubilee a lifestyle? How do we sustain liberty?”
“The jubilee year is the opportune time for us to begin participating in the sacraments more frequently. The two sacraments that we can partake of regularly are Eucharist and Reconciliation.”
“Purgatory is merciful and necessary for a departed soul to become completely detached from sin and made pure; however, in a way, it is sad and entirely unnecessary, since Christ and his Church give us ample opportunities to rectify this payment on earth, if we sincerely make use of them. These opportunities are indulgences.”
“The Sacrament of Reconciliation is available on any given day. And all the sacraments help us overcome the evil one and become free. The spiritual battle rages on, but falling wounded is not the worst thing in battle. The worst thing is not being healed. It is not being restored and getting back into the fight.”
“The Sacrament of Reconciliation is available on any given day. And all the sacraments help us overcome the evil one and become free. The spiritual battle rages on, but falling wounded is not the worst thing in battle. The worst thing is not being healed. It is not being restored and getting back into the fight.”
“Throughout this book, we have seen the story of salvation in a new light and come to recognize that jubilee is and always has been at the heart of God’s plan.”
I pray those samples give you a feel for the poser of this slim volume. John gives up a history of then Jubilee from the bible and from Jewish history. He clearly explains the fulfilment of prophecy and Jesus as the Jubilee of Jubilees. He walks us through the role of Melchizedek historically and continuing through history. His words on confession, the sacraments and purgatory are clear, concise and deeply moving. The conclusion of the book focuses on way we can experience the Jubilee in a deeper and fuller way. And in the epilogue John shares his own history with the Jubilee as a focus of research, the great Jubilee of the year 2000 and his own conversion to Catholicism. In which he is open, honest and transparent with us his readers.
This is an excellent volume. I have read 14 volumes related to the Jubilee of Hope so far. This is one of the best. If you are going to only pick up one book ok the Jubilee to read, make it this one, if you are willing to pick up 2 make it this and
Hope An Anchor for the Soul 30 Daily Devotions by Amy Welborn.
This is an excellent volume that any Catholic would benefit from reading. It is a life changing volume. One certain to have a lasting impact. I challenge you to pick it up and read it. A wonderful volume to read on this Jubilee year of Hope! I highly recommend it.
Jubilee of Hope 2025 Book List:
A Light in the Night Meditations on Hope - Pope Francis
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Books by John Bergsma:
Bible Basics
Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls: Revealing the Jewish Roots of Christianity
Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Priesthood
Jesus and the Old Testament Roots of the Priesthood
Love Basics for Catholics
Murmuring Against Moses
New Testament Basics for Catholics
Psalm Basics for Catholics
Stunned by Scripture: How the Bible Made Me Catholic
The Bible and Marriage
The Jubilee from Leviticus to Qumran
The Word of the Lord: Reflections on the Mass Readings for Solemnities and Feasts
The Word of the Lord: Reflections on the Sunday Mass Readings for Year A
The Word of the Lord: Reflections on the Sunday Mass Readings for Year B
The Word of the Lord: Reflections on the Sunday Mass Readings for Year C
Yes, There Is a God... and Other Answers to Life's Big Questions
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