that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (Matt. 6:31–33).
Such an exhortation might be misunderstood as encouraging laziness, but in the framework of expecting God’s kingdom (of which the Jubilee was to be a foretaste) it can easily be explained. One can interpret Jesus’ exhortation as follows: “If you work six days (or six years) with all your heart you can count on God to take care of you and your loved ones. Let your land lie fallow without fear. Just as he does for the birds of the sky, who neither sow nor reap nor gather away in barns, God will also provide for your needs. The Gentiles who ignore the Sabbath are no richer than you are.”
Remittance of Debt and Liberation of Slaves
Unlike the preceding regulation, the second and third jubilean provisions are not marginal, but central to Jesus’ teaching, even to his theological vision.
The Lord’s Prayer, which sums up Jesus’ thinking about prayer, contains the following request: “Forgive (or remit) us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors.” Several versions translate this passage incorrectly as: “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” In reality, the Greek opheilema means a money debt, a sum owed, in the material sense of the word.2 Jesus is not vaguely recommending that we forgive those who have created problems for us. No, he is instructing us to forgive sins, which includes completely canceling the debts of those who owe us money, that is, to practice the Jubilee.
The material connotation of the word “debts” in the Lord’s Prayer was so obvious that Jesus thought it fitting to add a commentary to the prayer, to explain that the words concerning the debts also applied to “trespasses” in general: “For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their sins [the term he uses here is paraptoma, or transgression], your Father will not forgive your sins” (Matt. 6:14–15).
Thus, the Lord’s Prayer is truly jubilean. In this context, Jesus’ listeners understood it to mean: “The time has come for God’s people to cancel all the debts that bind the poor because their debts to God have also been cancelled.” Jesus was setting up a rigorous equation between practicing the Jubilee and the grace of God. Although he was not otherwise a legalist and unhesitatingly forgave even prostitutes and people of ill repute, Jesus was very strict on this one point: only he who grants forgiveness can be forgiven. God’s aphesis toward you is in vain if you do not practice aphesis toward others.3
The parable of the unmerciful servant and the parable of the unjust steward both further clarify Jesus’ thought on this point. The first expresses the strictness of the “equation” of the Lord’s Prayer: no mercy for him who has none (Matt. 18:21–35).
Why has this parable been detached from its sociological background? Why has it been understood as a rather pale portrayal of the forgiveness of sins granted by God to those who forgive their brothers? In fact, its sorry hero was almost certainly a real person, a Galilean peasant whose name was probably known to Jesus’ disciples. He had been a beneficiary of the proclamation of the Jubilee, having been granted forgiveness by God. All his debts had been cancelled, though they were enormous: 10,000 talents (approximately ten million dollars!). This astronomical figure expresses the debtor’s insolvency toward the prince.
We now know how Galilean peasants who had been free proprietors before Jesus’ time had been forced into slavery by their progressive indebtedness. To a large extent, Herod the Great was to blame for this situation. He had overburdened the people with taxes and expropriated the recalcitrant proprietors. To avoid expropriation, a peasant borrowed money from a usurer who usually worked hand in hand with the king’s steward or the tax collector. His pawned property would soon become the usurer’s, and the peasant his sharecropper, or “servant.” But this did not solve the peasant’s problems. His unpaid debts accumulated until they reached horrendous proportions. The creditor sought repayment and ordered that the sharecropper be sold (along with his wife, children, and all he owned) in order to reimburse the debt. This was the situation of the “unforgiving servant.” Jesus described the peasant’s loss of his property and freedom as a direct consequence of his indebtedness.
But because of the Jubilee, the servant appears before the king, who cancels his debt. This story would be quite encouraging if it stopped there. But it was told at a time when Jesus was facing opposition to the Jubilee from the majority of his fellow Jews, sometimes even from very humble ones. The rest of the story reflects his bitter disappointment in the face of this rejection.
Upon meeting one of his fellow servants, who owed him about twenty-five dollars, the newly freed slave refuses to grant his debtor the same jubilean privilege that set him free. He seizes him by the throat and says, “Pay what you owe.” Denounced by his fellow servants, the unforgiving servant is arrested and taken before the king. The Jubilee is no longer applicable for such an unmerciful and thankless man. He must be sold along with his wife and children to pay for his debts. There is no divine Jubilee for those who refuse to practice it on earth.
The jubilean practice of forgiving debts had one very serious drawback, which is addressed in Deuteronomy 15:7–11. A too frequent occurrence of the remittance of debts tended to freeze credit. As the sabbatical year approached the rich were increasingly hesitant to loan money to the poor for fear of losing their capital. This stinginess paralyzed the economy and hindered their profits. Because of this, some of the most orthodox rabbis, even champions of the restoration of the Mosaic Law such as Hillel and Shammai, hesitated to require a strict application of the Jubilee.
The rabbis, and in particular Hillel, eventually came up with a solution to this problem. The solution was called the prosbul.4 Prosbul probably comes from the Greek pros boule (a deed carried out before a law court). According to the Gittin tractate of the Mishnah (iv, 3), Hillel gave the creditor permission to use a court as his attorney in recovering a debt that the sabbatical year had abolished. By means of this subterfuge, loans with interest, which had been abolished by the Mosaic Law (Exod. 22:25) and limited in duration by the provisions of the sabbatical year, once again became possible. The rich, and particularly the Pharisees, whom Jesus accused of “devouring widows’ houses,” used this measure to its fullest.
The Mishnah has preserved a text which refers to the prosbul: “I (so and so) transfer to you (so and so), the judges (in such and such a place), my right to a debt, so that you may recover any amount which (so and so) owes me, at whatever time I will so desire.” The prosbul was then signed by the judges and the witnesses.
Jesus was an avowed adversary of the prosbul. Usually, Jesus is pictured as an opponent of the sabbatical laws. But in this case, the opposite is true. When it was a question of bringing out the humanitarian intentions of the Mosaic Law, Jesus was even more radical than the Pharisees.5 If this were not the case, Jesus’ continuous confrontations with the Pharisees would lose all meaning, especially if they merely centered on religious practices. In reality, the conflict went much deeper than that. It revolved around the nature of justice.
“What is goodness?” the Pharisees would ask themselves, and they would answer with a multitude of detailed ordinances in the midst of which they lost the essential truth.
“What is goodness?” Jesus would ask. His answer was to go back to the essential thrust of the Mosaic Law, without detouring through the scribes’ elaborate interpretations. Jesus’ radicalism was exactly the opposite of forgoing the Law. When Jesus retorted that God made the Sabbath for man, he meant: “God set the Jews free by taking them out of Egypt. The sabbatical year, like the Sabbath, must be put into practice. It was made to set people free, not to enslave them.” That is why the prosbul, as well as all other regulations added to the Law to alter its liberating and revolutionary
