Let Us Keep the Feasts

Leviticus records a remarkable practice mandated by God called the Year of Jubilee. Every 50 years, a trumpet sounded (jubilee means blow the horn) to announce a wholesale overhaul of economic and social conditions. Jubilee signaled a new beginning, a time when all who had failed at life and work were given a do-over, and when all who had benefitted from others’ failures let go of their gains. Land reverted back to its original ownership, debts were forgiven, slaves set free the score set back to zero. As a year-long extension of the Sabbath, everyone took a year off to enjoy, stress-free, the fruits of their labor with thanksgiving. It sounds so wonderful, yet so unrealistic. Perhaps this is why there is no evidence that Jubilee was ever observed. Though commanded by God, it never happened. Maybe it was deemed too impractical. Or maybe it just took too much faith to do it. In the end, this was what many of the temporary Levites felt about Leviticus. The joys promised came at too extreme a personal cost. Which may be why when the month was up, all of us pretty much reverted back to the way we’d been living before. And yet, something had changed.

We needed to celebrate. We needed the joy Jubilee brings. All month long we’d been recording our adventures on video and then posting them on Facebook. How would we record Jubilee? We decided to make a final movie, but rather than something in documentary form, we thought we’d go with the genre of music video. So we pulled out a folk tune entitled “Ain’t No Grave Going To Hold My Body Down” (Jubilee and Easter turn out to be closely related). We then decked ourselves in white and commenced to dance in a graveyard, symbolic of both the good news of resurrection, the ultimate Jubilee. People watching us make this video were convinced we were crazy. And we were. I mean, c’mon, we’d been living by Leviticus for a month! But our celebration was not that the month was over. We were actually a little bit sad about that. Our celebration was about finding obedience a joy—a discovery we hoped would end with the experiment itself.