Jubilee 2025 is a yearlong season for reconciliation and grace. The Jubilee traces roots in the Israelite life of tradition and practice. It is not just adopted from the Old Testament but leads to the understanding of Jesus’ whole ministry in terms of coming to restore the year of God’s favor, the Jubilee.
Pope Francis, exercising the authority to bind and loose, calls us to celebrate this Jubilee Year, 2025. When the successor of Peter sets aside a certain time as holy, it really does become holy time, and it changes reality. He has called on our Heavenly Father to pour out extra graces during this year and make it a time of conversion and renewal for all of us. Catholics take advantage of traditional Jubilee practices like pilgrimages, the gaining of indulgences for the living and the dead and other celebrations. It is expected to be a year of conversion for the whole world.
Jubilee was the center of Jesus’ mission. The Jubilee was a year of freedom that was supposed to come in ancient Israel every 50 years, coinciding with the Day of Atonement. All debts were erased, family property that had been lost or sold for debt was returned; everyone was set free to return to their family and their property — it was a great year of restoration. The prophets began to point to the future and to the Messiah as the one who would bring about the everlasting Jubilee. Isaiah 61 talks about the one who is anointed with God’s spirit, the Messiah, who will proclaim liberty to captives and will proclaim the year of God’s favor.
We read in Luke’s Gospel that Jesus begins his ministry in Galilee by going to his hometown, Nazareth, and preaching in the synagogue of his hometown, and he chooses that passage from Isaiah, reads it, and declares that it’s fulfilled in his Person. He is this Messiah who has come to deliver on the Jubilee that the people of God never observed. Jesus’ ministry of delivering people from every evil and from the debt of their sins, this is all a Jubilee ministry.
He entrusts that ministry to his apostles, who pass it down to their successors, and the Church to this day is still about the ministry of Jubilee. Through the sacraments, Jesus feeds us the fullness of God, with the abundance of God’s provision for us. We can understand Jesus’ whole ministry in terms of coming to restore the Jubilee. We need to embrace the Jubilee year with a spirit of childlike trust, just as Jesus says, because the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to those who are like children. We should lean into traditional Jubilee practices such as frequent reception of the sacraments, pilgrimages and indulgences.
The Jubilee year is a great time to practice forgiveness in our own families and friends. It’s a great opportunity in 2025 to spend some time with an examination of conscience and see if we’re holding a grudge or a resentment or an unresolved anger towards anyone in our life, and then make that interior act of forgiveness, and then also exterior acts to express to that other person that we have forgiven them.
Regarding freedom, we should appreciate the sacrament of reconciliation and make more frequent use of it. We should see it as an experience of liberation where we’re freed from our bondage, from our habits, addictions and disordered desires through the sacrament.
Faith in God means learning to trust in God’s providing for us. One great way we can live our faith is observing the Sabbath. Giving time to the family, making space for prayer and spiritual reading on the Lord’s Day can be a great way to attach to the Jubilee year.
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