Week 17 Saturday (Year 1)

Readings: Leviticus 25.1, 8-17; Psalm 67; Matthew 14.1-12

The first reading gives us the biblical basis for the jubilee year which is being celebrated in the Church in 2025. The fiftieth year was to be a 'super-sabbatical' year during which things were to be restored to their original just arrangement. People were to return to their property, the heritage of their family, and if they had been obliged to alienate any of this in the previous fifty years it was to be restored to them. Likewise if people had been obliged to go into slavery they were to be freed. It was announced on the Day of Atonement, the great day of repentance and reconciliation, with the blowing of a trumpet, yobel, the ram's horn, from which the English term 'jubilee' comes. Later in the Bible we read that in this jubilee year debts were to be cancelled. 

Throughout the history of God's chosen people the promise of a great jubilee continued to inform their hopes and when Jesus stood up to read in the synagogue in Nazareth he chose to preach on a text from Isaiah which speaks about 'the year of the Lord's favour', in other words the jubilee year. 'Today this text is fulfilled in your hearing', he says, which is another way of saying the kingdom of God to which you look forward is coming to be even as you listen. It is coming to be in him for he is the fulfilment of all the promises of the Old Testament, the realisation of all its hopes.

The tradition of celebrating a Holy Year in the Church began in the year 1300. At first it was to be celebrated once a century but after some time it settled down to a celebration every 25 years and so it continues to this day. It is understood in the first place as a kind of 'super-Lent', a time of repentance and reconciliation, of return to our true homeland ('come back to me with all your hearts') and the cancellation of debts (the 'indulgence' granted by the Church refers to the broadest possible offer of forgiveness and reconciliation from God). 

Pope Francis inaugurated the Holy Year of 2025 and Pope Leo will close it at the beginning of 2026. Francis gave it the theme of 'Pilgrims of Hope' because it seemed to him that this was the virtue or gift which is most urgently needed in the Church and in the world at this time. We live in a time of tension and anxiety, with wars and rumours of wars, carried on militarily but in other ways also, when humanity is fragmented and troubled in many ways. We live in a time, says Francis, when many people seem to have lost the joy of living a human life: witness the declining birthrate in many countries, including many traditionally Christian ones.

Hope is the virtue that frees us to live with joy, freedom and energy. The future is in God's hands. God has worked many wonderful things for us in the past and is absolutely reliable, which means that God's promises for the future can be relied on. Living with that confidence and trust regarding the future - 'all will be well and all manner of thing will be well' - means we can devote our energies to what needs to be done today, here and now, and we can do it freely and joyfully.

Hope is always accompanied by faith and love: these three graces constitute the programme of a Christian life. Hope is founded on faith - in particular our faith in the Risen Lord - and nourished by charity. But in turn, says Pope Francis, hope makes our faith joyful and our love enthusiastic.

As I write these words Rome is full of young people, come to celebrate the Jubilee of Youth with Pope Leo. We pray together for an increase in the gift / virtue of hope in the Church. May all who seek to follow Christ be filled with joy in that following and give themselves generously and with enthusiasm to the work of building the kingdom of God among us even now. It means bringing good news to the poor, helping the blind to see, setting free those who are oppressed or imprisoned, showing in how we live that the year of the Lord's favour has indeed come.