Kim Tan on The Jubilee Gospel
Kim Tan, The Jubilee Gospel: The Jubilee, Spirit and the Church (Milton Keynes: Authentic, 2008), xviii + 141pp., ISBN 9781860247033.
At a time when ‘lifestyle’ books, including many Christian ones, fill many a bookshop shelf, this short, punchy book distinguishes itself by credibly considering life-together, God-style. Over the course of its broad sweep through biblical and post-biblical history, tracing the story of the laws and principles which make up what he calls ‘the Jubilee programme’, Tan traces a theme which makes sense of many laws and regulations in the Torah, and the recurrent prophetic messages throughout the Old Testament, and sheds light on the very character of God and the shape of our own discipleship in Christian community.
Beginning by exploring the terms of Yahweh’s covenant with Israel, Tan shows how the ‘Jubilee programme’ shaped a system of laws instituted to embed key values into the heart of a society – justice, generosity, community and shalom peace – highlighting the inextricability of keeping God’s covenant, inhabiting the land of promise, and living according to Jubilee principles. He then traces the (largely gloomy) story of the Jubilee ideal through the Old Testament, unpacking how Israel’s failure specifically to live according to Jubilee principles led to exploitation, injustice and idolatry, God’s warning through the prophets and ultimately to exile.
He then follows this narrative into the New Testament, beginning with Jesus’ messianic Jubilee declaration in Luke 4 and tracing Jubilee themes through Jesus’ teaching, his healing work, attitude to the Sabbath, his inclusiveness of women, lepers, the ritually unclean and the socially despised, and the proclaimed forgiveness of sins in the Synoptics which, as he points out, is intended to echo the Jubilee concern with debt cancellation. Jesus is, in himself, the embodiment and fulfilment of Jubilee. He considers Pentecost, when at the celebration of the giving of the law to Moses, the promised holy Spirit powerfully entered the life of the nascent messianic community, arguing that whilst the giving of the Spirit at Pentecost fulfils the prophecy quoted from Joel 2 about God pouring out his Spirit on all flesh, the timing was not coincidental. Just as God’s Jubilee community was established at the giving of the law (celebrated at Pentecost), so the new Jubilee community is established at the giving of the Spirit. Tan then goes on to explore how this lifestyle was evident in the New Testament church and afterwards how small communities sought to maintain a counter-cultural lifestyle in ‘Christian’ environments that were increasingly indistinguishable from the world they inhabited. He ends by considering some present-day examples of how Christians in more recent times have tried to implement Jubilee living.
It is possible to highlight, among all the strengths of this book, three particularly notable ones. The description of Jubilee as a revolutionary social and economic system, designed to mould a culture that reflected the character of Yahweh, its resonance with God’s character as he reveals himself, and the consistent cross-referencing of Jubilee concern and imagery throughout Old and New Testaments is both imaginative and thought-provoking, as Tan peels back the layers of culture and history surrounding Jubilee and brings the concept to life from the pages of Leviticus.
Secondly, Tan manages to create a new lens for understanding many present theological quandaries, from the significance of the land of Israel, the covenants and exile through to tithing and generosity and the significance of Pentecost, all of which are helpfully illuminated (although inevitably not finally resolved) within a Jubilee-shaped worldview. In doing so, he gently reminds us of how far short our lifestyles and our Christian communities fall from the Spirit-empowered Jubilee ideal explored in the Old Testament and radically put into effect in the first Christian communities.
The third significant strength of the book is how applicable it is on different scales, to people of different backgrounds, occupations and life circumstances. Tan’s descriptive prose and gracious application presents Jubilee as a very practical outworking of loving obedience to God and his commands. Its perspective is applicable to personal relationships, work in the office, the garden or in government, home and church, as well as offering radical guidance for policy-making and international business. It is an invitation to creatively consider the possibilities of Jubilee lifestyle.
However, whilst Tan presents some inspiring examples of incorporating Jubilee thinking into everyday community life, it is notable that all his modern-day, non-theoretical examples are partial outworkings of Jubilee living, commendably applying certain principles, whether through common finances, debt cancellation, shared living, and so on, but none appear to bring all of the elements of Jubilee together in a way that might reflect the harmonious vision of the first half of the book. This, one might conclude, is impossible outside of the direct earthly rule of the Messiah, an example of the now/not yet dynamic of ‘your will be done on earth as it is in heaven’. Nevertheless, this is not explicitly stated, and introduces a weakness into the argument: is Jubilee living actually possible, in the entirety of its vision?
A second area of weakness is obscured slightly by the apparently thoroughgoing study of Jubilee as one of the great themes of Scripture, but raised by the book’s title, The Jubilee Gospel – despite considering Jesus’ life and ministry, it almost skips over his death, resurrection and ascension to land us suddenly at Pentecost. The window of Jubilee gives us only a glimpse of the cross, through the work of the kinsman-redeemer stipulated in Leviticus 25 and exemplified in Ruth 4. The kinsman-redeemer element of Jubilee society is presumably still in Jesus’ mind but it is not a parallel that the New Testament draws on significantly; arguably Graeco-Roman ideas of redemption from slavery, and, more importantly, God’s rescue of his own covenant people from Egypt are much more fully referenced in New Testament reflections on the crucifixion. There is still some disconnect, therefore, between the arc of the Jubilee story throughout Scripture, and the death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus, even though we understand that those events make Jubilee living newly possible. Nevertheless, the connection Tan draws between Jubilee principles on the one hand, and the ‘good news of the kingdom of God’ so central to the message of Jesus on the other, warrants the claim that the gospel of Jesus is indeed a ‘Jubilee gospel’, and, as Tan concludes his book, ‘a powerful antidote to a society propped up by Valium’.
Christina Winn
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