The Fulfillment

Fr. Frederick Edlefsen

For the past few Sundays, the Gospels reveal Jesus’ divine power.  At Jesus’ baptism, the Father’s voice proclaimed, “This is my beloved Son.”   That was the first public revelation of Jesus as the Son of God.   Last week, the Gospel was about Jesus changing water into wine at the wedding in Cana.  That was the first of his miracles when he “so revealed his glory, and his disciples began to believe in him.”  

In today’s Gospel, Jesus goes into a synagogue on the Sabbath and reads the prophet Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me, to bring glad tidings to the poor.  He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.”   He concludes by saying: “Today, this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.”  

Flash back to Leviticus.  God said to Moses:  "Seven weeks of years shall you count--seven times seven years--so that the seven cycles amount to forty-nine years.  Then, on the tenth day of the seventh month [of the 49th year], let the trumpet resound … This fiftieth year you shall make sacred by proclaiming liberty in the land for all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you, when every one of you shall return to his own property, everyone to his own family estate” (Leviticus 25: 8-10).  This 50th Jubilee year was supposed to a year-long Sabbath: debts cancelled, slaves freed, and collateral returned. Of course, this was arguably the least-observed law in the Covenant. 

However, Christ fulfills the jubilee!  Changing water into wine suggests the fulfilment.  However, Christ’s jubilee is not of this world.  It’s beyond death.  The invitation is issued at Baptism.  

Christ has come to set us free from the burdens of a fallen world.  So use your borrowed time – in work and in leisure – to pursue goodness, truth and beauty.  Prepare yourselves for the ultimate and enduring Freedom and Joy:  the Jubilee of God’s Paradise.  “To him who conquers, I will grant to eat of the Tree of Life, which is in the Paradise of God” (Revelation 2:7).