All of the elements in the Jubilee Year in the Pope’s teachings and from the Hebrew Scriptures  relate to the impact of faith on culture, to the effect of the proclamation of God's Word on how persons relate to the earth, to one another, and to God.  They teach that revelation has a direct influence in the political, economic, and social formation of a people.  Religion and everyday life are one.  This is important to keep in mind in a culture such as ours which at times tries to artificially separate faith from culture.

In his beautiful Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Nuntiandi, Pope Paul VI declares that "the split between the Gospel and culture is without a doubt the drama of our time, just as it was of other times.  Therefore every, effort must be made to ensure a full evangelization of culture, or more correctly of cultures.  They‑ have to be regenerated by an encounter with the Gospel."  Evangelization in the spirit of Jubilee will reconnect the Gospel with culture and heal a split which should never have been made. 

Jesus as the fulfillment of Jubilee.  In the passage from his own Jewish Roots in Luke 4:16-21,  Jesus proclaims the Jubilee ideals, i.e., to “proclaim a year of the Lord’s favor” and by asserting “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing,  proclaims he is the fulfillment of the Jubilee ideals.  He also lives out these ideals as the Incarnate Word.  As eternal High Priest, he was in prayerful union with the Spirit of the Lord throughout the Joyful, sorrowful, and glorious mysteries of his life.  As a Prophet, he taught the poor that they are blessed and sinners that their debits are forgiven.  As shepherd King, he witnesses to his prophetic teachings by living as a poor man, healing the blind and the lame, dying as a condemned prisoner and giving to those who imitate him an eternal home in the Kingdom of Heaven.  The scriptural accounts of Jubilee are indeed brought to perfection in the very person of Jesus.

In Tertio Millennio Adveniente, John Paul states, “For the Church, the Jubilee is precisely this ‘a year of the Lord’s favor.”  As the term “Jubilee” indicates, it is a time of great joy, “not jus an inner joy but a jubilation which is manifested outwardly, for the coming of God is also an outward, visible, audible, and tangible events as made clear in 1 John 1:2. , “What was from the beginning…”  But Jesus has exerted an impact that has extended far beyond the border of his Church.  Pope John Paul reminds us that the Jubilee of the Year 2000 is extraordinarily important “not only for Christians but indirectly for the whole of humanity.”  

Christ’s coming into the world is, in fact, “the center of the calendar most widely used today.”   The whole world has been changed by the coming of Jesus Christ.  The universe has been hurled in a forward direction from which it can never turn back.  Literally every person, nation, philosophy, even religion has felt this forward progressive thrust set in motion by Jesus of Nazareth.  The famous poem, One Solitary Life, appearing in, among other places, the annul Christmas Spectacular at New York’s Radio City Music Hall, sums of the above sentiments:  

He was born in an obscure village, the child of a peasant woman.  He grew up in still another village, where he worked in a carpenter shop until he was thirty.  Then for three years he became an itinerant preacher.  He never wrote a book.  He never held an office.  He never had a family or owned a house.  He didn’t go to college.  He had no credentials by himself.  He never traveled two hundred miles from the place where he was born.  He did none of the things people normally associate with greatness.  He was only thirty-three when the tide of public opinion turned against him.  His friends ran away.  He was turned over to his enemies where he went through the mockery of a trial.  He was crucified between two thieves.  While he was dying, his executioners gambled for his clothing the only property he had on earth.  When he was dead he was laid in a borrowed grave through the pity of a friend.  Nineteen centuries have come and gone, and today he is the central figure of the human race and the leader of mankind’s progress.  All the armies that ever march, all the navies that every sailed, all the parliaments that ever sat, all the kings and queens who ever reigned, put together, have not influenced the life of man on this earth as much as that One Solitary Life. 

The very ideal of universal social betterment and world progress would not exist at all were it not for the coming of Jesus Christ.  He is the key, the focal point, and goal of all human history.  For it was he who fulfilled and made universal through his Holy Spirit the Jewish tradition of Jubilee.

Condensed from Fr. Niei's presentation at the Theology of Jubilee Year 2000 Symposium , Bloomfield Hills, MI, Sept. 1999.