The Very First Sermon Christ Gave Taught Us About The Jubilee
It’s early Christmas morning as I write this. I just could not sleep with this story dancing around in my head. The sugarplums are really upset at being pushed aside. I’m thinking about why we celebrate the birth of a man who preached debt cancellation, without celebrating or practicing that part of his message.
Oh, sure. We can go on all day about peace on earth. But few of us are willing to talk about what causes so much discord and violence that is the scarcity created by debts. Why would Jesus even bother to make the Jubilee year a priority in his first sermon? Because he knew the history.
In his book, “…and forgive them their debts”, Michael Hudson explains the history of debt and how it grew into being. He describes the rise of man from hunter-gatherer to farmer to trader. He demonstrates how civilization started out in a society where every man, every family, had a plot of land they could not lose. At least, not until the primordial banker came along to screw everything up.
In antiquity, humans needed to stay together to protect each other against dangerous predators, bad weather, and other bands of humans. They formed groups of 10 or 20 thousand in which every man was given land for subsistence. In return for the land which they could not lose, the men would serve in the army, build walls, and dig irrigation ditches.
In those early days, the ruler collected taxes to pay for the services and maintenance of the kingdom. The taxes were paid with a fraction of the harvest from each family. Sometimes the people fell into arrears. Sometimes there was drought, flood, or war. In those times, the ruler would cancel debts to the temple because they knew the debts could not be paid.
Some of those people got smart and figured out that they could loan surpluses from their harvests at interest, usually about 33% a year, to other people not so fortunate. These were the primordial bankers, the early loan sharks. They were not so worried about getting paid back as they were about securing the debt bondage of their victims. These early bankers began to compete with the rulers for labor.
The rulers grew wise to this practice and they began to issue debt cancellation orders and decrees so that the people would be free of the debts to the early bankers. Rulers canceled debts to keep the people from fleeing the group. They canceled debts to remove the competition for the labor required to maintain the kingdom. According to Hudson, debt cancellation was a time-honored tradition in early human history for 3000 years.
And then it stopped.
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When Jesus gave his Sermon On The Mount, he spoke of debt cancelation and the restoration of the Jubilee year. He spoke of the long tradition of debt cancellation. And if you listen to the message of Christmas, of Christianity, the message of debt cancellation is almost entirely absent. Most of this talk about forgiveness has nothing to do with debts. It’s all about how we mistreat each other and how we can atone for our sins of mistreatment. But as Hudson says in his book, almost all of that context about debt has been removed from the bible. From Hudson’s book:
Violence played a major political role, almost entirely by creditors. Having overthrown kings and populidst tyrants, oligarchies accused advocates of debtor interests of being “tyrants” (in Greece) or seeking kingship (as the Gracci brothers and Julius Ceasar were accused of in Rome). Sparta’s kings Aegis and Cleomenes were killed for trying to cancel debts and reversing the monopolization of land in the 3rd century BC. Neighboring oligarchies called on Rome to overthrow Sparta’s reformer-kings.
About those land monopolies. The early rulers gave the people land they could not lose. They could not even give it away. They could only pass it down to the next generation. The primordial bankers figured out that they could loan part of their harvest at interest to the point where they could “foreclose” on the property. Since the early laws permitted land transfer only by inheritance, the early bankers got an idea. The debtor family could “adopt” the creditor as a son in the forgiveness of the debt. I have to admit the creativity of that solution.
All of this history was deciphered with the help of the Rosetta Stone, a team of Assyriologists, and all of the ancient tablets and scrolls found by archeologists. Hudson worked with teams of scholars to translate the scrolls and tablets and put them in sequence. The transaction records demonstrate a clear pattern of connivance and guile on the part of the creditors to accumulate land and to sucker people into debt bondage.
Antiquity is replete with a pattern of debt cancellation to restore peace and order, to remove extreme inequality from politics. We stand surrounded by astronomical piles of debt, income inequality, and political polarization because we refuse to forgive debts. I meant to say, the government refuses to step in and cancel debts. As Hudson says, “A debt that cannot be paid won’t be paid.”
The first sermon that Jesus ever gave included a pointed message about debt cancellation and how canceling debts can restore peace.
Why are we borrowing money to spend it? Because we’ve been raised to believe that it’s normal to borrow money to spend it. We’ve been raised to believe that it’s normal to pay interest for everything we buy, including the land we live on. We’ve been raised to believe that it’s ok for the financial industry to siphon off a large chunk of the economy for themselves, in exchange for loaning money that they create from nothing.
Why is the church so quiet about this? They’d like to see the next Christmas.
These are just some of the things I think about on Christmas Day.
