The Isaiah Project: Chapter 61, or, Jubilee

Remarkable how these closing chapters tie up the structure of the prophecy as a whole. Here, the prophet closes a circle that was opened way back in Chapter 6.

1. The spirit of God my Master is upon me, because God anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He sent me to bandage broken hearts; to announce liberty for hostages and opened eyes for the blind.

2. To announce a year God’s gracious acceptance, and a day of recompense for our god to console all the bereaved.

3. To settle the bereaved on Zion. To adorn them with elegance instead of ashes, oil of delight instead of bereavement, garments of praise instead of a spirit weighed down. They’ll be called terebinths, oaks of righteousness, which God planted so he could adorn himself.

4. They’ll build up the deserts of ages past. They’ll raise up the ruins from the beginning and repair the desert cities that were ruined from generation to generation.

5. Immigrants will stand and herd your sheep; the sons of foreigners will be your husbandmen and vintners,

6. But you will be called priests of God — they’ll say that you wait on our god, and you’ll feed on the might of nations. You’ll preen yourself in their majesty,

7. In exchange for your double helping of shame. They shouted in triumph, ‘disgrace is what they get.’ And so they will take possession of double their territory; eternal joy will be theirs,

8. Because I am God who loves justice; who detests theft with evil. I pay them back in truth and cut a deal with them forever: the eternal covenant.

9. Their offspring will be known in the nations, and their descendants among the peoples. Everyone who sees them will hold them in high regard, because they are the offspring God blessed.

10. I rejoice, and my joy is in God. My soul exults in my god, because he has clothed me in garments of salvation, wrapped me in a cloak of righteousness, the way a groom attires his head with priestly ornaments and his bride bedecks herself with jewelry.

11. Yes, the way the earth produces blossoms and a garden blossoms forth with seedlings — that’s how my Master, God, makes righteousness and praise-song blossom in the sight of every nation.

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According to the Hebrew calendar, this is year number 5781 since the creation of the world. On September 8 of the standard calendar—at the end of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year celebration—we will be in the year 5782. That year is special: it is a shmita, a year of release. Every seven years, according to Leviticus 25, Jews are commanded to leave all their fields fallow. In modern Israel, the practice is still observed: during the shmita, no one farms.

But there is another custom that has not been practiced for many centuries. The “Jubilee Year”—named for the blast on the yobel, the ram’s-horn trumpet, which announces it—is the Sabbath year of Sabbath years, the fiftieth year after seven cycles of the shmita have been observed. In that year, said God to his chosen people, “proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.” It is the year when the captives go free.

This blessing of blessings, this year of abundance and mercy, has not come for many generations. It is only to be observed when all the tribes of the Jewish nation inhabit Israel. It's a contentious matter in Jewish scholarship, but one thing seems certain: before the Assyrians deported the ten tribes of Northern Israel into exile, the Jubilee Year was celebrated regularly. After 70 AD, when the second temple was destroyed, no Jubilee Year was ever marked again. The great catastrophes of the 6th century we have been tracking here, the exile of the Jews that Isaiah prophesied, set in motion the events that would end the Jubilee Year.

But here is Isaiah, in the voice of God’s anointed one, announcing a “year of God’s gracious acceptance” in which broken hearts are healed and prisoners set free (verses 1-2). There will come a day when all of Israel will be whole again, when her children and even her persecutors celebrate and serve together within her walls.

In the previous chapter I described what it would mean for the lost sons of Abraham to return to their would-be mother country, to reveal the hidden potential of their many cultures and unite in service of God. Now Isaiah declares a day when Israel, too, will be reunited. All that is about to be broken—the nation that will lie in ruins and the rituals that will be violently interrupted—shall be made whole again. “The way the earth produces blossoms and a garden blossoms forth with seedlings — that’s how my Master, God, makes righteousness and praise-song blossom in the sight of every nation” (verse 11).

Christians, of course, will see in this chapter a description of Christ’s healing work during his life on earth, ongoing today in the power of the Holy Spirit and destined to be completed at the Last Day. But we do not always realize we are part of a story that has been going on since time began, a restoration of all that Israel was and shall be again. Every act of God is a step back in this direction, toward the healing of these ancient wounds.

Perhaps you remember all the way back in Chapter 6, when God made Isaiah a prophet and announced his intention for the coming years of exile and despair. It was a painful prophecy: the nation of Israel was to be “devoured in flame — like a terebinth tree, like an oak. When they are toppled, their stump remains. Their stump is the sacred seed.” I noted back then that even this metaphor contains within it the beginnings of God’s plan for healing: the trees that God burns down will reveal in their ruins the beginnings of rebirth.

“Their stump is the sacred seed.” Now, as the prophecy draws to a close, God makes good on that promise: he will “settle the bereaved on Zion” and “They’ll be called terebinths, oaks of righteousness” (verse 3). In the final year, when Jubilee comes again, when rest and liberation are entire and God’s people are one at last, we will see that the makings of our salvation were there from the very beginning of time. There is not one inch of creation that God does not intend to make new.

Rejoice evermore,
Spencer