A Reflection for Saturday of the Seventeenth Week in Ordinary Time
Find today’s readings here.
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,
every one to his own family estate. (Leviticus 25:10)
In Matthew 6:12 we read a version of the prayer Jesus taught us that runs a little differently from the version you likely hear at Mass. Jesus instructs the disciples to use these words: “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.”
How unwilling we are institutionally and personally to do as Jesus tells us. We hang on hard to the debts owed to us and resent those held over us by others, where it’s a bank after a home or education loan or a friend who may have unintentionally offended us. My Irish family held on grimly to some of their grudges, a venerable aunt telling me vehemently once of an indignity she endured at the hand of another family member as a child in Galway. When I did the math later, I realized it was an event that predated the Great War.
I have good news to share. We don’t have to hold on to those burdens. We can let them go. We can be rid of them. The debts owed to us, the debts we owe others. An appeal to forgiveness and a nod to mercy and they can become lifted away forever.
Yes, I am speaking of figurative debts, but Hebrew Scripture in today’s first reading is not. It outlines a timetable for debt forgiveness to be taken literally, a plan of Jubilee, of liberation. It is a formula for freedom, for ridding ourselves of burdens, worth embracing in our homes and our relationships, even in relationships among nations. And 2025 is such a year, declared by Pope Francis as a year of Jubilee when “Hope does not disappoint.”
In his last year of life the late Pope Francis was keenly aware of the importance of this Jubilee year, urging Catholics to take advantage of it in pilgrimage and prayer, creating Holy Doors around the world for them to pass through in acknowledgement of Jubilee.
Surrendering debts and absolving burdens creates room for the hope Francis called “the central message of the coming Jubilee.”
In hope, Pope Francis urged a special debt jubilee for the world’s poorest nations. He cared deeply about the heavy burden of international debt on low-income nations. That burden can be so high, many small states struggle to balance spending on social needs like education and health care with the demands of debt service to powerful global lending institutions and wealthier nations.
In a special message about the Jubilee year, he said: "Another heartfelt appeal that I would make in light of the coming Jubilee is directed to the more affluent nations. I ask that they acknowledge the gravity of so many of their past decisions and determine to forgive the debts of countries that will never be able to repay them. More than a question of generosity, this is a matter of justice.”
Forgiving debt can be a matter of justice, Francis believed, because of the often iniquitous manner debt was created in their first place—perhaps after geopolitical arm-twisting of a powerful nation over a subject state or as a device to steal the resources of another country or simply in the form of a public burden established to disguise an individual payoff.
When a debt grows too large that its interest is a claim on hope and a leverage on the future, then it becomes subject to God’s divine mercy, something beyond the limits of our mercantile minds and our petty calculus of interests and allowances. Such grace is worth seeking to emulate as best we can from time to time, say every 25 or 50 years.
