 it is such a privilege for me to be with you. This is one of the most enjoyable conferences, a real highlight of my whole year when I get the opportunity to address you all. And it's particularly delightful this year because of the theme that Father Dave chose for this priest Deacons and seminarians retreat based off of Luke four, because in the providence of God, my doctoral dissertation was basically the background of Luke four, tracing the Jubilee themes through the Old Testament into what we call the Second Temple Jewish literature and the Dead Sea Scrolls. And it's not because I was interested in Jubilee or Jubilee themes, I had no interest in that kind of stuff at all. People that were into that were usually into like the social justice movement and that's not where I was at when I was 27 and entering grad school. And so on, the reason why this came about was an older friend of mine said, you got to choose a doctoral topic quick. So this is what you do, you choose a director that you can get along with, choose him for his personality, not for his subject area and then ask him what you should write on and do whatever he tells you because he knows and you don't, what's out there and what's doable. So that's exactly what I did. I went to the University of Notre Dame, I picked a director that I could get along with, I took him out to lunch and I picked his brain until he suggested something and what he finally suggested, because he was kind of laissez-faire and he wanted me to do my own thing and discover myself and all that. And I was like, no, no, I just want to get something done. And finally, finally, he said, well, I had this project that a student worked on about 15 years ago and he never finished and he dropped out of the program and so on, but it was on the Jubilee and tracing the Jubilee from Leviticus to Luke four and this theme and how it develops in scripture. I said, okay, fine, I'll work on it. So I did, but at the time, I didn't understand the theological payoff of what I was working on. Really didn't become a parent, but then out of grad school and then after coming into the Catholic Church in my third year of my doctoral program in 2001 and then coming here to Steubenville, first to work with Dr. Scott Hahn and then to teach at the university and as my career has developed, every year, every other year, I see a new reason why God had me work on the material that he did. So I'm beginning to see the province and this conference is one of those providential moments where I look back and say, I'm glad that I put in that work. So we're gonna have a wonderful time this afternoon looking at the background of this amazing passage in Luke four and some amazing discoveries from the Dead Sea Scrolls that shed tremendous light on the dynamic of what was going on in Nazareth probably the late 20s AD when our Lord shows up at his hometown to preach from a controversial passage, namely Isaiah 61. So let's get into this and talk about how Jesus fulfills this law of Jubilee. Now, of course, we're talking about Leviticus 25. Leviticus typically is not people's favorite book of the Bible, you know? Father Mike Schmitz has been doing a great job at getting people through Leviticus, you know, in his Bible through a year program, because usually Leviticus is like being at a tractor pole, you know, you know how a tractor pole, they have that sledge with the big weight that moves forward and, you know, you're trying to make forward progress and eventually that weight just bogs you down and you can't move. Well, that's like trying to read the Bible through in a year like Genesis is okay, you know, and then Exodus it's harder and then you hit Leviticus and that's that weight on that sledge moves forward, you stick down into the mud, you just can't get through and that's where a lot of attempts to read the Bible through in a year have died in the mires of Leviticus. But anyway, Leviticus actually has some great stuff in it and our Lord says that he came to fulfill all of the law and the prophets. Think not that I've come to abolish the law and the prophets, our Lord says, in the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, I have come not to abolish them, but to fulfill them. Christ is the fulfillment of all of the scriptures. Amen. And Bishop was talking to us last night and just giving us an experience of Christ through the scriptures. But we experienced Christ also through the Old Testament. It's less direct, but it is all an indirect experience of Jesus. So even the liturgy of the people of Israel, the liturgy that was instituted under Moses, it was an experience of Jesus Christ through different facets of his personality, different facets of his redemptive work were represented symbolically in the ancient liturgy, including things like the law of Jubilee. We see our Lord teaching this in the famous Emmaus Road episode, Luke 24, 25. We know the story. He's walking with the two men on the road on the day of his resurrection. He rebukes them, oh foolish men and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken. Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things? And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures, the things concerning himself. So all the scriptures witnessed to him and he explained through the Pentateuch and through Isaiah and the major prophets and the minor prophets how all of scripture was a vicarious experience of the Messiah. A great example of the way that our Lord took up passages that you would never think of as prophetic and fulfilled them occurs on the cross. The famous piercing of our Lord's side. John identifies that as a fulfillment of Exodus 1246, you shall not break a bone of the Passover lamb. Now prior to its fulfillment, you would have never thought of that kind of cultic legal requirement as being prophetic. But it turns out in light of our Lord's redemptive even these laws that seem kind of, sterile or pedantic, et cetera, take on new meaning because they pointed to Christ. And that's true of the Jubilee law as well. So let's look at this passage from Leviticus 25. It's laying out the cycle of feasts in ancient Israel in Leviticus 23. We get the listing of the solemnities that all occur annually. And then we move to Leviticus 25 and we get what you might call super annual observations, liturgical observations that take place less frequently than every year. So you have, for example, the Sabbath year that occurs every seventh year. And the grand mama of all of the liturgical observations is the one that occurs on the largest cycle and that's the 50 year recurring Jubilee year. So Moses recounts at the word of the Lord, you shall count seven weeks of years, seven times seven years, so 49 years. Then you shall send abroad the loud trumpet on the 10th day of the seventh month on the day of atonement. And you shall hallow the 50th year and proclaim liberty throughout the land. It shall be a Jubilee for you when each of you shall return to his property and each of you shall return to his family. So there's several things to notice here. It's set on this cycle of seven sevens. You will recall that when Peter comes to our Lord in, if I'm recalling correctly, Luke 12 and asks him, how many times shall I forgive? No, I'm sorry. Matthew 18. I'm in a Bible scholar moment. Anyway, how many times shall I forgive the one who sins against me? And our Lord says not seven times, but what? 70 times seven, right? That's a Jubilee number. We're gonna look at that again. We're gonna see that in Daniel chapter nine. What is the significance of seven? Well, it's a sacred number, many will tell you, but it's also particularly associated with covenant because in the Hebrew language to form a covenant, which is a family bond, okay? A covenant is the extension of kinship by oath. It's a way of swearing people into your family. A covenant is always oriented towards family formation. Maybe that's old news to you, but it's not old news. It's something to really embrace and make a part of our teaching because at every mass, we talk about the new and eternal covenant, but if Gallup poll put their pollsters at the exits of Catholic sanctuaries around the country and ask parishioners leaving mass on a Sunday morning, what is a covenant? Oh my goodness, you get so much head scratching. I'll bet less than 5% of Catholics could give you an adequate definition of what a covenant is. Isn't that ironic? We're coming to celebrate the new and eternal one, but we don't even know what it is, okay? What is this reality that we're celebrating, this new and eternal reality? Well, a covenant is a family bond made through an oath. And the Eucharist is the oath of God that forms us into the family of God. But going back now, in the Hebrew language, to swear an oath, you literally sevened yourself. That's the meaning of the verb for oath swearing. It means to seven yourself. And that arose from the practice of performing a gesture or uttering a statement seven times in order to make it solemn. And so we can look, for example, in Genesis 21, where Abraham and Abimelech make a covenant with one another and they exchange seven lambs to solemnize the covenant because that's representative of oath. And in fact, the Hebrew word for oath is spelled with the same consonants as the number seven. It's just a slightly, it's pronounced slightly differently due to the vowels, but it's based on the number seven shava and to swear the oath is nishva to seven oneself. So seven is associated with covenant. And that's what we're getting here. We're getting seven weeks of years, seven times seven years. So it's like perfectly covenantal. It's the covenant squared, okay, is jubilee. And then you shall send abroad the loud trumpet on the seventh day of the seventh, the 10th day of the seventh month on the day of atonement, you see? So this socio-economic institution that freed all the indentured Israelites and returned them to their property, it flowed out of reconciliation with God. It flowed out of the liturgy. It flowed out of the cult. And it flowed out of the forgiveness of their sins that God granted in response to the day of atonement. And that's a major point that we need to grasp about the jubilee. So often as church, we get the cart before the horse. We want to rectify society. We want to establish social justice and we want to reconcile human beings with one another before they're reconciled to God. And it doesn't work that way, amen? First reconciliation with God. Until the human heart is right with God, we cannot be right with our brothers and sisters. We have to get the order. It flows down from a right relationship to God and God taught that truth to the ancient people of Israel by the way that he set up the liturgy, first he had the high priest perform the day of atonement, then the trumpet went out and proclaimed a manifestation, an external manifestation of that interior reconciliation and restoration that was granted by God in the forgiveness of their sins. So God's forgiveness of the sins of Israel was to be reflected by Israelite's forgiveness of each other's debts. And that's significant because when we state it that way, you can see that the our father is a jubilee prayer. Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. This is the principle of jubilee going back to the liturgy instituted under Moses. And so we see this, it's on the day of atonement that they experienced this restoration. It goes on to say you shall hallow the 50th year. You might ask yourself, okay, 49th year or 50th year, what's going on? Seven times seven, 49 or 50. Well, it was like the way that we count an octave. You know, the octave day is also the Sunday or the first day of the following week. So this is how they did it. The 50th year was at the same time, the first year of the subsequent cycle. So it was on the 50th year that you observed the jubilee, but the jubilee years were only 49 years apart from one another because the 50th and the first did a double duty. And so you shall hallow the 50th year and proclaim liberty throughout the land. This line, by the way, a little bit of American trivia here, this is inscribed on the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, Leviticus 2510, you shall proclaim liberty throughout the land. Very unique phrase, it's old, archaic, it's like King James Hebrew, okay? This is Mosaic Hebrew here that you don't find very much in the rest of the Bible, except when they are referring back to the jubilee year in this unique phrase, proclaim liberty. And it shall be a jubilee for you when you shall return to his property and each of you shall return to his family. So let's talk about the three effects of the jubilee year. Now sometimes you'll hear people say that God allowed the Israelites to enslave one another. That's not actually true. In Exodus 21 and Deuteronomy 15, there are laws allowing Hebrew slaves, but Hebrew is a ethnic category that included many other related peoples like the Moabites, the Ammonites, the Edomites. All those people groups were Hebrews, descendants of Hebrew, who was an ancestor of Abraham. And so in Exodus 21 and Deuteronomy 15, you have laws that limit the slavery that the Israelites could impose on the nations that were roundabout that were related to them by blood and they could only take a slave for seven years and then they had to set him free after seven years or if the slave by his own free will wanted to remain with the family for life, then they marked his ear lobe with an awl and he became part of the family as a servant for his entire life, but that was by his own decision. Now as for Israelites themselves, you see, Israelite is not synonymous with Hebrew. Hebrew is this broad group of Semitic peoples and among the Hebrews, there are specifically the sons of Israel. They were not to be enslaved and Leviticus 25 makes that very clear. The most that could happen to an Israelite is that he have the status of what we would think of as an indentured servant. Okay, so he'd have to serve by law for a certain period of time, but never legally became a slave and hopefully one of his kinsmen would come and buy him out of this indentured servant servitude and the kinsmen who came to buy him back was called a goel in Hebrew. That translates to a redeemer and it's important to remember that Leviticus 25 is not only the chapter about the great Jubilee law, but it's also the chapter that tells us about the role of the redeemer, the role of the goel, okay? And that's significant because the time we get to Isaiah, the prophet Isaiah begins to apply that term redeemer to the Lord God of Israel and that's where we begin to see the term goel applied again and again to the God of Israel who's going to send his servant to redeem his captive people. But, okay, getting back to the three effects of the Jubilee, it ended this indentured servitude. So if you were not bought back by any of your male relatives, weren't highly motivated like, ah, yeah, we'll let Billy work this off. Maybe he'll learn a life lesson, you know? But in case none of your relatives came to your aid, the Jubilee year would come around every 50 years and usually you weren't indentured on the very first year of the cycle, so it was usually less than 50 years it was gonna come around and it would end your period of servitude. So put an end to the servitude. Also the Jubilee year canceled all sale of ancestral land. So when the people of Israel entered the land of Israel, they cast lots and they divided the land by tribe and by clan and by family and every clan and every family within Israel was given an ancestral plot and that was sacred, okay? And that was the land that they buried their forefathers and their foremothers on and that was the family land and that could not be alienated. At worst it could be sold for a while but when the Jubilee came around that family land went back to the family. So it ended servitude, it restored the family land and it restored the family, okay? Because anybody who had lost connection with their family land because they had become a servant and become a debt slave to some other Israelite, they were released and could go back to their ancestral property and be reunited with their family. And so there is a strong family focus to the law of Jubilee. It wasn't an end in itself, it wasn't just to establish some kind of socioeconomic equality. The point of the Jubilee was to maintain the family intact. It was about restoration of the family and even restoring the land, that wasn't an end in itself. The restoration of the land was to give a place for the family to come back to and the releasing of the servants was to allow all the servants to go back to their family. So it's all about family restoration and that's what covenant is about. Covenant is about family formation. God is a loving father who establishes his family on earth and wants us to become our sons and daughters. So that's a little bit about the year of Jubilee. Moses institutes it, but they scarcely ever observed it. Over the course of about 500 years after Moses, we have the ups and downs of the history of Israel. We won't go into all that, but you know that eventually the kingdom of David failed and the Babylonians came and took all that was left of the people of Israel and took them into captivity in Babylon. And the sacred author at the end of the book of Chronicles comes to this point in their history and he speaks about how Nebuchadnezzar took into exile in Babylon, those who had escaped from the sword until the establishment of the kingdom of Persia to fulfill the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah until the land had enjoyed its Sabbath. All the days that it lay desolate, it kept Sabbath to fulfill 70 years. And that is to say they were in exile for 70 years. So this was the thing. Every seventh year they were supposed to abstain from work, rest for that year and let the land rest. And then the seventh Sabbath year was the Jubilee. Well, the Israelites observed neither the Sabbath year nor the Jubilee. So in God's punishment of the people of Israel, he takes them off of their land and allows the land to rest so the land can recoup those 70 Sabbath years that the land never got because they were working the land all the time. And this strikes me as the irony of this is that the laws of God are given for our flourishing. The Sabbath itself, the weekly Sabbath, as well as the Sabbath year, as well as the Jubilee are given to us so that we can rest and so that we can enjoy the creation. And that's the purpose of all of the laws, all the laws of God, the 10 commandments, as well as the laws of Moses, as well as the sets of exhortations and in the New Testament as well, all of them are given for us to experience joy, for us to flourish as human beings. And we, to quote from Matthew Kelly, we resist happiness. We don't want to be happy. God says, I want you to relax. I want you to take a day off. No, I don't want to relax. I don't want to take a day off. I want to work, work, work, work, work. Where did we get this? Is it just because God's telling us to relax that we don't want to relax? I don't know what it is, but therefore our own good and we resist our own good. And we look at God's law given to us to liberate us and we wrongly perceive the law of God as an oppression when in fact it is a liberation, which we're gonna see more dramatically as we move through and look at some of these other sacred texts. So the people of God would not relax. They would not rest and enjoy the good creation. So God enforces a, we're gonna have a little vacation to Babylon, okay? You won't take a break, okay? Take out the Babylon, you can rest out there, you know? And the land can get its rest. So there's also an ecology thing. There's a cure for creation motif to the Jubilee as well. So the Israelites failed to keep this law of liberation. They didn't free their servants. Not only did they make indentured servants out of their fellow Israelites, but we find out in the book of Jeremiah that they even enslaved their fellow Israelites contrary to the law of God. And that backfired because once Israelite slavery began, most of the people ended up by the vicissitudes of economics as slaves themselves at some point. And so they reject the liberating law of God and instead embrace a culture of slavery. And that's really each one of us as well. The constant fight in the path of Christian discipleship is to resist that urge to go back to the life of slavery. That's the old man that St. Paul talks about. But as I said, the Israelites failed to observe this law. And so as we move on in the history of Israel, the prophets more and more began to place their hope in the future anointed one, the future servant of the Lord, whom the Lord God would send to make right all the wrongs of Israel's history. And that Jubilee law, which had never been faithfully observed, the prophets like Isaiah began to recognize that it would only be implemented when the Messiah would come. And so here is our famous passage that our Lord reads in Nazareth. This is Isaiah 61. The spirit of the Lord God is upon me because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. That's the gospel right there. O'angelion to bring the good news. And although this passage does not use the term meshiah, which means anointed one, it's clear that the speaker is the anointed one because he speaks of being anointed by the spirit of God. Spirit of the Lord is upon me. He has anointed me. He has mashacht me. It means to smear with oil. Really, you could translate the Messiah as the smeared one. Doesn't sound as poetic as anointed one, but that's really what the Hebrew is saying. And he's anointed me to bring good news to the poor, sent me to bind up the brokenhearted to proclaim liberty in Hebrew to Kara deror. This is archaic Hebrew. It's like King James Hebrew or better, Mosaic Hebrew. It's old Hebrew that was no longer current in Isaiah's day. And so it's obviously a quote from the ancient scriptures from half a millennia, at least earlier when Moses wrote. And so it's an obvious allusion to Leviticus 25 to proclaim liberty to captives. This is a line out of the Jubilee law and the opening of prison to those who are bound to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor. This too, using archaic Hebrew, alluding back to Leviticus 25, the day of vengeance of our God to comfort all who mourn. So this is one of the servant songs, excuse me, of Isaiah. We all know how beginning in Isaiah 40 and going through Isaiah 66, there are these beautiful poems about the servant of the Lord. We call them servant songs. Different scholars count them differently. Some come up with four or six or sometimes even more. Depends on your definition of the genre. I count several of them because I think we should include those that are in the first person as well as those that are spoken in the third person. Sometimes the prophet is speaking about the servant. Sometimes as in this case, the servant himself is speaking through the voice of the prophet. So this is this famous prophecy. This is the anointed servant of the Lord who's gonna come one day to proclaim liberty, to do what the Jubilee law was supposed to do even though they never fulfilled it. Isaiah, however, doesn't give us any kind of timeframe as to when to expect this to be fulfilled. If we want some kind of idea of the chronology by which this is gonna take place, we've only really got one prophet who does that for us and that is Daniel. And we're talking about Daniel nine. Now in Daniel nine, at the beginning of the chapter, we find out that Babylon has fallen and Persia has taken over and that was foreseen by the prophet Jeremiah. And so now the prophet Daniel sees that the time is ripe for God to restore all the good things of the covenant to the people of Israel. And so Daniel prays a long prayer of repentance in Daniel chapter nine, pleading with the Lord for the Lord to fulfill the good promises that he had given through Jeremiah and other prophets, promises of restoration, even though the exiled Judeans have really not expressed sufficient repentance for their sins against the covenant. Daniel nonetheless stands in the gap and repents on behalf of his people and says, look with mercy on your people even though we have not repented as we ought to have done. And the angel Gabriel is sent by God to Daniel in response to this prayer of penitence to give a kind of bad news, good news message to the prophet Daniel. The bad news to Daniel is the restoration will not happen immediately. It's going to be delayed by a factor of seven and we're gonna look at this in just a minute. The good news though is the restoration will come. You can count on it. God will send the restoration that he spoke through his prophets, but it's gonna happen again on a longer timeframe. So Gabriel said to me, Daniel recounts, oh Daniel, 70 weeks of years, that's 490 years, that's 10 Jubilee cycles, okay? Are decreed for your people and your holy city to finish the transgression, to put an end to sin, to atone for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal both vision and profit and to anoint a most holy, okay? Six things are mentioned there. If you look at them all, you'll realize all of those things were accomplished in the life and ministry of Jesus Christ. Now that last line from verse 24, it may sound a little bit awkward. It says, to anoint a most holy. Most English translations will say to anoint a most holy place, but in the Hebrew it's simply to anoint a most holy or literally to anoint a holy of holies and it's ambiguous. It could be a holy place, that would be a temple or it could be a holy person, that would be the Messiah. So which is it? Holy place or holy person? Holy place or holy person? We've got to taste great, less filling debate going on here. There's some of you old enough to remember that, old meme before there were memes. But anyway, holy place or holy person? Well, in light of the New Testament, we could say, yes, right? John 221, he spoke of the temple of his body. The most holy is going to be the temple and the Messiah in one. And Daniel leaves it ambiguous and open to that fulfillment. Okay, so there's gonna be this period of roughly 500 years and Daniel is seeing this vision or he's receiving this revelation from the angel Gabriel roughly 500 years before the birth of our Lord. And it goes on to say, from the going forth of the word to restore Jerusalem to the coming of a Messiah of Prince, there shall be seven weeks and 62 weeks. Now this is not the way most of your English versions are going to read. Most of your English versions follow the punctuation of the traditional Jewish text which is called the Masoretic text but that punctuation was not put in until the year 700 AD. If you go back to earlier witnesses to the text like all the ancient versions, the Septuagint, the Paschita which is the Syriac, the Ethiopic and the other translations that reflect more how the text was read in the very early centuries, they all read like this, seven weeks and 62 weeks. It's a kind of odd way of stating it but that's a total of 69 weeks before the Messiah comes. So you have this period of roughly 500 years and towards the end of that period, the Messiah Prince shows up and that is what Daniel is seeing. Now we've looked at Isaiah, we've looked at Daniel. Now let's look at the Dead Sea Scrolls and this is just amazing. I was telling the, with the other speakers and so on with our team lunch, you can't make this stuff up. That a document like we're about to look at was actually found in the Dead Sea Scrolls is mind blowing. Not only that, but it was one of the last discoveries made because it was found in the 11th Cave. You know how this went? There were a couple of Bedouin shepherds back in 1947 who were driving their sheep and goats down the shores of the Dead Sea. One of them threw a rock in a cave mouth, heard some shattering of pottery, realized that there were human artifacts in there, was hoping that there was gold in there. So they marked the cave mouth, came back a couple of days later and pulled out three large scrolls. What, what, what? Looking for gold. All we find is these scrolls. So they put these scrolls in a bag and they hang up on a tent pole for several weeks while they wait till they have a chance to go into Bethlehem to try to sell them for a few bucks. So here are these three old scrolls blowing in the wind to put that in perspective. Within 10 years of that discovery, the State of Israel would spend tens of millions of dollars to build a bunker-like museum where these things would be held in a climate-controlled environment. Here they are waving in the wind, blowing in the wind, as somebody once said. So after a few weeks, they went into Bethlehem. They eventually found a somewhat unscrupulous antiquities dealer who was willing to buy them even though they didn't have proof of ownership and they sold them for 25 British pounds, about 100 bucks in a US equivalent. And once that sale was made, these scrolls began to work their way up the hierarchy of political leaders and academic leaders until they reached the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and photos were sent to the dean of American Old Testament scholars who at that time was a man by the name of William Foxwell Albright at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. Albright receives this package with photos of ancient scrolls. He opens them up, he looks at those photos and with all his training and all his skill in epigraphy, he almost cannot believe what he's seeing because one of the photos is a picture of a complete copy of the book of Isaiah and the handwriting places it around 200 BC. To put that in perspective, the oldest complete copy of a book of the Old Testament that we had prior to that discovery only went back to about 8080. So one discovery jumping forward by about 1200 years. And so that was the beginning of the, that was about 1948, that was the beginning of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Missions went down to the geographical location called Qumran over the next 10 years. And they found more and more caves that had scrolls in them. Ultimately, they found a total of 11 caves. The last one obviously was the 11th cave to be found. And in this last cave found about when they were wrapping up these archeological missions around 1956 to 1958. They found a document that was a prophecy about that mysterious biblical figure Melchizedek. So this is what we have before us. They have an English translation on the screen of some of the passages from 11Q Melchizedek. Let me explain that jargon. It's actually a typo there. It's just 11Q Melchizedek, not 11Q1 Melchizedek. But what that means is Q stands for Qumran. 11 stands for the cave where it's found. So it's found in the 11th cave at Qumran. Melchizedek is the content of the document. The two there stands for the column. We don't divide these by chapters because they didn't have any chapterification in these documents. They just had columns of text. So it's a second column of text. The one stands for the first line. So we're talking about this scroll about Melchizedek found in the 11th cave. And this scroll, of course, was written by members of the Essene movement who were the Essenes. They were one of the three major sects of Judaism in the time of our Lord that the historian Josephus tells us about. The other two were the Pharisees and the Sadducees who are more familiar to us because they're mentioned by name in the gospels. The Essenes are also present in the gospels if you know what to look for, but their name is not used and so they're less familiar to us, but they were kind of a holiness group comparable in size to the others like the Sadducees and the Pharisees. They had communities all through the cities of Israel. They practiced asceticism. They practiced celibacy. They practiced monasticism. They had sacred rituals that are eerily reminiscent of the Christian sacraments and they're just a fascinating branch of ancient Judaism, but they wrote their own prophetic literature. They had their own prophets, Josephus tells us, and these prophets wrote down visions of how they expected the future to go and what they expected God to do. And this is a writing from one of their prophets and this prophet is interpreting scripture to refer to the future. And we read, concerning what scripture says, in this year of Jubilee, you shall return every one of you to your property. That's Leviticus 25, 13. And also what is written, and this is the manner of the remission. Every creditor shall remit the claim that is held against his neighbor because God's remission has been proclaimed. That's an interestingly similar law in Deuteronomy 15 that forgave debt on a seven year cycle. So this Essene prophet is combining the release law from Leviticus with a debt forgiveness law from Deuteronomy and he's gonna kind of interpret them together. And he says, the interpretation is that it applies to the last days, okay? It's an eschatological prophecy and it concerns the captives. Just as Isaiah said, to proclaim the Jubilee to the captives, Isaiah 61, see? So the Essene prophet has these release laws and he accurately sees that Isaiah is alluding to those release laws so he brings that text into it and he's gonna combine them all and derive a picture of the future based on these sacred texts, okay? To proclaim the Jubilee to the captives. Even from the inheritance of Melchizedek for they are the inheritance of Melchizedek. What? Where are we getting Melchizedek from? Where's that dude? I mean that dude gets more play time on the scriptural radio than anybody else and he only shows up for like two verses in Genesis 14. I mean holy cow, you know? Abner and Joab get more attention first and second Samuel than Melchizedek but Melchizedek gets all this theological significance. What did this guy do? Anyway, can't go into all that about why he was so important in the Jewish tradition but they're bringing in Melchizedek. Well, there is a connection to Melchizedek because if you go back to Genesis 14 and you read about when Melchizedek shows up to bless Abraham, it is just after Abraham has defeated these kidnapping Mesopotamian kings who have just taken his relative, his nephew Lot and Lot's friends and Lot's family captive and so Abraham has released the captives and then he brings them back to the Promised Land and Melchizedek shows up to bless Abraham after he's freed the captives and so that's part of the inner logic here about why Melchizedek is associated with freedom. So it goes on, even from the inheritance of Melchizedek for they are the inheritance of Melchizedek who will return them to what is rightfully theirs? So this Essene prophet is saying Melchizedek is gonna come back in the last days and he's going to restore what is owed to the righteous remnant of Israel. He will proclaim to them Jubilee, thus releasing them from the debt of all their sins. Wow, okay? So this eschatological Jubilee from Melchizedek isn't gonna be primarily about monetary debt, it's gonna be about the debt that you owe to God. It's gonna be about release from your sins. We go on now in 11 Q. Melchizedek, this ancient prophecy from the Essene movement. What is this gonna happen? Well, the Essene author continues and he says, this word, the deliverance that he's just described will thus come in the first week of the Jubilee period that follows the nine Jubilee periods, okay? So he's working with a 10 Jubilee period chronology, that's the chronology of Daniel nine. So this roughly 400 year period until the Messiah shows up and he's saying in the very last, the last 10th of that 500 year period, this Melchizedek is gonna show up. Then the day of Atonement shall follow at the end of the 10th Jubilee period. So after this whole 10 Jubilee cycle is completed, then you're gonna have the eschatological day of Atonement. Remember the Jubilee year was pronounced, was proclaimed on the day of Atonement. When he, let's talk about Melchizedek now, shall atone for all the sons of light, okay? This is a phrase that shows up in the writings of John and Paul. And when this phrase sons of light was found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, it shocked Bible scholars because some of these unusual phrases like sons of light, critical scholars like Rudolph Boltman had said, oh, that's the influence of later Greek philosophy and Neoplatonism. And so certain documents among Paul's letters and the Gospel of John can't be from the first century. They can't be from the time of Jesus because they reflect these later Neoplatonic concepts, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then we find these unassailable Jewish documents that carbon date from the time of Jesus and they're using phrases that are otherwise found only in the writings of John and Paul. And all of these documents predate the year 70, okay? I think it's the providence of God giving his people assurance of the historicity of the scriptures and that the scriptures are what they claim to be. They are writings from people that knew Jesus in the lifetime of Jesus and they reflect what we can demonstrate to be the authentic religious vocabulary of Judaism at that time. Amen? It's beautiful. So really strengthens our understanding and our appreciation of scripture. So he showed to them for all the sons of light and the people who are predestined to Melchizedek. So all of this, you know, this Melchizedekian Jubilee is going to take place after these 10 Jubilee cycles according to the chronology of Daniel. So our ancient Essene prophet has combined these Jubilee texts from Leviticus and Deuteronomy and Daniel and Isaiah and he's mixed them all up into a spirit inspired stew of vision of eschatological vision for the future but it doesn't even stop there. He goes on to describe this age of liberation that Melchizedek is going to usher in. For this is the time decreed for the year of Melchizedek's favor. See, he throws Melchizedek into a quote from Isaiah 61. So you see that he's interpreting the anointed Messiah in Isaiah 61, the servant of the Lord, as also this heavenly Melchizedek figure. So this is the time of decreed for the year of Melchizedek's favor and for his hosts together with the holy ones of God for a kingdom of judgment just as it is written concerning him in the songs of David, God has taken his place in the counsel of God in the midst of the angels he holds judgment. Now, to follow the logic there, it's a little bit tangled but if you work on that passage and see what the ancient author is saying, he is equating Melchizedek with God mentioned in Psalm 82 and that's not the only time he makes an equivalence between God and Melchizedek. We go on. Therefore, Melchizedek will thoroughly prosecute the vengeance required by God statutes. In that day, he will deliver them from the power of Belial. That's ancient name for Satan, a variant of Beelzebul. Deliver them from the power of Belial and from the power of all the spirits associated with Belial. So from Satan and all his demons, Melchizedek will save the elect of God from all of those demonic powers. So this is a jubilee that's not gonna involve the delivery from human slavery but from slavery to sin. But there's more. It is written concerning him. Okay, so now we're gonna get another quote from Isaiah and this Essim prophet's gonna interpret it with reference to Melchizedek. So it is written concerning him. Now we're talking about Melchizedek here. Who says to Zion, your God reigns. Zion in Isaiah 52-7 is the sons of righteousness. So this is the elect of Israel. This is the righteous remnant. That's what Zion means in Isaiah 52-7. The sons of righteousness who uphold the covenant and turn from walking in the way of the people. Your God is Melchizedek. Look at this. So we got this divine priestly king who's gonna usher in this jubilee age who will deliver them from the power of Belial. Concerning what scripture says, then you shall have the trumpet sounded throughout all the land of, and then our text breaks off because the worms in the cave ate the rest. But so far from exposing Leviticus 25, it goes back to working through that chapter. So amazing, amazing stuff. So all of this prepares us now. This, you know, archeologically all the scrolls were basically written between 150 BC and maybe about 65 AD, okay? And so we know right in that time period which witnessed the birth and the ministry of our Lord, right in there, this prophecy was circulating among the Essenes. Now let's look at what St. Luke tells us about Jesus' first visit to Nazareth. And let me tell you something cool about Nazareth. Just about two years ago, archeologists were digging down in Nazareth. They reached the soil level from the first century and they recognized that the Nazarenes used Essenes agricultural practices. Now you're like, what on earth, how can you tell that from the soil? Well, this is the thing. The Essenes were the only group of Jews that would not permit human excrement to be used as a fertilizer. Animal excrement was okay, not human excrement. So in most Jewish agricultural remains, if you dig down to the first century layer, you will find human excrement there because the Pharisees were okay with it, the Sadducees were okay with it, but the Essenes weren't. You dig down in Nazareth to the fields cultivated by the Nazarenes in the first century around the time of our Lord, no human excrement. What does that mean culturally? They were Essenes sympathizers, okay? In the town and out. That's probably what it means, okay? They're like, how can you figure that out? But that's the logic of it. That's how they worked that out, okay? So he comes to this, comes to Nazareth where he had been brought up, this community of Essenes sympathizers, all right? Went to the synagogue as his custom was on the Sabbath day. And he stood up to read. And there was given to him the book of the prophet Isaiah. He opened the book and found the place where it was written, the spirit of the Lord is upon me. Oh my goodness. He's gonna read that text. This is a text that's highly controversial. You don't have to be an Essenes to know what the Essenes think about this. Just like we have an idea of what Baptists believe. We have an idea of what Presbyterians believe. So even if you're not part of the Essenes movement, you hear people talking, you rub shoulders with the Essenes at the marketplace, whatnot. So you know at least one of the major groups of Jews puts a lot of stake in this passage and associates it with a whole bunch of stuff that we just read. So the spirit of Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord. And he closed the book and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. Now I never understood that growing up because in our religious experience, when the homiless sits down, that means he's done with his homily. And if you're at Daily Mass and the celebrant sits down after the reading, it means we're not gonna get a homily today, right? So Jesus sits down and all my life I enter that, that means that he's not gonna give a homily. But that's precisely wrong. That actually was a sign meaning we are going to get a homily because Jews, the Jewish rabbis preached from a chair. So when he sits down, that's a sign to the congregation, the synagogue, that in fact we're gonna get a sermon and not just a reading. So they read and it's like, wow, that's provocative to read that passage. And he sits down like, oh, he's gonna say something about this. What's he gonna say? Does he realize what the Essians think about this passage and how they think it's gonna get fulfilled? And he began to say to them, today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing. Whoa! That is epic. When you're the son of God, exit Jesus is real simple. So it's homily prep. What should I say about this? Well, maybe I'll just say, I am the fulfillment. That was about me. Makes preaching pretty simple. That's about me. You guys can't do it. This is about him. But the son of God, it's always about me. It's all about me. All right. Today the scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing. Woo! This is electrify. You know? What? Are you the divine Melchizedek? Come back to free us from the debt of sin and slavery to Satan? Well, talk is cheap. Where's your game? Whatcha got? Let's see ya ball. Well, we don't even get out of that chapter and immediately after proclaiming that, our Lord goes back down to Capernaum. In the synagogue there, there was a man who had the spirit of an unclean demon. He cried out, ah, what have you to do with us? Jesus of Nazareth, have you come to destroy us? I know who you are. The holy one of God. Jesus rebuked him and said, be silent. Come out of him. He came out of him. Having done him no harm, they were all amazed. What is this word with authority and power? He commands the unclean spirits. He's releasing people from slavery to Belial and the spirits associated with Belial just as 11 Q-Milk is next set. Well, okay. How about freedom from sin? Oh, flip the page to the next chapter. Here comes the guy down through the roof and son, your sins are forgiven. I mean, this is electrifying for the Jews that were present in Jesus' day but also for the Jews that picked up a copy of the Gospel of Luke and began to read. For any of them that were formed in a cynicism, Luke is showing them what you are expecting. The heavenly Melchizedek that you are expecting is found in the man Jesus of Nazareth, the God man, the Messiah. Well, how did Jesus make this into an age? It's great that he does that personally. How does he perpetuate that? Well, we know how Mark recalls him drawing to himself the 12 in Mark 3, 14. He appointed them to be with him and sent them out to preach and to have authority to cast out demons. The casting out demons is one of his Melchizedekian Jubileian powers that he comes to institute. And so he shares that liberating power that he has, that Jubilee power to free from Satan's slavery with the 12 so that they can continue it beyond and longer than his own ministry. And likewise in Matthew 18, at that time the disciples came to him, Jesus said, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. Be great to expand on that, but that includes the forgiveness of sins. It's even clear in John 2022, receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven. If you retain the sins of any, they are retained. My Jubilee powers to free from Satan and to forgive sin, I'm investing you with these Jubilee powers. And that is perpetuated in the church. Is any among you sick? Let him call for the presbyters of the church. Let them pray over him. The prayer of faith will save the sick man. If he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. Look at that, the forgiveness of sins through the ministry of the presbyters. And then the general principle, confess your sins to one another that you may be healed. This is the beginning, the embryo of the sacrament of reconciliation to be exercised through the presbyters. I'm gonna talk about this more on my talk on Thursday. And the confession of sins is intimately tied up with releasing people from the power of Satan. I'm gonna get into this in my talk on Thursday again. So I'm just gonna try to keep it brief this afternoon. Father Gabriel Amor, the chief exorcist of the Diocese of Rome under the pontificate of John Paul II, writes, many times I have written that Satan is more, much more enraged when we take souls away from him through confession than when we take away bodies through exorcism. So on Thursday, we're gonna talk a lot more about the connection between confession and spiritual warfare. But what did Jesus do? He met the Jewish expectation for the divine Melchizedek who would inaugurate the era of perpetual jubilee. And that is what we are living in, fathers and brothers. We are living in the era of perpetual jubilee. Amen. We live in this era of the new covenant where at any day of the year, it is possible to receive the grace of God to be forgiven of our sins and released from Satan's power through the sacrament of reconciliation and through the other sacraments as well. It is an ongoing era. It is beyond the imagination of the ancient people of Israel is so much more even than what they hoped for. And that perpetuation of the jubilee is in the sacraments. The church through its sacraments is continually pouring out liberation from sin, liberation from Satan, but we take it for granted. We should not. But we have that tendency like ancient Israel to reject the freedom that God offers us and go back to slavery. We resist the working of the spirit. But Paul says where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. Peter talks about those who reject the spirit though and says they themselves are slaves of corruption for what over overcomes a man to that he is enslaved. And we are living in a culture of willing slaves, those who reject the freedom of God that they offer. And what we're praying for is the power of the Holy Spirit to unleash the blinders that keep people bound to their self-chosen slavery so that they can accept the freedom that comes to them through the grace of God. This is what we're gonna close with. St. Paul, brethren, we are debtors. Look at this is a jubilee concept here. We're debtors like the debt slaves the indentured servants of ancient Israel. But not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh. For if you live according to the flesh, you will die. But if by the spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. The spirit working in us puts to death those attachments that form a slavery and a bondage between us and created things so that we can be released to love the Creator and have no other love in our heart greater than that for the Creator Himself. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery. That's everything that is not jubilee to fall back into fear. But you have received the spirit of sonship, freedom and sonship. Remember how the jubilee was oriented towards family restoration. And the divine mill Kizadek has come back to restore us to the family of God and give us the status of sons of God. Let's go to him now in prayer in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, amen. Heavenly Father, we thank you for the work and the ministry of your Lord, of our Lord, your Son, Jesus Christ, who lived and walked among us in demonstrated divine power who was and is God with us. We thank you for these ancient prophecies. We thank you for the beauty of the gospel of Luke. We thank you that we continue to live in that reality even today. He's not ancient religious stories, defunct mythological texts, living reality, more real than the sunshine and the grass and the earth beneath our feet. The ministry of the Holy Spirit, more real than all of these things. Lord, we can't even bear the reality of all this. But thank you for ushering us into it and help us to be ministers of the era of Jubilee that you have brought with the new covenant. We ask all this through Jesus Christ our Lord in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, amen.