 Well, this is my 28th. I don't know that I've been here every year in the 28 years, but I've been coming here for 28 years. Since my, actually I was just converting when I came here the first time. Never dreamed in a million years I'd ever speak here. And that's great honor to be here. This is a very August group. I just want that it's a very special honor to speak at a Steubenville conference. And so I want to thank Dr. Han for inviting me and the whole team. And I'm very, very happy to be here. I do have notes today. I don't like to use notes when I don't have to, but this was a massive topic. And I want to make sure I do it right. So I do have notes. So you have bear with me. But this is a massive topic. And when they called and said would you, the theme is going to be jubilee. Would you be willing to do that? I said sure. And then I got looking at it. And the word jubilee is in the Bible only 21 times and always in the book of Leviticus, except once it's in the book of numbers. But it's all in Leviticus. Leviticus is that book that when you start the New Year's resolutions at the beginning of the year, you start with Genesis, you know, great stories. And you get into Exodus and it's delivery from Egypt. And then you get into Leviticus and you bog right down and you quit. And you say, well, I'll try again next year. So I'm looking here. You know, all the references to the English word jubilee are in the book of Leviticus. So all I'm going to do today is go through that chapter and no, I'm just kidding. So being the theme of the conference, I'm very honored that I got to explain the jubilee. So what is it? Some kind of a celebration where you're to be jubilant? Well, it is in a way. First, I'm going to give you four definitions from the English dictionary. First of all, and this is the one we're going to touch on the most tonight. It's a period of emancipation and freedom and restoration in the Hebrew law. So that's the first one. Period of emancipation in Hebrew law. Second one, it's a special anniversary, usually a 50th anniversary. My wife and I will celebrate that in four and a half years. A special year of solemnity in the Catholic church, a year of jubilee, which is usually every 25 years. And the next one coming up is 2025. So that's the third. And the fourth one is jubilee issues just in general of any season of celebration. So that's the English definition, but the English word is never found in, I mean, the English word jubilee is found in the Bible, but it's not found in the Hebrew. In the Hebrew, it's something quite different. In Hebrew, the word jubilee is yobel. And that word is used 27 times in the Bible, 20 of them in the book of Leviticus. So the word jubilee, the English word, when you look it up in Hebrew is yobel. And the word comes from this. Didn't he do great? Thank you, Andre. You gotta give him, he deserves the applause because I just brought the shofar yobel and gave it to him yesterday and said, could you do this? He said, I'll try. So thank you very much. You did great. This is a yobel. This is a ram's horn. And this is where the word jubilee comes from. Let me explain. Jubilee, the word jubilee is literally yobel in Hebrew and yobel means ram. So all it means. You read the Bible in Leviticus and it said jubilee. The Hebrews, when they're reading it says, we're celebrating the ram. That's the word. That's where it comes from. So I'm gonna give you the four definitions where it comes from. It is a mature animal, a sheep where it has a sizable horn. This one, by the way, you can't play this one because this is one that just got ripped right off the ram. There's no place to blow in this one. This is just a raw shofar yobel. This is the raw one. A bony outgrowth from an animal and a polished one that's made into a, this is what the rabbis play. When you're in Israel, you hear this, especially on the Mondays and Thursdays when they have their bar mitzvahs at the western wall, you hear these things blowing all the time. But we'll learn more about that as we go along. So it's a, so the beginning, this also means not just the horn, but it means it's the beginning of a 50 year cycle, the year of jubilee, which we'll discuss in a minute. So there's two Hebrew words for the ram's horn, which you just heard. They're referred to, you hear them in the Bible as trumpets. But you know, we really have in English, reading the Bible, we have a great disadvantage because we read trumpet and we think that's kind of like the marching band on the 4th of July, these brass trumpets. It's not at all what it's talking about. When the Bible refers to a trumpet, especially in the Old Testament, it's referring to what you just heard today. So it's the Hebrew words are yobel and shofar. Shofar is the word you usually hear. Sometimes they're used as synonyms in the same Bible verse. For example, the walls of Jericho, listen to this. When they make a long blast with the ram's horn, the yobel and Hebrew, when you hear the sound of the trumpet, the shofar, the synonyms, then all the people shall shout a great shout and the walls came a tumbling down Jericho. Another interesting use of the two words together is in Mount Sinai. Listen to this. On the third day, the Lord will come down on Mount Sinai in the sight of all the people. When the trumpet, the yobel, sounds a long blast, the people shall come up to the mountain. There was thunder and lightning and a thick cloud on the mountain and a very loud trumpet blast, shofar. So that all the people in the camp trembled, then Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet God. Mount Sinai was wrapped in smoke because the Lord descended in fire. The whole mountain trembled greatly and the sound of the trumpet, the shofar and Hebrew, grew louder and louder and louder and the Lord came down on Mount Sinai. You heard a loud blast on that shofar, but can you imagine with God blowing that thing in Mount Sinai? It was already terrifying, fire comes down, the mountain is shaking and then you hear this ram's horn coming from heaven, reverberating through the valleys and around the mountain and those people were so afraid, by the way, that they ran and hid and they said when Moses came down, don't you ever let God speak to us again. From now on, you go talk to God and you come back and tell us what he says. And that trumpet blast must have been a terrifying sound on the ram's horn echoing through the canyons around Mount Sinai. So why is the word Jubilee in the English, actually the Hebrew word Yobel for ram's horn? How did that happen? Why call the celebration a Yobel, a ram? Well, that brings us to Leviticus chapter 25. In the 50th year, on the day of atonement, the Jubilee, the Yobel, arrives with a Yobel blast, a clarion call of the ram's horn. To help us understand how it is, let me ask you this, where do we get the word mass? After the two talks this morning, we're gonna have mass, where do we get that mass, the word mass? It comes at the end, it comes from the end of the liturgy, the very last thing when the priest or deacon says, itte misse est, misse. Let us go, it's the dismissal. The whole liturgy is called mass because of that one little Latin phrase, itte misse est, mass. That's where it comes from. And likewise, the celebration of the Jubilee gets its name from something also, the blast of the ram's horn. That's why it's called the ram. It's repeated 14 times in Leviticus chapter 25 alone. The ram, the Yobel. And repeated with emphasis, the importance of the joy that was supposed to come with the Jubilee. The Jews never did the Jubilee, they never practiced what God told them to do. But it was supposed to be a great moment. And in the book of Jubilee, in Leviticus 25, 14 times alone, it's like then you read that chapter, it's going, it's the Jubilee. It's the Jubilee, it's the Jubilee. They wanna emphasize it over and over again. This is the most amazing event. Everybody's gonna go free, there's gonna be release and it's supposed to be emphasized. Leviticus 25 verse eight, I'm gonna read a few verses and you'll see the repetition and the excitement even that's in Moses' voice as he's explaining it. You shall count seven weeks of years, seven times seven years so that the time of the seven weeks of years shall give you 49 years. You've all got that, right? That's how often you're supposed to do it. So now that you've got that straight. No, I know that's as clear as mud. But literally it means seven times seven years every 70, every 49 years or it was to be taken place on the 50th year. That's why Jubilee is the 50th year. In short the Jubilee was to take place every 49 years which is multiples of seven, which is a sacred number. Leviticus 25, nine. Then you shall sound the loud trumpet which you already know what the trumpet is on the 10th day of the month, on the day of atonement. That's when the Jubilee was to start a whole year that it was going to be a day, a year of rest and it was to start on the day of atonement. That's Yom Kippur. If you're in Israel you always have to plan trips around Yom Kippur because if you go there in Yom Kippur all the streets are blocked. It's the day of atonement, it's the day of repentance and they enforce it even by law. You can't drive anywhere, the streets are blocked. So you have to take the day off and the Jews all go to the wall or to the synagogues and they repent and they pray and they have God's forgiving of sins. And what a great day to start the Jubilee is the day of atonement. So that is on the day that the atonement, the Yom Kippur, it's a day of release from sin and to inaugurate a full release of land and slaves. You shall sound the trumpet throughout your whole land. Loud like the trumpet of Sinai. You know how you have, and I don't know if you do in your neighborhood, but on a lot of the street corners they have these sirens, emergency sirens. And a lot of times they blast them on Saturday at noon and they send you an email or something saying, don't be worried at noon on Saturday, we're gonna test the system. I don't know if you do, but I know a lot of places where I've lived. So you hear all of a sudden it's new. And then you hear it down the road and pretty, it's a very scary kind of awesome sound of these sirens going off all and you can hear them in the distance. But just imagine on the day of Jubilee it was like that. They were to sound the trumpet throughout the land, throughout the whole land. The horns, just imagine these horns blasted on top all the way through the villages and the towns and the fields all the way across the land of Israel. It would have been something to hear. All of those trumpet blasts going off at the same time announcing the day of atonement, the day of forgiveness of sins and the beginning of the 50th year, the beginning of the Jubilee. It says, and you shall consecrate the 50th year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a Jubilee for you when each of you shall return to his property and each of you shall return to his clan. During the time, every time in the land of Israel, like anywhere else, you sell your property, maybe you run out of money and you need to sell the back 40 acres and you sell it and then you've lost it, right? But at the year of Jubilee, everything that used to belong to your family or your tribe, Ruben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Gad, Asher, Issa, Karzeb, Elin, Joseph, all the tribes, all of that land would go back to their original tribes. So it would be like starting over again. All the debts would be forgiven. All the slaves would be set free. All the land would go back to their original owners so that all the return of the property, it's a great year of Jubilee in release. On the 50th year, it shall be a Jubilee. It's repeating over and over again. You shall neither sow nor reap in your fields nor gather grapes from the vine. For it's a Jubilee is the next verse in it, you shall be holy to the Lord and you may eat the produce of the land. In this year, the Jubilee for each of you you shall return to your property. The year of Jubilee began with the day of repentance, the day of atonement. It centered in release. It involved restoration. It brought about reunion. It provided rest. It meant relying on God. It required the remitting of all debts and it was a time of rejoicing. Now we know what the big 50 year Jubilee is but let's back up a minute because there are two other smaller Jubilees that I wanna mention. More frequent Jubilees. So the three Jubilees are these. There's one, the first is the Sabbath. That's a Jubilee of sorts because you work six days and then the seventh day you are released from work. You are free at that day. The seventh day of the week is for worship, rest and freedom. It's the shortest and most frequent of the Jubilees that God gave us people and there was no plowing, no reaping, no working on that day and we'll see why that was the case in the moment. Even God rested on the seventh day and that word rest means that he ceased from his labor. It doesn't mean he was tired. God's gonna take a nap now. He did a lot of hard work. No, it means that he ceased from his labor. Exactly what we're supposed to do on the Sabbath is cease our labor and rest. Second Sabbath is every seven years the Israelites were to have a Jubilee year for the land. The land lies fallow. You can't plow or reap or harvest for a whole year. Can you imagine? You have to work really hard for the first six years because the seventh year you're not allowed to plow the land, harvest anything so you have to save up enough to survive during that seventh year. But then again, it's even worse because then you can start planting again after the seventh year but you're not gonna get your crop again till the end of that year so it's really two years. So during that time, no labor on the land. Jewish slaves were freed after six years if somebody back in those days if somebody got bad into bad debt, you could buy that brother Israelite but on the seventh year you had to set him free. But if you were do other slaves were freed every year of Jubilee, every 50th year. The big Jubilee, the seven times seven weeks slaves were freed, debts were canceled the land lay fallow forfeited land was returned to its original clan and owner. One word is repeated over and over again with all of these Jubilees and that's the word release. Release slaves, release debts, release the land. Quite simply, the 50 year Jubilee was the year of release. All three actually were release and rest. The Israelites were to remember the freedom God had given them especially from Egypt. Just a side note, 50 years. How long his row versus wade terrorized our country? 49, 50 years. Do you realize that 50 years ago I just graduated from high school in 1973? I didn't even know what abortion was back then. And we've just been released after 50 years from the wickedness on a national level. This year we celebrate the 50 year Jubilee of release from the national scourge. Now we start the new battle in 50 states. But at least it's no longer a national rule and hanging over us all. It's now we fight it on the state level but what a beautiful thing I could not believe row versus wade. I could because we've been praying for it but isn't it amazing it's on the 50th year of the Jubilee? Now I'm gonna give you a sneak peek, a little spoiler. Ultimately Jesus is the ultimate Jubilee. He brings the favorable year of the Lord. Ultimately all these days of rest, the Sabbath, the seventh day, the seventh year and the 50th year. All of these point towards Christ. Our whole Christian life is a Jubilee by the way. Freedom, joy, fulfillment, release that all that binds including sin and slavery to the world. The flesh and the devil, all of this is found in Christ. He is the ultimate response to all of the Jubilees of the Old Testament. Not just in the spiritual realm either but in all of our human existence. St. Ignatius who has just recently made a doctor of the church. He's one of the guys that made me Catholic. He said the glory of God is man fully alive, fully free, fully functioning the way God wants him to be and that's exactly what Christ brings us, the Jubilee to live fully as human beings in all aspects of our humanity. Not just our prayer life but in everything that we do. How do we become spiritual? You know Mary changed dirty diapers and you could think well Mary should have been praying. Changing diapers isn't so spiritual. Why would the holy family spend 30 silent years in a cave changing diapers and hauling water around because they were teaching us what it meant to be fully alive, what it meant to be a family and what it meant to be spiritual is to be doing what God wants you to do at any moment in life and to be fully alive in Christ. Not bound by sin and slavery to the flesh and the devil but to be fully alive in Christ. God in all of his works are a Jubilee, a celebration of freedom, joy, love and release from any bondage. That's what the Christian life is to be a Jubilee. In fact there are two ways to spell Jubilee. J-U-B-I-L-E-E or you could also spell it J-E-S-U-S. You could say the Jubilee brings about jubilation. Where do you think you get the word jubilation? From the jubilee which is joyous, rejoicing and expressing great joy. But I wanna go back to creation. I'm gonna hop around a little bit but I wanna go back to creation because the Jubilee started even before creation. Before the creation of the earth, the Jubilee started. Why did God create us? I was thinking about this the other day and it was lovely. Why did God create you? The three members of the Trinity love each other long before they created us. They had so much fun together. They loved to laugh together. They made us in their image so what we do it reflects them. We laugh and we have a good time and we communicate and we love. And the Holy Spirit and the Father and the Son do that too. They love each other and they have so much fun it just kinda bubbled over. It was just like buzzing in the heaven and the Trinity and the life of the Trinity. They said this is so much fun. We've gotta create beings in our image so we could share it with them. That's why you were created. It overflowed and God has a secret and he's bringing you in on his secret. Do you know what a secret is? He wants to share it with us. What is the secret? The secret is the very reason you were created. God's special secret in among the Trinity is the very reason you were created. The Catechism says in 221 by sending his only son and the spirit of love in the fullness of time God has revealed his innermost secret. God himself, this is the secret. God himself is an eternal exchange of love. Those three love each other so much. It's a constant exchange of bubbling, bubbling, overflowing love. Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And because of that love, he has destined us to share in the exchange. That's why you were created to share in the exchange of love between the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit. That's the great secret of the whole universe that God wanted to share his love and happiness and joy and laughter and all the fun that Trinity has together through all eternity. They said, let's make these people right here and they can share it with us. It's too exciting to keep to ourselves and they created you to share it with them. Let us make man in our image to share all of this, enjoy it and to enjoy it. That's why he created you. He didn't create you to smack you down and send you to hell. He didn't want you to feel guilty and sad all the time. He created you to share in his secret, his love. You should experience jubilation even hearing those words. You think you're not important. You think you're not loved by God. Think of the whole reason he created us is because he loves you so much. The Garden of Eden, after the original creation, the Garden of Eden was a perpetual jubilee. Walking with God in the cool of the evening. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine what it would be like to have no sin to be beautiful and naked in the innocence, walking through the garden together and every evening God's gonna come through the trees and you're gonna commune with him and he's gonna talk with you and share his life with you in the garden. But sin brought an end to all of that. Disobedience did. Adam and Eve and all of mankind are now overshadowed by a bondage to sin and death. I just finished writing a commentary on Genesis that's gonna get published by Ignatius Press next year. And I just was, when I was reading that, when God says you're gonna go back to dust, can you imagine the terror in Adam's eyes and what do you mean I'm going back to dust? The dust that I took you from. I formed you and shaped you but when you get older now you're going to die and go right back into that dust. Can you imagine the terror that Adam felt when he heard those words? All of mankind is under bondage to sin and death. Even nature groans under the burden of the sin that Adam and Eve brought. And life took on a new thing, not of liberty and joy and walking with God in the garden. Now it was two words, toil and death. In other words, life is tough and then you die. But there was a solution in the works because God doesn't like that side of it. He still wants to have us enjoy his presence in the life and the joy and love of the Trinity. So already there was a jubilant solution in the works. The Gospel of Joy and Hope, which is the title of this conference. The Gospel of Joy and Hope was promised first in the garden in Genesis 315 where there was a promise of a woman and her son. But back to creation. Even after creation, God rested. He ceased his labors for seven days. This pointed forward to the jubilee of the Sabbath. This was really, the Sabbath was really something that was enforced later with Moses. But the day that God rested, he ceased from his labor. It pointed forward to the jubilee of the Sabbath that we know in the law of Moses. The Sabbath was not just for Israel either by the way. It's also for us Gentiles. And we'll see that in a minute. We see the importance of the Sabbath during the 400 years of bondage. That's really where we begin to see the Sabbath and the importance of it when they were slaves in Egypt. The people, can you imagine slavery in Egypt? Every single day you work, there's no day off. You're working all the time. The people cried for release. God, you gave this land over on the other side to Abraham. We haven't seen it for 400 years. What kind of a God are you to promise these things and not give them to us? We've been in labor and in slavery here every single day for 400 years. When are you gonna free us and emancipate us? The Pharaoh, he was a cruel task master. They worked seven days a week every single day from sun up to sun down. There was no time for God. There was no time to worship. There was no time for family. There was no time to relax. Every day, every waking hour. Work, work, work as a slave. Work, work. And the lash of the word kept you going every day and you never had the anticipation even of a day off. You know when you're going through a long period of work and trouble you're always looking forward. I'm gonna have a vacation coming. We're gonna have a week off. They never had that for 400 years. Never a day off. No anticipation of freedom. No time to love your wife and your children to educate them because it was work, work, work every single day. Can you imagine the beauty of being freed from that slavery and going across the Red Sea and looking back and watching all the Egyptian soldiers drowned? That had to be very delightful. I was arrested once in Egypt and I kind of understand how they felt. And making my movie on Moses I wanted to have a burning bush. So my wife and I, I got a gallon of gas and with our filming crew we went out to Mount. I haven't even told you yet. What are you laughing for? And we went out by Mount Sinai. I went way on the other side and I poured the gas and I said to my wife at the right lines when I say these lines, light the match and the crew or the cameras are all set up and the gas, the fire was shoot through the sand and the bush went up in fire. It was beautiful. But as soon as I did this, we're in the middle of nowhere. A white Jeep comes tearing across the desert and they arrest me for burning a protected bush. This is what they do if they see Americans. They make new laws. I said, there's no signs. New law, new law yet because I'm an American and you want my money. So they took me to jail and it took me a whole half a day to negotiating with these Egyptians in their jail to get out. And when I left, I felt just like the children of Israel leaving. I was glad to get out of there. But by the way, we went a little further out, got another gallon of gas. And if you watch the Moses movie, you'll see the fire. But this time I didn't get arrested. God is now their taskmaster. They have left Pharaoh as their taskmaster and now they have a new one. And he's God and he's a good one though. His yoke is easy and his burden is light. God forced them. God is a taskmaster too. God forced them. He bound them to take a day off. That was God's forcing. What did God force them to do? Take a day off. I'm going to enforce it. You have to have a day off. Can you imagine after 400 years of bondage and slavery of never having a day off, all of a sudden to hear God say, I am going to force you. In fact, I am binding you and forcing you to take a day off so you can be with your family. God called it the Sabbath rest just like he had had his day off of labor. And imagine hearing this after 400 years of grueling, backbreaking slavery from sun up to sun down where you just crash on your mat at night and you'd be jerked awake in the morning and go right back to it again and never a hope of any freedom. And you hear this Exodus chapter 20 verse 8. Moses says, remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all of your work. But the seventh day is a Sabbath, a rest to the Lord your God. Can you imagine hearing those words after 400 years? On the Sabbath, you shall not, I command you, on the Sabbath you shall not do any work. Neither you nor your son nor your daughter, your male servant, not even your female servant, even your animals are not allowed to work. Or the sojourner who is within your gates. Why was Jesus always so angry at the Pharisees, the scribes and the Pharisees? They twisted the Sabbath. They turned it into the opposite of what God wanted it to be. The Sabbath rest to us to be for a joyous worship once a week, you'd have it all, freedom and fun, rest and family. But the Pharisees put the poor laborers, the common folks into an impossible bondage. Poor doesn't mean like what we mean poor here today in the United States. I think we use that word way too freely here in the United States. People have welfare and everything else but poor back in the old days meant that you were really poor. You had nothing. Poor, it was when people worked the land and they had hard workers like carpenters, Jesus and Joseph are probably stone masons. They worked 12 hours a day but they had the Sabbath off. But it meant the people who worked the land all day from sun up to sun down. It was very low pay and little time. How did they have any opportunity to know all of the rules that they were supposed to obey? How did they know all the intricate impossible requirements and regulations that the Pharisees imposed? The Jews have calculated that when you read Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, there are 613 laws of Moses. 613 laws that were required to be. When you see the Jews with their prayer shawls at the Western Wall, you see all those little tassels. The number of strings and knots together combined our 613 to remind them to obey the law. I asked one time, do you obey all those laws? He says, no, we can't. I said, why? Because he said, we don't have the temple. I said, well, why don't you have the temple? He said, because we're stubborn and stiff-necked people. I said, when will God give you the temple back? When we stop being a stubborn and stiff-necked people. But they wear those tassels on their prayer shawls because they total a number of 613 to remember them that before God they have all these laws to obey. But the Pharisees, they piled and heaped on mountains of other rules and regulations. And this is what Jesus and them always clashed about. They piled mountains of these on people. In fact, Jesus says in Matthew 23, Jesus scolded them. He said, the Pharisees tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear and they lay them on people's shoulders and they themselves will not even move them with a finger. You serpents, you brood of vipers, how are you to escape being sentenced to hell? Was Jesus nice? No, but he was loving and honest. Don't ever confuse nice with love. Jesus was not nice, but he was loving and he was honest. This was very serious business. No one has a right to take away the jubilee, the Sabbath, the freedom that God gave you. And the Pharisees, they were as bad as the Pharaoh, even worse because they bound their people with all of these burdens all the time. Even on the seventh day, they put so many burdens on them, you could only walk a short distance, you couldn't do this. Even today in Israel, if you go to a hotel, it's called a Sabbath day elevator. You can't push a button to go up on an elevator because pushing a button is work. So they have an elevator where you just have to wait. It comes onto the first floor, you get in, it goes to the second floor, you wait, it opens, then it goes to the third floor. If you're on the 17th floor, it takes you an hour to get to your room, but you don't have to push a button. It does it all automatically. There's all of these rules. Even today, the Jews have all these sabbatical rules. And Jesus was always fighting with them over that because these rules, 613 laws of Moses, and then you heap a whole pile of other regulations and traditions and things on top of that. And Jesus was furious for them because he said, I am the Lord of the Sabbath. What was supposed to be a day of joy and worship and relaxation and fun? And the rabbis even said it was a day to romance your wife. So guys, remember that on Sunday, that all of the things you're supposed to do, family and fun and God and relaxation and a walk in the woods and romance your wife. The next time you read the gospel, notice that how often it is when Jesus is debating with the Pharisees and the scribes and these religious people that it's because of the Sabbath. You can't eat that, pick that wheat off the chill and eat it like that. Who told you you could do that? You healed a man on the Sabbath. Jesus said to them, you, there's two rules, there's two laws. One is that you have to circumcise on the eighth day. The other one is that you cannot do any work on the seventh day. So what happens if a baby gets eight days old on the Sabbath, what are you gonna do? Which law trumps the other? Are you gonna circumcise the baby which is doing a work or are you not gonna circumcise? The circumcision trumped the day of rest. So if it's the eighth day, even if it's on the Sabbath, you have to circumcise the baby. And they said to Jesus, you can't heal on the Sabbath. And he says, why not? You make a man less than whole on the Sabbath by cutting off his foreskin. Why can't I make a man whole on the Sabbath? He was a good debater. It helped that he was God, but he was still good. He was always opposing the Pharisees because they twisted the Sabbath into an ugly monstrous thing which they had created themselves. Jesus said, I am the Lord of the Sabbath and the Sabbath was made for man and not man to be crushed by the Sabbath. It was turned into exactly the opposite of what God wanted to be. So how does this apply to us? This whole idea of the Sabbath, the seventh day of rest, the Jubilee every Sunday. We are also bound by God's laws. He is also our task master, but he's a good one. Even his laws on the Sabbath and Sunday, they bind us. But we are bound to take a day off. Oh, poor us. Mass is a Jubilee. You are bound to go. You are bound to receive joy and freedom and a taste of heaven and the Eucharist and the medicine of immortality, the very life of God, the source and summit of our faith and the pinnacle of the week. You're forced to do that. Doesn't that sound horrible? I'm gonna force you to go out and have a steak dinner. Mass is a Jubilee. Sins are forgiven. Everything is forgotten. We've been fed, exhorted, encouraged, and we depart released from everything that binds us to enjoy a day with our family, our friends, to relax, to have a beer. When I was an anti-Catholic, that was 28 years ago. I was for 39 years. Now I've been a Catholic for 28. When I was an anti-Catholic, I accused the Catholic Church of being like Pharisees, making all of these rules that bind the Catholics, especially the Sunday rules. But listen to how foolish I was. Here are the actual rules that the Catholic Church imposes. 2193 in the Catechism. On Sundays and other holy days of obligation, the faithful are bound to abstain from their labors and business concerns, which impede the worship to be rendered to God. The joy which is proper to the Lord's day, to the proper relaxation of mind and body. The Catechism talks about it. You need relaxation. God knows you do. So he institutes Sunday the day of rest and he binds you to take the day off and relax and have a beer. Can you believe this? This is amazing. It's enshrined in canon law. Paragraph, canon law 1247. All the rules and the regulations of scripture and the church are not to bind us to slavery but to deliver us, to release us and give us true freedom. What delicious play on words. I love the word bounded as it's being used here. Sin in the garden bound man to sin and death. The pharaohs bound the Israelites with slavery. The Pharisees bound heavy loads and put them on the shoulders. What a wonderful play of words because now you are bound not to be bound. Think of that, you are bound not to be bound. We're being forced to be free. God wants to save us and to give us time to rest and enjoy his creation. There's a beautiful word only used twice in the New Testament. It's in Romans chapter one verse 20 and it's the word poema in Greek. And that one word poema is translated five words in English that which has been made. It says that you can understand a lot about God as infinity and his power by that which has been made, meaning the word poema. What English word do you think we get from poema? You can understand and know a lot about God by reading his poem, the creation. The second time it's used of the church by the way it says that we are his poema. The creation of God he said was very good. When he created it's very good and that does not change. That has not changed, it's under bondage but it's still very good. And we are expected on the Sabbath day to love and enjoy and appreciate his creation as much as he does. Artists and poets love to create. They love to share. Artists don't wanna paint an art and put it in his attic. What does he wanna do? Put it on display. That's why they have all these big art fairs. Artists and poets and musicians like these guys, they wanna display and share what they do, their creations and God is not any different. We're in his image. That's why we have that desire. God is also a creator, a poet, and he loves to create and to share it with us. Just think of the hummingbird. Bird watching's always been one of my hobbies. Do you know that little tiny bird can, his wings flap 70 times a second? He could fly backwards and up and down. There's a lot, I could go on for an hour about the hummingbird. I'm not going to, but God would do it because God creates the hummingbird and don't think that he doesn't get tremendous pleasure watching that little thing buzz around. He loves his creation, butterflies with all of those cells, those colors. Think that God doesn't watch them and enjoy them. When it says the trees and the nature all praise God, what is it? It means they're doing what they do best. They're doing exactly what God created them to do and they're bringing great joy to their creator. He said, it's very good. I like what I made. And I wanna share it with my people that I made in my image and I want them to enjoy it too because they're like me. They enjoy art and music and nature and I want them to have time and freedom to do it. Even you know the Mariana Trench is in the Pacific Ocean. It is so deep that at one point if you put the Mount Everest in the Mariana Trench, Mount Everest would still be a mile underwater. And there are living creatures down there that we haven't even discovered yet but God knows them and he watches them and he delights in them. And he loves it. I think when we are discovering and exploring and walking through the woods and learning, teaching our children, this is one of our great joys, is teaching our kids and our grandkids all the different trees and the birds and the butterflies. And we're enjoying God's creation with him. That's why he gave us this great poem, the creation so that we could enjoy his creation with him. Every artist wants to do that. He invites us, rather he forces us to take the time to do it. So if you're still spending your Sundays working or doing other things other than what God wants us to do, change, obey him, follow the taskmaster. I wanna step back to the Old Testament now to get back to the Jubilee. Many Catholics don't like the Old Testament so much because it's about this thick. The New Testament's only this thick. You know, the Old Testament's about this thick. And it's like as if they had the food out here for you and they have some left over this year and they put it away for next conference. And so when you come to the next conference, next summer, I hope you all do, they have over here all the food that was left over and over here's all the new food that still has steam coming up. At which table are you gonna go to the old food or the new food? You're gonna go to the new food. Why would you want the old when there's the new? And that's the way Catholics think about the Old Testament. Why would I wanna waste my time with that big, thick, old one with all these names I can't even pronounce when there's the new and it's new. And it talks about Jesus. But that's not the way you have to think about the Old Testament. The Old Testament is foundational. Without that, you don't have a New Testament. Without the foundation of this building and the whole campus, you don't have buildings. The Old Testament is the foundation. The New Testament is the fulfillment. You can't even understand the mass without going back and understanding the foundation, the Old Testament. And walking on the road to Emmaus, Jesus talked to Cleopas and his companion. Remember Luke 24, and he said, Jesus said to them, oh foolish ones, slow of heart to believe that all the prophets have spoken from the beginning with all the Moses, the prophets, he interpreted to them all of the scriptures, how they concerned him. All of the prophets and the Old Testament, Moses and the prophets, he's interpreting that and explaining how it is all about him. Come on Luke, why didn't you record that? Wouldn't you have loved to heard that homily of Jesus along the way explaining all the passages about him? I'd have given anything to be at that Bible study. But I see Jesus as like the conductor between the Old and the New Testaments. The Old Testament throws up a theme. And then Jesus is the conductor in the middle between the two, and he throws that theme over to the New Testament. And the New Testament, the woodwinds and the bassoons and the flutes all take off and they develop the theme. So say for example, water baptism. They go through the Red Sea with a cloud above. That's water baptism. And that theme comes up and then Jesus goes over here and whoop, the New Testament talks all about being born again by water and spirit and regent. And Jesus is the conductor between the two. And so I wanna go back to a passage in the Old Testament that is referring to Jesus, although they may not have known it at the time, but it was and it's now when you look and Jesus is in the middle between the two, you hear this and it comes up and all of a sudden you see in the New Testament, aha, it's developed. And the theme is beautifully developed and the woodwinds and all are going and developing that beautiful theme. Remember I said you could spell jubilee, J-E-S-U-S. So I'm gonna look at a very important passage from the great prophet Isaiah. At this point it's not Jesus saying these words. He will in a minute, but right now it's 700 years earlier and Isaiah says in verse six, the spirit of the Lord is upon me because the Lord has appointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind the brokenhearted to proclaim the year of captives, the liberty of captives and the opening of prisons, ding, ding, ding. This is the jubilee, you can already hear it coming. He said coming to proclaim the spirit of the Lord and to proclaim liberty to the captives and the opening of prison to those who are bound to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor, that's the jubilee. And to comfort all who mourn. That is certainly a prophecy of the coming Messiah and even today the Jews believe Isaiah 61. We believe the Messiah has come and already brought that and is fulfilling it through Jesus Christ. The Jews don't accept Jesus as their Messiah so they say that prophecy in Isaiah 61 is still to take place when the Messiah comes all of these things will be done and there will be release of the captives and so on. But now let's get in a time machine from the time of Isaiah and go forward 700 years. Now we're at the time of Christ 700 years later and those words are going to come back. In Luke chapter four we read them again. Jesus came to Nazareth where he had been brought up and as was his custom he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day and he stood up to read and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him and he unrolled the scroll. I love this because you know we flip pages in a book but can you imagine finding a verse and a scroll and there's no chapters or verses. The book of Hebrews three times says, quoting the Old Testament, the writer of Hebrews says, and somewhere in the Old Testament it says. And the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him and he unrolled the scroll and found the place finally after 10 minutes where it was written. The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor, he has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering the sight to the blind set, liberty those who are oppressed to proclaim the favorable year of the Lord. Jesus read those words. This is a messianic prophecy. It's bigger than the Jubilee of the Old Testament. What was looked forward to then is now happening. Jesus is bigger than the Jubilee. He is the ultimate Messiah and the word Christ means Messiah so when you say you're a Christian you're saying I am a follower of the Jewish Messiah. This is the Jewish, this is the Jubilee but even bigger. And as Jesus rolled up the scroll and gave it back to the attendant he sat down. Jews always taught sitting down. If I was Jewish or were Jewish I'd be sitting to talk because it represents the authority, the chair of Moses. So he gave it back to the attendants and he sat down and all the eyes in the synagogue were fixed on him. They all knew him by the way. He's Jesus the carpenter, the son of Joseph who has died recently. He's the guy that comes home from work every day with camel dung between his toes. Calluses on his hands and flies buzzing around his head. We know this Yeshua. He's been here for 30 years. He's all sun beaten and burned from working outside all the time. And now they're all looking at him in this little village. They all know him and he said to them, today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing. And they said, is this not Joseph's son? When they heard these things all in the synagogue were filled with rage and they rose up and drove him out of town to the brow of the hill so that they could throw him down the cliff and kill him. Jesus had just proclaimed himself to be the Messiah and the fulfillment of Isaiah's prophecy and especially about the Jubilee. And this was intolerable. They knew him, he was like in John six. I am the bread which came down from heaven. What? Show us your hands. Your hands are all covered with calluses and scars from working with stone. What do you mean you just came down from heaven? We know who you are. And they were angry with him and they tried to kill him. But would you have said if you were there? Would you have said, oh yes, swatting the flies away from him? Oh yes, of course he's the Messiah. He's God incarnate. See, we have the advantage of hindsight and revelation. We can be Monday morning quarterbacks but the average poor worker back then was perplexed. We know him for 30 years, he's lived here. What does he mean it's been fulfilled? Who does he think he is? But he is God and he is the Messiah and he is bigger than the Jubilee. This really is the favorable year of the Lord. He has come not just to rectify social injustices and oppression. I went to the Oberammergau play a month ago and I'm taking another group in a week. And in that Oberammergau play the director said, we had to after 100 years rewrite the script for a modern world. We knew we needed to remove the religious and bring the social issues to the front. And Jesus in that play is a social justice warrior. He's a Marxist, he's a socialist. He's never referred to as a son of the father or coming to save from sins. Jesus did not come to rectify social injustices. He's not a social justice warrior though he is but that's not why he came. He didn't come to overthrow the Romans even in the book of Acts when he's going up into heaven. They said, is it now time that we're going to restore Israel? In other words, where's your white horse and sword? He was not a deluded nonconformist rabbi. He has come as the son of David, the eternal word of God, the savior to free us from slavery of sin and death in the world, the ultimate freedom. God sent his son to deliver us from the domain of darkness and bondage and transfer us to the kingdom and the freedom of his beloved son that's in Colossians. I added a few words but that's what it means. And this is not just for the Jews. Many times people in the early years thought that Jesus, these things only happen to the Jews and all youths, Gentiles had to be circumcised first if you wanted to have the Jewish Messiah be yours too. But it's not just for the Jews, it's also for all of us uncircumcised, unclean, goyim, Gentile dogs. All of us have been brought. What the Jews said, we were all unclean dogs. We are now been brought into the covenant and made one. And you are no longer just Gentiles this favorable year. You've been made citizens of heaven because of this Jubilee. You are now beloved and adopted children. He did not just release you from bondage to sin and freed you from slavery. He adopted you into his family. God is now your father, that's why you say Abba. One of the beautiful things being in Israel out in the fishing boat, I hear the little boy yelling to his dad, Abba, Abba. It's an endearment, daddy. And now we are part of the royal household. You have blue blood running through your veins because you're royalty. Don't ever think you're not important. You're part of the royal family. You're blessed to live in this ultimate Jubilee, the freedom in Christ and liberty and meaning to life and eternal life and joy not only in this world but in the one to come. So how does this all apply to, how do we live the Jubilee? What are we freed to do? The world thinks of freedom as license. Free to do whatever you wanna do. Live out your passions and lusts. Follow every women desire and lust that you have. Let the flesh in your body control you. But that's wrong. That's not what freedom is. We are not given the freedom to sing with Frank Sinatra. I did it my way. That is not true freedom. Freedom and license to do whatever we want like the LGBT movement and the abortion mania. This is not freedom at all. It's a bondage that leads to sadness and death, disappointment and eventually it leads to hell. A true Jubilee follows the laws of God and his laws are there to make us free not only now but for all of eternity. Contraception and abortion, infanticide in euthanasia, sexual perversions and gender bending may seem to bring freedom but it's a big lie. God made the universe with natural laws and he created us with those laws and printed in our hearts. We are now free not to do whatever we want to do. We're free to do what we ought to do. And that's what brings freedom. I like to tell when I'm talking to kids about a fish tank and the fish are there having a good time because that's the way God made them to live in the water. But one day they look out and they say, hey, come here over here fish. Look, there's those people walking around. They go in and out. They're going in the kitchen and eating. Why do we get stuck in here? It's a conspiracy. They put us in here to keep us from having fun and being free like they are. So on Saturday morning the fish all go down in the bottom of the tank and they get their tails flagged and they all go together and they jump right out of the fish tank. Now they're all free, right? No, they're dead. Fish aren't made to live on the carpet. Fish are made to live their optimum existence in the water. And God is the creator of the universe and he's the creator of us. And he knows the optimum environment for us. And it's not to have unlimited freedom and jump out of the fish tank for us to have the purest joy and the most fulfilling life and the happiness and the release and everything God wants us to have and everything that all human beings want to have is to live in the heart of his church. Who are the really happy people? Go find the people who live in the heart of the church and go find the truly happy fulfilled people. We are given freedom to do what we ought to live as the sons and daughters of God because where the spirit of God is there is true liberty. Now there's another Jubilee that I mentioned at the very beginning. The Catholic Church has established Jubilees and I wish I had more time for this, but I don't. I'm running out of time. We don't have time to go into the whole history of it but the very first recorded official Christian Jubilee as a celebration was in 1300s by Pope Boniface and he established it for special graces, indulgences, pardons and joy. You could go to Rome and visit the churches and get indulgences and it was a wonderful, wonderful time but it was only every 100 years. And there's a problem, people die. How can you get, if you're born right after the Jubilee fat chance you're gonna make the next one. So it's been adopted over the centuries and now it's every 25 years there's a Jubilee with the opening of Holy Doors, not just in Rome but all over the world and the next one's coming up in 2025. Holy Doors are open in churches, indulgences, extended celebrations, rejoicing and so in summary. Be jubilant, rejoice. You are living the true Jubilee anticipated in the Old Testament and brought to life in Christ. You are now living what the prophets and the patriarchs could only have dreamt of. You should rejoice and be jubilant. And St. Paul echoes this when he refers, in his mind you can tell when he's writing this he's thinking of the Jubilee. Paul was saying the same thing, rejoice and be jubilant and he echoes the year of Jubilee. He says what are you waiting for? 2nd Corinthians 6-2, God says it's a favorable time I listened to you and in a day of salvation I've helped you. I freed you from Egypt, I freed you from everything. Now, behold now is the favorable time. Behold now is the day of salvation. What are you waiting for? Dive in and live the gospel of joy and hope in the Jubilee year of Christ. Oh and by the way at the end of time there's gonna be another trumpet blast. The Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of a command in the voice of an archangel the sound of the trumpet, the trumpet of God and the dead in Christ will rise and so we'll always be together with the Lord in an eternal Jubilee. The way he created us to be with him so that not just here on earth but we'll be raised right up into the life of the Trinity and that special secret God has that he created you for, we will live that special secret the loving bubbling over love and fun and joy and laughter of God for all of eternity. Sometimes it's best said I'll close in poetry and hymns. Hark, the Jubilee is sounding. Oh the joyful news has come. Free salvation is proclaimed in and through God's only Son. And then let's go to Bethlehem because you can still hear resounding from the caves and the hills of Bethlehem. Shepherds, why this Jubilee? Why these songs of happy cheer? What great brightness did you see? What glad tidings did you hear? And they look to you and respond, come to Bethlehem and see. Him whose birth the angels sing come a door on bended knee. Christ the Lord, the newborn King. That's why this Jubilee, God bless you.