Luke Timothy Johnson: Mandate

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If among you, one of your brothers should become poor, in any of your towns within your land that the Lord your God is giving you, you shall not harden your heart or shut your hand against your poor brother, but you shall open your hand to him and lend him sufficient for his need, whatever it may be. Deuteronomy 15:7-8

“Inasmuch as all the people called into the covenant were to share in the promise, all were to have a share in the land. The attention paid to the precise allocation of the land to the tribes (see Joshua 13-19; Numbers 26:52-56) has the theological understanding behind it that each Israelite was to have some part of the land, given as a gift from God…

This view of the land itself as an inheritance, or as a free gift given in fulfillment of the promise had two implications. First, since the land came as a gift, there was to be no collapsing of private property: there was not to be indiscriminate use of the land by all. The warnings against moving landmarks (Deuteronomy 19:14; Proverbs 22:28; 23:10) remind us that the limits of an individual’s property had been set by God and were not to be tampered with.

Second, and out of the same perception, any attempt to win prosperity by taking the property of another (in any way) was a direct offense against God, not alone because it broke a law, but because the property of a neighbor came to him as a share in God’s heritage…For landowners who had lost their property through bankruptcy, there was the mechanism of the Jubilee Year…The return of property to its ancestral owners is explicitly and emphatically connected to Yahweh’s ownership of the land (Leviticus 25:23-24).

Not only property indebtedness, but debts of every sort were to be canceled in the Jubilee Year (Leviticus 25:29-42)…For those perennially impoverished because of their dispossessed status (orphans, widows, sojourners) the law demands a sharing of the produce of the land…From the demands of the covenant comes the mandate to Israel: “therefore, I command you, you shall open wide your hand to your brother, to the needy, and too the poor, in the land” (Deuteronomy 15:11).”

Luke Timothy Johnson in Sharing Possessions: What Faith Demands, Second Edition (Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, 2010) 83-85.

As I continue to lean into the idea of ‘jubilee’ alongside my word for the year ‘abundance’ as it relates to generosity, two thoughts come into view after today’s reading. They provide us a mandate for life in modernity.

Firstly, God declared in the OT that He owned everything and that property boundaries must not be tampered with. This leads me to wonder the implications for us when we act like we own property and when with acquisitiveness we try to accumulate more than God has supplied to us. It seems, such thoughts and actions actually destroy us.

In the NT, texts like Hebrews 13:5, reveal God’s heart for us regarding such behavior. Keep your life free from love of money, and be content with what you have, for he has said, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.” The desire for money and things supplants our service to God and we become overcome with discontentment.

Secondly, God desires that those who steward property consider even the produce it brings forth not as their own but as something to be shared with the needy. We live in a world that declares adamantly, “I earned all I possess. It’s mine.” In reality, all we have, and all we produce belongs to God and must be stewarded for His purposes.

So, what path should we take if we desire to exhibit generosity with the abundance God supplies? The head of the Jerusalem church and the half-brother of Jesus says it best in James 1:27. Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.

Father in heaven, by the washing of the Word and the power of the Holy Spirit make us into openhanded people and help us remain unstained by the world, so that our living, giving, serving, and loving looks like Jesus. Amen.