If you enter your neighbor’s vineyard, you may eat all the grapes you want, but do not put any in your basket. If you enter your neighbor’s grain field, you may pick kernels with your hands, but you must not put a sickle to their standing grain. Deuteronomy 23:24-25
“God’s ultimate ownership of the land also meant that part of its produce had to be reserved for God, both directly through tithes and other similar duties, and indirectly through making it available to the needy. A hungry or thirsty traveler could go into any field and eat grain and grapes as long as nothing was taken beyond what was needed.
“‘When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the foreigner. I am the Lord your God. Leviticus 19:9-10
“Likewise, the poor, the orphan, the widow, and the sojourner had a right to a portion of every crop. This included the edges of a field of grain, any fruit that had dropped to the ground, and all that the harvesters left behind after passing through the field once.”
Justo González in Faith and Wealth: A History of Early Christian Ideas on the Origin, Significance, and Use of Money (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 1990) 20-21.
The jubilee provision of availability looks so beautiful, and yet, it strikes us as unimaginable in modern times. We can hardly envision someone walking into another person’s field and helping themselves to the grain or grapes. They would have had to climb over a barbed wire fence with a posted sign, “No trespassing!”
Equally unthinkable is the jubilee provision of gleaning. Farmers could only take one pass through the field. They were required to leave the edges for the needy. Because God owned the land, He declared that the margins of the field were for the marginalized, namely, the poor, the orphan, the widow, and the sojourner.
The aim of these provisions was equality, or in biblical terms, God wanted to make sure everyone had enough.
We live in a world where the gap between the rich and poor is growing, not shrinking. The distance between the “haves” and the “have nots” continues to widen. All the while, the instructions of Jesus (and those echoed by Paul and others in the NT) call for equality. But, because they are not set forth as law, most (sadly!) read them as optional.
Hang with me. I have a point. Many people in the generosity space use the biblical notion that “God owns everything” as a basis for instructing people to give. Ironically, that’s neither what God connects to that notion nor the focus of the jubilee idea. God looks at what we try to keep for ourselves and what that reveals about our hearts.
If we treat any portion of the grain and the grapes that we produce as belonging to us, regardless of the lip service we give to God’s ownership of everything, we reveal that we embrace the world’s thinking rather than the jubilee He has declared. Those are strong words intended to awaken readers to realize that our actions reveal our beliefs.
Followers of Christ make whatever they possess available to the marginalized.