Mortgaged to Death

I paid off my student loans the year I turned 41. A nervous breakdown in my twenties made me to default on the loans. The penalties, which I’d signed off on as an 18-year-old eager to go to college in Los Angeles, nearly doubled my principal balance. By the time I finished paying for my bachelor’s degree in theatre (I know, I know, there’s a reason I’m a professional beggar), my full tuition scholarship cost me around fifty grand.

After recuperating from my quarter-life crisis at 28, I started the long, hard slog of paying off my debt. It felt like it was never going to end. The book of Proverbs says, “The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is the slave of the lender.” (Proverbs 22:7) I felt every bit a slave paying my $337 every month for decades for a degree that I would never use. Working for a non-profit meant that my salary was modest, so that payment felt like it was sucking the life out of me.

A Jubilee Just for Me

Then, nearly 20 years later, when I’d whittled the loan down to a few thousand dollars, I got a big surprise. A dear friend told me that he wanted to pay off the loans for me. I went to the website and got the payoff amount, and he cut me a check.

I was stunned. Delighted. Overwhelmed. Filled with gratitude. Overjoyed. I told my wife, and we both laughed with joy and relief. It was our own little Jubilee. We had been set free.

In the book of Leviticus, God establishes the Jubilee Year as a time of rest and restoration. Slaves were to be set free. The land was to lie fallow. The Israelites who bought land from their neighbors had to give it back. Jesus echoed this call to Jubilee when He proclaimed the book of Isaiah:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring glad tidings to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord (Luke 4:18-19).

When Jesus took on a human nature, all of mankind was in an even deeper kind of slavery than my student loans. While the Jews chafed under Roman Rule, that political bondage was only a sign of a deeper slavery. Since the fall of Adam and Eve, mankind had been enslaved to sin, held captive by darkness in their minds, weakness in their wills, and disordered desires. The ultimate penalty we had all earned, the wages of our sin, was death.

Revealing His will through the law and the prophets didn’t work, because the souls of men were possessed by sin and death. Jesus had to come in person to set the captives free. He had to pay our debt so that the evil one could no longer hold us in bondage. He did that by giving His life on Calvary. His death was the check that brought my balance to zero. Account closed.

The Price of Freedom

But freedom has its price. “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” (Matthew 6:12) The price I pay now that God has forgiven my debts is to forgive anyone who sins against me. This makes it a bit harder.

One thing I learned from the student loan processing company is that creditors don’t like to forgive debts. They want their money back with interest. And if I fail to pay on time, they’ll apply a fat penalty that will double what I owe. I borrowed the money and spent it. Justice demands that the debt be paid.

My heart is the same way. When someone sins against me, the hurt is real. The pain I feel is real. My need for justice, to be repaid for what’s been taken from me, is real and it’s just. And when it’s not paid on time, I want the person to pay even MORE for making me wait for what they owe me.  What makes forgiveness so hard is that the debt is real, and my desire to be repaid is just. Justice is good, isn’t it?

The Triumph of Mercy

Mercy is bigger than justice. Mercy is a sign of wealth so great that the size of my debt doesn’t matter. In the parable of the unforgiving servant, Jesus tells us that the servant brought before the king owed 10,000 talents. To put that debt into perspective, it’s roughly 375 TONS of silver, worth about $358,000,000 today. That makes my student loan debt look like the change I find between the couch cushions.

The king in the parable knows that he deserves repayment and announces that the servant should be sold along with his family and his property to pay off the debt. When the servant begs for mercy, the king’s enormous wealth is displayed when his compassion overrules the promissory note. The parable of the wicked servant shows us that God acts first. He is the first to forgive, to practice mercy, but He expects us to learn to forgive.

Our debt to God is similarly vast. All the things we do, or fail to do, or say, or even think, add up. God does not need us to repay Him. In fact, our debts are so great that we could never pay them off ourselves. So, God Himself chose to pay the debt with the life of His Beloved Son.

And that’s what this Jubilee Year of Hope is all about. The infinite worth of Christ’s Self-Sacrifice will pay not only my debts, but the debts of all men for all time. The Jubilee Year is our opportunity to proclaim this liberty to captives. God’s mercy is freely available to everyone. All they have to do is ask for mercy and, once they experience God’s mercy, begin to share that mercy with others. When everyone does that, the whole world will be debt-free.

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