Sabbath and Jubilee Economics: Weekly Summary
Sunday
The prayer of petition Jesus teaches still raises questions about economics: How does the burden of debt—the personal debt people carry in our consumer society, the national debt carried, particularly by Global South countries—keep people imprisoned in their own history?
—Richard Rohr
Monday
Even as our individual rest is important, we also need to help others in our communities to rest. Keeping the Sabbath rhythm requires everyone in the community, including those with privilege and power, to participate so that all can rest.
—Cindy Lee
Tuesday
God’s will and cosmic design is that no one suffer unjustly, but because human beings create unjust systems, shalom-type social parameters must serve as a social safety net to offset human disobedience.
—Randy Woodley
Wednesday
The Lord’s Prayer, with its tangible economic language and intent, has also been called the Jubilee Prayer. Imagine if all of us who know this prayer by heart took the challenge embedded in it seriously?
—Kelley Nikondeha
Thursday
Jesus represents the worldview of abundance in every one of his multiplication stories. There’s always the making of much out of little and there are always baskets left over. That’s the only possible message: There’s plenty!
—Richard Rohr
Friday
We thought, “Wow, this money isn’t just for our nonprofit. This should go to folks on the street, because we were literally fighting anti-homeless legislation.” We said, “Let’s use that money…. Let’s have a Jubilee party and let’s do it on Wall Street.”
—Shane Claiborne
Week Five Practice
Sabbath as Resistance
Author J. Dana Trent imagines the radical possibilities that could arise if we practiced communal Jubilee and Sabbath:
As much as our privilege allows, we can use Sabbath to opt out of the mammon machine one day per week. If all U.S. Christians did this, we’d harness and mimic the enormous economic power of the most successful boycotts. But nothing will change if we remain in our silos, allowing the allure of prosperity and the power of empire to obstruct the true meaning of the gospel.
And Sabbath is practiced in community: “God did not give this commandment to a person but to a people, knowing that only those who rested together would be equipped to resist together,” Barbara Brown Taylor writes in The Christian Century. Keeping Sabbath not only prevents our own exhaustion but also defends against the exploitation of others.
Real Sabbath, Brown Taylor insists, is done in community each week and every seven years, Leviticus 25-style. Everyone and everything are affected: Land and animals are given rest; debts are forgiven; those who work in bondage (literally or metaphorically) are freed. It’s the kind of wild community cooperation we’ve come to expect from a triune God….
Sabbath as resistance is nearly impossible to practice in isolation. We must opt out of mammon to create new systems of care for the marginalized in our communities. Like Mohandas Gandhi’s satyagraha (“truth force”) movement, our positive duty is to create spaces that foster truth, love, nonviolence, fearlessness, tolerance, and the dissolution of the U.S. “caste” system.
May we, like the Israelites, turn to God each week, to remember and keep holy the fulcrum commandment that connects us to the divine and to one other. May we be reminded that systems of oppression and coercion can only be perpetuated by our participation. If we, as Christians, use Sabbath as a tool of resistance—both in a negative and positive duty—we free ourselves and others from the bigotry of America first and rich.
Reference:
J. Dana Trent, “Sabbath as Resistance” in Light for the Way: Seeking Simplicity, Connection, and Repair in a Broken World, ed. Rose Marie Berger (Broadleaf Books, 2026), 11o–112.
Image credit and inspiration: Wei Feng, untitled (detail), 2025, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Like this person in the field, arms unbound and outstretched, we explore the freedom that rises when we support economic justice, no longer tethered to endless and oppressive debt relationships.
