by Rosanna Virgili
«He came to Nazareth, where he had grown up, and according to his custom he went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day. He stood up to read. The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Rolling up the scroll, he gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing”» (Lk 4:16-21).
With these words and this gesture, Jesus announces, in the Gospel of Luke, his “jubilee”. In the New Testament, in fact, the jubilee appears as the mission, indeed the very person of the Nazarene. And it is precisely in the Synagogue of the small village in Galilee, where the son of Joseph had grown up, that he announces the purpose of his coming to earth: to bring, indeed, even to be a “year of grace from the Lord” and to proclaim to all that “today” the words of Isaiah have been fulfilled, the light has dispelled the shadows from the eyes of the blind, freedom has enlarged the hearts of the oppressed, liberation has made all those who are bound in material and moral chains rejoice.
It is the “reality” of which the “happy announcement” is made, the Gospel for all the poor, that is, for all those who are the non-guaranteed of the earth, the excluded, suspended between surviving and dying. Jesus is, for all of them – as for all of us – a year of grace! He is the gift of life freed from all suffering, from every bond of pain, from the horrors of war and enmity, from privations, from existential and emotional darkness, from every shame. A dream that he will make concrete during his earthly mission on the roads of Galilee, in Judea and Samaria, in the Decapolis and in Phoenicia, where he will pass restoring sight to the blind and freeing from impure spirits all those who were afflicted by them, healing from the infirmities that held poor creatures enslaved inside a crippled or curved body, and their inner being oppressed by worries and anguish of every color.
This “year of grace” will continue to be a “today”, to become current in the work of his disciples after the Risen One has ascended to heaven, in a contemporaneity that has yet to be actualized in the work of Christians, in the jubilee of the Church, called to become a message of joy, justice, peace, redemption for all. Before being a year of forgiveness, the jubilee is a year of proclamation and testimony of God's gratuitous love towards humanity, starting with the most forgotten, it is a voice against the current that inspires and spreads hope in a world enveloped in violence. It opens a passage of trust with the Spirit of goodness and love, among the threatening waters of history that instead instill fear in most.
As is known, Pope Francis announced the Jubilee of 2025 with a bull of indiction entitled Hope: Spes non confundit (Hope does not disappoint). Thus he introduces this virtue
(nn. 1-2): «Everyone hopes. In the heart of every person there is hope as a desire and expectation of good, even without knowing what tomorrow will bring. The unpredictability of the future, however, sometimes gives rise to conflicting feelings: from trust to fear, from serenity to discouragement, from certainty to doubt. We often meet people who are discouraged, who look to the future with skepticism and pessimism, as if nothing could offer them happiness. May the Jubilee be an opportunity for everyone to revive hope. The Word of God helps us to find the reasons for this. Let us be guided by what the Apostle Paul writes to the Christians of Rome: “Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we also have access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in our hope of the glory of God. [...] And hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us (Rom 5:1-2.5).
With the words of the Apostle Paul who writes to the community of Rome, Pope Francis connects the ancient reality with the current one: already then, at the beginning of the history of the Church, it was necessary to "resuscitate hope" in the hearts of people. Even then, in fact, people gave in to resignation in the face of so many realities and experiences of oppression and pain, they collapsed in disbelief that they could lift their eyes beyond the limits of human misery. It was not easy even at that time - on the contrary, it was perhaps much more difficult - to think and opt for freedom, to undertake with courage and faith a path of liberation. But the Risen Lord offered everyone the Spirit who gives faith and makes us firm in hope. Our strength is the love of God that the Holy Spirit has poured into our hearts; our peace is in him who "has made the two one, breaking down the dividing wall of hostility through his flesh" (Eph 2:14).
The Jubilee is the door of hope for those who are desolate, disappointed and confused, and also for those who are oppressed by the harmful effects of their own sin. The year that has begun, therefore, calls all Christians to a double task: the first is to rejoice, that is, to make of what we hope for a word and a prophecy about the present, a jubilation of joy and gratitude that projects us toward the future; the second is to lend ourselves today to complete the work of the Lord. To pay off the debt of a year of grace awaited in every corner of the world.