Economy of joy 4/ - From the exile of the Jewish people in Babylon emerges the simplicity of authentic faith, which is refined and stripped bare over time
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 23/04/2025
In Ezekiel's prophetic vision, the house of God is transformed into a river, symbol of a spirituality that transcends material sacred places and becomes living water, secular and concrete
Spiritual life begins in absolute simplicity - 'And there was only a voice'. Soon, however, it becomes complicated as it enriches itself, because the first naked voice of youth becomes worship, religion, temple, sacred objects, dogmas. But in the end, after a long time, if life works and does not throw us off track at some particularly difficult and blind bend, we return to simplicity and poverty. And there, barefoot, we finally understand that what matters in life is only to try to become smaller and simpler in order to try to pass through the eye of the angel's needle—because any religious object or furnishing we carry with us prevents us from passing through. Only that first subtle voice, perhaps a good friend, and a shred of truth about ourselves will pass through. We spend much of our lives searching for God in temples and sacred places, only to realize, almost always too late or at the end, that what we were looking for was simply inside our homes, in our everyday chores, among the dishes and the cupboard. But we couldn't have known that before passing through the last eye of the needle.
Let us continue our study of the biblical Jubilee. According to an ancient Jewish tradition, the prophet Ezekiel's grandiose vision of the temple came in “the year of the Jubilee” (Talmud Arakhin 12b,6). The Talmud quotes the beginning of chapter 40 of Ezekiel, which contains the account of that wonderful theophany, a center of gravity for the entire Bible: “In the twenty-fifth year of our deportation, at the beginning of the year, on the tenth day of the month, fourteen years after the city [Jerusalem] had been taken, on that very day, the hand of the Lord was upon me and he brought me there” (Ezekiel 40:1). An event placed on the axes of time and space with the solemnity of a testament—because, in reality, it is a testament.
This Talmudic tradition, placing Ezekiel's vision of the temple in a jubilee year, tells us something very useful for understanding the nature and culture of the Jubilee. Some historical background is perhaps necessary. Ezekiel, one of the greatest prophets, carried out his mission in exile, because at the age of twenty-five he ended up in Babylon during the first deportation (in 598 BC), which affected the technical and intellectual elite. We must also keep in mind another essential element. Many of the words that the Bible has left us about the Jubilee and the sabbatical culture that is its root were written or completed during the Babylonian exile. They would have been very different, certainly less prophetic, without Ezekiel, without the so-called 'second Isaiah' (the author, among other things, of the 'songs of the servant of YHWH'), and, albeit in a different way, without Jeremiah. The rules of the Jubilee are part of the Law, but they cannot be understood without the prophets. The Jubilee is, in fact, Law and Spirit, institution and prophecy, already and not yet. Ezekiel had prophesied the destruction of the temple years before it took place, and he had made that future destruction the center of his prophetic message, which represents a peak, perhaps the peak, of biblical prophecy. In Babylon there was no temple, there were shrines to other gods, false and lying. In Jerusalem, the temple of the one true God would be destroyed, prophesied the young Ezekiel, and so it came to pass. Ezekiel, who was also a priest (without a temple), had the decisive task of teaching the people that the true God, unlike idols, does not need the sacred enclosure of the temple to be present and to act. The factual reality of the absence of a temple in exile and its destruction in the homeland became a theological and ethical reality: the temple is not necessary for faith; indeed, it can easily become an obstacle to it. Exile was an immense creative destruction of the faith of Israel. Returning small, poor, wiped out by the greatest theological and political defeat, something extraordinary happened to those exiles that marked the beginning of a new religious era: the 'age of the spirit,' of God present outside the temple and everywhere, and therefore the era of true secularism, of the religion of the earth. In that vision of the temple, Ezekiel overcomes in an instant millennia of material religion that needed to see statues and images in temples and shrines to feel the presence of the deity. They could not have known it, but in Babylon those deportees began to worship God 'in spirit and truth'.
In fact, Ezekiel's vision begins with a new temple and ends with the wonderful and powerful image of a river, in one of the most sublime passages in all of ancient literature, which still leaves us spellbound: “He brought me back to the entrance of the temple, and I saw water coming out from under the threshold of the temple toward the east... The water was coming down from under the right side of the temple, from the south side of the altar. He brought me out through the north gate and led me around to the outer gate facing east, and I saw water flowing from the right side... It was a torrent that I could not cross, because the water had risen; it was navigable water, a river that could not be crossed. Then he said to me, 'Have you seen, son of man?'” (Ezekiel 47:1-6). The temple becomes a spring and then a river. A synthesis of biblical humanism. The water of the spirit that fertilizes the earth is not given to wash away the blood of sacrifices under the altar of the temple. And like the Law, the temple is also a teacher, which one day must step aside to make room for immediate contact with living water. The square will be the new name of the temple. Here the young priest Ezekiel dies and rises again in the old prophet.
In reality, we know that despite Ezekiel's vision and the similar words of the Gospels, Paul, and Revelation, the homo religiosus of yesterday and today has forgotten a thousand times the profound meaning of that prophecy. Even Christians have fenced God into sacred places, consecrated things and people to him, and forgotten Ezekiel's vision. Because religious men and women like river shrines more than squares, Mass more than the smell of incense more than the smell of kitchens or factories. And so, every day, we turn faith into a consumer good, the temple into a sofa, the Jubilee into a passage through a door, religion into a comfort zone, and God returns chained to the cramped places we prepare for him without asking his permission. The Bible knows this well, and its prophets certainly know it; and that is why it has preserved for us the vision of a prophet who, now nearing the end of his mission, on a day in his adulthood (he was now over fifty, twenty-five of which he had spent in exile), was shown by the Spirit the new temple-river in the new Jerusalem—and his prophecy is fulfilled. The temple dissolves to become water that irrigates and quenches the earth.
And finally, we return to the Jubilee. It is in this context of the universal and secular temple-spring that we find some economic indications: “Have honest scales, honest efa, honest bat... This shall be the offering you shall take: one sixth of an efa for every homer of wheat and one sixth of an efa for every homer of barley... Ten bat are equal to one homer. From the flock, from the fertile pastures of Israel, one sheep in every two hundred. This shall be given for the oblations, for the burnt offerings, for the communion sacrifices” (Ezekiel 45:10-15). If the temple becomes water, if the place of religion is the street, it is not surprising that for the Talmud these are Jubilee norms. And so, in the heart of these chapters all devoted to one of the greatest biblical theophanies, Ezekiel speaks to us of scales, ephahs, baths, homers (units of weight and measure), coins, sheep, and taxes, because that is what they are in fact.
What do taxes have to do with the new temple-source? We know that in the ancient world, including Israel, the temple was also the center for the collection and use of taxes, particularly tithes on agricultural products. But why is there talk of taxes even in the new non-temple that has now become great waters? The answer is simple. In the Bible, taxes are neither theft, nor usurpation, nor an instrument of war, nor, even less so, duties: they are reciprocity, an expression of the golden rule and the law of communion that must inspire the life of the people. In fact, we do not understand the Bible if we do not read about the liberation from Egypt together with taxes, the Law of Moses with coins, angels and visions together with contracts and debts, the money of Judas and the Good Samaritan with the empty tomb. But we, who have forgotten the Bible and the Gospels, think that the really important things of faith are heavenly words, prayers, apparitions, and so we relegate economics and finance to low matters, to 'things of this world', to secondary matters for experts, to the tables of deacons. We reduce both faith and economics to nothing, both distorted and perverted, and then we place them in a realm of darkness where mammon becomes God, and God becomes mammon. Instead, the Bible tells us over and over again that taxes are Shabbat, that they are as important as the Jubilee, as Ruth's gleaning, as the burning bush and the open sea: “Thus says YHWH: Enough, princes of Israel, enough of violence and robbery! Act with justice and righteousness; remove your extortion from my people” (Ezekiel 45:9).
Only if we hold together the Ezekiel of the vision of the new temple with the Ezekiel who says 'enough' to economic injustice does the Bible become liberation and help us today to say 'enough' to the violence, robbery, and extortion of our powerful and our kings, even if we never do it enough. These are the humble, earthly, and secular truths that the prophets give us, to teach us the true meaning of the Jubilee.
