Weekly Reflection
THE JUBILEE YEAR OF 2025 – Pilgrims of Hope
Pope Francis inaugurated the Jubilee Year of 2025 on Christmas Eve this year. It will come to its conclusion on the feast of the Epiphany 2026. He has invited all the dioceses of the world to inaugurate the Jubilee locally on Sunday, 29 December, which is not the most convenient time in this part of the world. Nonetheless, the Dean of St Stephen’s will lead a celebration inaugurating the Jubilee at the Cathedral, blessing the Holy Door and leading the people through it as a sign of walking as pilgrims with Christ into newness of life. I invite parishes and deaneries to be as creative as possible in inaugurating and celebrating the Jubilee Year.
The Jubilee looks back to the first Roman celebration in 1300; and Rome has always been the epicentre of celebration, as it will be of the Archdiocesan Pilgrimage which I hope to accompany in September next year. But the Jubilee Year also looks back much further to the biblical jubilee, which was celebrated every fifty years. It was a time of renewal for the people of God, a time to make a new beginning, a time to focus again on the God-given identity of ancient Israel as a community of slaves set free in a world which says that slaves can never come free.
The Jubilee Year is therefore a call to recognise the many forms of slavery, overt and covert, that are found in this culture and in our own lives – and to renew our faith in the possibility of freedom and commit ourselves anew to what freedom requires. Any pilgrimage – even the little pilgrimage of walking through the Holy Door – is a farewell to an old enslaving way of life and an embrace of a new way of life which the Lord crucified and risen makes possible.
The motto of this Jubilee Year is “Pilgrims of Hope”. Any journey we make through this year we make not as tourists or holiday-makers but as pilgrims. It is a journey of faith. And it is driven by a hope which is not mere wishful thinking but the proclamation of a true hope in a world which often seems hopeless, a hope grounded ultimately in Easter. This hope is an expectation that what God has done in Jesus he will do in the world and even the cosmos. God will bring light from darkness, life from death.
The Letter to the Hebrews tells us that “there remains a sabbath rest for the people of God” (4:9). In a deeply restless world, may this Jubilee Year be a time of sabbath which God alone can provide, refeshing our souls and putting new heart into the Church as we take the path traced by the Archdiocesan Synod and its Action Plans. Amen. (Message from our Archbishop)
