ἄφεσις aphesis
What It Means
ἄφεσις comes from aphiēmi, to send away, to let go, to release — and the New Testament spends it on the two things a guilty and captive people most need: freedom and forgiveness. It is the word for a prisoner’s release and a debt’s cancellation, and it becomes the standing term for the forgiveness of sins (Luke 24:47; Acts 2:38; Ephesians 1:7). Long before, the Greek Old Testament had used it for the Jubilee, when every fiftieth year the trumpet sounded and Israel proclaimed aphesis across the land: debts wiped, slaves freed, lost inheritances restored (Leviticus 25:10). So when Jesus stands in the Nazareth synagogue, unrolls Isaiah, and reads that he was sent “to proclaim liberty to the captives … to set at liberty those who are oppressed,” the word on his lips is aphesis — twice. The Jubilee has a face.
A Story
In 1751 the Pennsylvania Assembly ordered a bell for the State House in Philadelphia, to mark the fiftieth year since William Penn’s 1701 Charter of Privileges. Around its crown they had cast a line from the Jubilee law: “Proclaim LIBERTY throughout all the Land unto all the Inhabitants thereof” (Leviticus 25:10). They chose it for a colony’s fiftieth anniversary — the very interval of the biblical Jubilee — perhaps without seeing how deep the borrowed words ran. Generations later the world would call it the Liberty Bell. A nation prized the promise of release; Scripture had already named the one who can proclaim it and mean it to the depths.
For Your Journey
We are strangely reluctant to be released. We would rather manage a debt than have it cancelled, rather serve out the sentence than accept an unearned pardon, because a release we did not arrange leaves us owing everything to another. Yet aphesis is not a discount on what we owe; it is the whole letting-go of it. Let us stop rehearsing the ledger — the old failures we keep current, the resentments we guard like collateral — as though holding them proved us serious. The Jubilee trumpet does not ask whether we have made enough progress; it simply sounds, and the captives walk free. To believe the gospel is to hear that trumpet as meant for us, and to lay the account down.
In Christ
Every Jubilee left a question ringing: the trumpet sounded, but the human heart stayed bound. Then Jesus rolls up the scroll and says, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (Luke 4:21) — the year of release has arrived in person. He purchases the pardon he proclaims. The Jubilee freed slaves and forgave debts; the cross frees us because the Lord of the Jubilee takes the debt onto himself, the [propitiation](https://devotions.inkling-s.com/bible-language.html#hilasterion) in whom “we have redemption … the forgiveness of our trespasses” (Ephesians 1:7). So the risen Christ sends the church to preach “repentance and forgiveness of sins” (Luke 24:47) — the same [repentance](https://devotions.inkling-s.com/bible-language.html#metanoia) and aphesis joined forever. The one who read the release aloud is himself the release: he proclaimed liberty, then bought it with his blood.[^1][^2]
[^1]: Tim Keller, “The Poor Have Good News Preached to Them,” Gospel in Life — on Luke 4, Jesus claims Isaiah’s jubilee as fulfilled in himself. https://gospelinlife.com/sermon/the-poor-have-good-news-preached-to-them/ [^2]: The Septuagint renders the Jubilee “liberty” of Leviticus 25:10 (Hebrew *deror*) with ἄφεσις (*aphesis*), the same word Luke places on Jesus’s lips in Luke 4:18.
“My chains fell off, my heart was free, I rose, went forth, and followed thee.”
“To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.”