In Luke 4:16-21, Jesus Christ delivered to his hometown synagogue in Nazareth a memorable message that none of them likely forgot, whatever they thought about it: “So He came to Nazereth, where he had been brought up. And as His custom was, He went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and stood up to read. And He was handed the book of the prophet Isaiah. And when He had opened the book, He found the place where it was written: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He has anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor; He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed; to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.” Then He closed the book and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. And the eyes of all who were in the synagogue were fixed on Him. And He began to say to them, “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.””

Aside from the obvious fact that the account tells us that this particular sermon happened on the Sabbath day, what are the other layers of understanding the views of Jesus Christ towards the Sabbath that can be gathered from this message. After all, as we might expect, there are many such layers. While we might not be surprised that Jesus, as a Jew, read out from the scriptures on the Sabbath, this was a much greater honor than is commonly understood. In order to be allowed to read in the synagogue, one must be judged as an observant Jew, who was particularly observant with regards to the Sabbath, a standard that is far higher than most understand. For example, one of my religious instructors had gone to Europe on a trip, and while visiting London had visited the synagogue, as an honored guest of Levite ancestry, he was conditionally invited to read before the synagogue, but that invitation was revoked when he answered a query about the Sabbath and confessed that he had driven on the Sabbath, thus making him ineligible to do the reading. In order to have, as His custom, the role of reading in the synagogue, He must have been recognized as unusually law-abiding even by the standards of Judaism, despite the way His example and conduct are largely ignored by contemporary Christians.

There is yet more to this passage as relates to the Sabbath. This passage is one of the earliest references to the Haftorah reading, in which a passage of the prophets or writings is read along with the weekly Torah portion in a synagogue as part of the liturgy of the Jews, which strongly encouraged a cyclical approach to reading the scriptures as they had them, similar to the annual Bible reading programs that are popular in certain circles. But perhaps the most pointed reference to the Sabbath, and the most unexpected, is the fact that Jesus Christ said He had fulfilled the passage in Isaiah 61:1-2a to preach the acceptable year of the Lord, the Jubilee year, which was signaled by its focus on liberation and restoration. As we have read in Leviticus 25, the jubilee year was an important aspect of the Sabbath, a chance to start again, and that is precisely what Jesus Christ allowed for all of humanity, a freedom from the burden of debt, from slavery to sin, a freedom that was not only granted from God to man but that was to be granted to others in turn.

Why is the Jubilee year described as the “acceptable year of the Lord?” Having seen that the Jubilee year offered freedom from indentured servitude and the restoration of inheritance from debt and the consequences of misfortune, we must gather that God desires the removal of burdens from others, a desire that was shared by Jesus Christ given that He cited this verse as His own purpose statement when returning to His hometown synagogue at the start of His ministry. While on the one hand it is obvious that Jesus Christ’s presence on earth was an act of reconciliation and atonement, so that the massive and completely unpayable debt of our sin could be forgiven, so obvious that the idea, once discussed, helped start the Protestant Reformation and made the distinction between penance and repentance all the more stark, on the other hand many people do not really act as if God and Jesus Christ love to forgive, and that the commands of God are not about putting burdens on others but about removing them, and that is especially true of the Sabbath.

Let us therefore look to the sermon of Jesus Christ in Nazereth, which described His purpose on earth, as a way of understanding the true purposes of the Sabbath and why it is so special to God and Jesus Christ. The passage cited in this message, Isaiah 61:1-2, was cited at least one more time by Christ when speaking to the disciples of John the Baptist in Luke 7:20-22, when He pointed out what He was doing and that it was in accordance with the prophecy in Isaiah. In our own time, of course, the importance of showing compassion to the poor, being gentle and tender to the brokenhearted, and seeking the restoration of those who have faced debt and imprisonment, has become a matter of social importance for many believers. Prison ministries and anti-trafficking initiatives and efforts to show generosity to the poor and ill are important parts of the Christian faith, but they spring from the context of the Sabbath, from the desire for rest, for peace, for wholeness, for restoration, and for reconciliation that exists in the hearts of both God and men. In honoring this desire to see things made right, let us understand that this is part of the context of the Sabbath, and that by honoring the Sabbath in its fullness, we do not put burdens on mankind, but rather, we remove them so that others may know true rest in all aspects of life, in the shadow of the future rest that is to come.