[Note: The following is the prepared text for a Spokesman’s Club message given to the Portland, Oregon Spokesman’s Club on Sabbath, February 8, 2025.]

Today I would like to give a mini-sermonette on a single verse that we are likely all familiar with and look at an unfamiliar aspect of the verse that you have perhaps never considered. The verse in question is Luke 4:16, which reads: “So He came to Nazareth, 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.”

When we look at this verse, it is our habit to look at the verse as being evidence that it was the custom of Jesus Christ to go into the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and this is true, but it is not the only thing that it was Jesus’ custom to do. Instead, the verse also says that it was his custom to go into the synagogue on the Sabbath day to read.

You might think that it is an ordinary thing for someone to go to a synagogue, or as we would go, to church, and read. This thought, though, would be mistaken. There were, and are, in fact, rules that are required to be a reader in a Jewish synagogue.

It is admittedly unclear exactly what rules applied to Jesus Christ in the specific synagogue in Nazareth when Jesus rose up to spoke. According to the Talmud, in tractate Megilah, as well as more contemporary sources like Seferia, Orthodox Jewish synagogues have a list of requirements for someone to stand up and read the Law: the reader must be male, a strict adherent to the laws and traditions of the Jewish religion, have a thorough knowledge of Hebrew including the melody in which the Law is to be chanted, and is to be humble and modest on top of this.

There is a catch, though. Generally there were several people who divided up the reading of the Torah between them, while the reader of the Haftarah, the section taken from the Prophets, got to read the whole section for themselves. It was this lesser reading of the Haftarah that Jesus Christ read, as we can see in Luke 4 later on that he quoted from Isaiah 61:1-2, not from whatever the Torah portion was for that week.

In contemporary Judaism, the reading of the haftarah section is less prestigious and the standards for a reader of that section of the Bible are less stringent than those who read the law. Interestingly enough, though, by reading the Haftarah Jesus was able to read the entire portion of the reading from the prophets by Himself, and was also able to read something that pointed to His own prophetic work as the promised Messiah that He was fulfilling as he spoke.

It is also interesting that this verse in Luke is the first recorded example we have of the haftarah reading in Jewish history, even though the custom is thought to have dated from Hasmonean times. It is also very impressive, I think, that we can understand all of this by pondering the single point that it was Jesus’ custom to stand up and read when He attended synagogue services on the Sabbath day. Hopefully you agree.