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Daily Meditations

Jesus Learned Obedience Through Suffering [part 2]

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Let’s go just a little deeper down the rabbit hole, shall we?

I’ve been intensely fascinated by the idea of Jesus arriving at new stages of experience as one commentator put it. One road of Hebrews 5:8 we could journey down is that Jesus learned obedience through a particular kind of suffering which we do not normally think of. Suffering is, as we know, not limited to physical pain. Pain is a part of growth as a human being. As Luke Timothy Johnson astutely points out in his commentary on this passage,

“intellectually, the learning of new ideas is a form of growth: our minds expand to include new realities of which we had not previously been aware. The growth is good. But it is also painful, since it implies the disruption and rearrangement–and often the abandonment–of our previous mental furnishings. To enter into new mental territory means at least a partial death to old mental territory. Stretching the mind to encompass new truth means suffering the pain of mental disequilibrium.”

Can you wrap your head around the fact that Jesus, taking on our humanity to the fullest degree, likely leaned new ideas which stretched him?

Perhaps he grew up hearing some corrupt religious teachings which he later found out, through seeing more of the light of God, were unhealthy and not truly from the heart of Yahweh. To shed something we’ve been taught, or simply heard and absorbed most of our life, is indeed a death, a suffering. We’ve all had to drop certain ways of thought which we discovered were unlovingly judgmental, and it does kind of hurt to admit to ourselves that we ever harbored such views.

Of course I am not saying Jesus ever sinned, nor will I ever. I’m merely pointing out this fascinating aspect which shows how deeply he can relate to us because of his great sacrifice and service to humanity that is no doubt greater than we’ve probably previously imagined.

The word “learned” in this verse is not conveying that Jesus went from disobedience to obedience, but rather has the connotation of coming to know something firsthand through personal experience. This is why I love the First Nations Version (a wonderfully fresh Indigenous translation of the New Testament) of this verse: Even though he was Creator’s Son, he still had to learn, through suffering, what it means to stay true to the ways of the Great Spirit.

Maybe Jesus had to experientially learn as a kid that life is not about pleasing people or trying to look good, but about pleasing God and serving people. At some point he probably recognized that we cannot transform others; we can possibly inspire them. Even God’s Son did not have a 100% conversion rate. Therefore, we can say with a little more certainty that Jesus experienced the suffering that comes with people not accepting what you are offering them, of people not really listening to you, and perhaps the most confusingly painful of all–people misunderstanding you and your intentions. How horrible is that?

But he had to keep obeying his Father anyway, through all of this suffering.

Despite the inevitable unmet expectations and desires that come with being human, he still had to trust in God. Gee, that’s always easy.

And remember, obeying is deeper than simply keeping the rules, as efficacious as that might be. Did you know that the Latin root of the word “obey” means to listen, to hearken to, to pay attention to? Despite suffering, we must keep listening to the One who designed us. We must keep our attention focused upon our Creator who is perfect love and knows us better than we know ourselves and wants the absolute best for us at all times. And not only listening and paying attention, but saying yes–every time.

Daily Meditations

Jesus Learned Obedience Through Suffering

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Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered. ~HEBREWS 5:8

This verse has intrigued me for many years.

Jesus learned obedience through suffering.

I have sat with this single sentence for almost three weeks now, and feel that my thoughts still have yet to coalesce into any sort of non-ambiguous distilled formation worthy of sharing.

But there’s so much here, so much I’ve poured over, thought about, prayed through that I desire to share….so I will simply start putting down thoughts in hopes that Spirit will move if this is of God, and stop me if it is not.

I’m blown away by the fact that Jesus had to learn what it meant to be obedient. Think about that thought alone for a second! He became acquainted with what it was to obey in the face of suffering, to obey even when that very obedience was the cause of harm to Himself.

He had to overcome and override His (God-given?) human desires whenever they were at odds with the Father’s will and plan for His life. He took on human desires to fully identify with us. Along with humanity came temptation and weakness. So it seems there must have been times when he humanly wanted something other than what the Father had in store for Him. The most obvious scenario we could point to is having to override that innate sense of survival when He was called upon to give up His life, and in a most cruel manner.

In my study of this verse, one theme that kept coming up across the different commentaries was this idea of reverential submission. William Barclay had a really thoughtful insight on this topic: “Jesus learned from all His experiences because he met them all with reverence.” I don’t believe I have ever thought of that exact idea before. Jesus was always, without fail, looking to His Father, deferring, trusting, obeying. So therefore, in every situation of His earthly life He was learning since he greeted each and every circumstance with reverence and submission. His human mind and body must have possessed urges, because of how complete was His identification with us flesh and blood beings. Urges to play it safe, to do whatever His flesh messaged Him was good to do and pleasing for Himself. Temptation and weakness are not sins. But they are challenging to deal with as humans. And He dealt. So focused was He on Father in every situation, and on learning His will more completely, that He never succumbed to allowing Himself to be overwhelmed with what this life threw at Him.

In thinking of this, I was reminded of what C.S. Lewis said about temptation with regard to Christ in his book Mere Christianity. If you think Jesus does not understand our plight because He never sinned, think again:

A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is….A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because he was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means–the only complete realist.

It’s like if there was a CrossFit contest with a 40 day course, Jesus would have been the only one to ever finish it. How foolish it would be for someone who tapped out after day 6 to say, “You don’t know what this course is like; you don’t understand how hard this is!”