I was reading through chapter 5 of Hebrews the other night, and was confused by vs 7 to 9:

7In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence. 8Although he was a son, he learned obedience through what he suffered. 9And being made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him, 10being designated by God a high priest after the order of Melchizedek.

My problems:
Firstly, is v9 implying that Jesus learns obedience exclusively from his sufferring(s) on earth? I’d always thought that Jesus, since the beginning was always reverent (submissive in the NIV) to the Father, and that the best example of this was on the cross.

Secondly, does this sufferring refer to Jesus’ work on the cross exclusively, or his sufferring whilst living out his 33yrs on earth? 

Thirdly, in v9, is the passage suggesting that Jesus has been made perfect by his death and resurrection? If this is the case, is there a better way of expressing this verse, so that it doesn’t sound as though Jesus was not perfect before?

Can someone of greater scholarly ability then I shed light on these verses?

Maybe I should take comfort in v11:

11About this we have much to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing.

Hi Ivana,

Difficult questions, considering we’re speaking of the eternal sovereign Creator becoming a temporal weak man, before becoming the first undying, perfect ruling man of God’s approaching new creation..!

If we were to try and explain it “logically"… Because Jesus was God, there was no sense in which he could fail his mission and disobey his father.  But because Jesus was man, he was capable of going his own way and denying his father (otherwise his intense temptation and frustration were presumably fake).  I suggest that somehow these two things coexist in a way we can’t comprehend.

Before his glorification Jesus was indeed imperfect, I think in a similar sense to which Adam was imperfect before the fall.  “Imperfect” not meaning somehow “tainted”, but rather incomplete and unfulfilled. Jesus, fully man, was capable of dying—but God had already decreed in the OT that his perfect people would be undying.  Thus Jesus was not made whole until God raised him to eternal life as his King, setting the pattern for the rest of God’s people to come.  (Kutz and I have chatted about this a little here .)

Whether or not Jesus suffered throughout his life, “suffering” here ultimately refers to Jesus’ drinking of God’s cup of wrath at the cross.

Hope this is of some assistance.

As for suffering during His life.
Well, with a small touch of humour I would quote the Princess Bride.
“Life is pain Highness, anyone who says otherwise is selling something.”

Living is painful, this is the fundamental basis of at least one other religeon (Buddhism).
Without getting into the theological objections we have with that faith, it is worthy of note that the basis of belief of at least one major world view is that pain is a fundamental element of living. I think that this is a major factor in the perception of the writer of the book of Hebrews. He appears, to me, to perceive living as pain and so describes Our Lord’s experience of life as the same as what most of us cop.
Pain and suffering. I wonder also if Jesus’ experience of suffering wouldn’t be even more profound. He did descend from a great height to become a human (er yuck).

Re: Heb 5:7-9

[quote author="Ivana Kuo"]
Thirdly, in v9, is the passage suggesting that Jesus has been made perfect by his death and resurrection? If this is the case, is there a better way of expressing this verse, so that it doesn’t sound as though Jesus was not perfect before?

I’ll have a crack at it. The greek word underlying this, telos, has as much a sense of a destination reached or a task completed.

The problem comes in that the verb is a passive, this is not something that Jesus is doing but something that is done to Him. I’m not entirely sure how one would translate it in another way.

Thanks for all your replys-they’ve been very helpful!
Arthur, I will have to listen to Philip’s talks from NTE again (aside: so how many other SAers were there in 2002?). Humanity seems to tie my brain in knots.

I really can’t think at the moment so please forgive me if this isn’t of any use, but my initial reaction to v8 is that Jesus learned obedience as a result of enduring the sufferings that he did, though not necessarily only due to this. Likewise, I think we learn obedience by reading God’s word and being taught it faithfully (among other things), but we also learn it through our sufferings (although personally I prefer the former to the latter)!

My curiosity about this verse would be more around how Jesus, who was always obedient, could be learning obedience (similar to your question about Jesus always being perfect). Can you be obedient in every way, while still learning obedience? I can’t, of course, but could Jesus?

Thanks for making me think this through a bit! I shall mull it over more…

Han

A quick response. You need to set these verses in their broader context. It’s not talking about the nature of Jesus as the eternal Son, but the process by which the eternal Son became the firstborn among many brothers and our great high priest. Jesus was not perfect as saviour until He had taken on the likeness of human flesh and experienced the full consequences of sin. This is a brief paraphrase of the flow of ideas from Hebrews 1 through to this point in Hebrews 5.

As our representative he lived in a sinful world and I believe that the whole experience was one of pain and sufferring. The NIV translates verse 7 as ‘during the days of Jesus’ life on earth’. Think of his temptation in the wilderness; think of the outright opposition he faced from ‘his own’, those who should have known better; think of being labelled as being in league with Satan because he healed someone on the sabbath; etc. But all that pales into insignificance against the events of the Passion - from his arrest, witnessing his friends desert him, hearing one of his closest deny him, the beatings, the crucifixion. Both physical and spiritual sufferring of the highest degree.

And against all this He stood firm. Yes, in what He went through He learned ‘obedience’ in a new way - the way that is necessary to redeem fallen humanity from our own stupidity, ignorance and disobedience, and to heal us from the dreadful sickness that is sin, and to raise us from the death that we are in because of sin.

I understand that the Greek word that is translated as “learned” in the phrase “He learned obedience” has a meaning along the lines of learning ‘by use and practice” - see the following link on the crosswalk web site’s lexicon .

As the passage says, even though He was the eternal Son, Jesus had to do all this in order to be the mediator between God and humanity. In that sense He was made perfect through suffering. There is no hint in the passage of eternal imperfection in the character of the Son of God. But He wasn’t a ‘high priest of the order of Melchizedek’ until He had followed the path of obedience, even obedience to death on a cross.

That’s helpful Warren, and much more directly related to the passage than what I was saying!  I was talking about Jesus’ perfection merely as a human, but the passage is talking about him not only becoming human but also becoming the one perfect high priest.

Yes, cheers Warren.  A top explanation using the whole passage.