learning obedience

Perhaps there is no more stunning verse in Scripture than this: Son though [Jesus] was, He learned obedience from what He suffered (Hebrews 5:8).  Though He was the infinite, omnipotent, omniscient Son of God, Jesus nonetheless took on the limits of space, time, and experience in becoming one of us.  He could have taken an adult body, as Adam and Eve received in their creation, and He could have hastened to the Cross.  But He didn't.  He experienced an ordinary human life from gestation to birth to youth to adulthood.  Learning and growing and suffering are a part of life for all of us, as will be death.  Jesus experienced all of that with us, and for us.

And though as God He didn't need to learn anything, yet in His humanity He learned obedience to His Father through what He suffered.  He transformed what we experience as anticipatory death into a gateway to Life in increasing abundance.

This Lent, and throughout our days, may we join Jesus in learning this faithful obedience, and particularly so in our suffering, gradually discovering, as He did through the years of His earthly Life, that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been to us, as that same Spirit was given to Jesus (Romans 5:3-5)