This past Sunday I was asked to preach on a difficult text: Hebrews 5:5-10. The text includes the startling truth, “All though he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered.” I began by telling the congregation that this is a sermon best whispered because like Peter, who was rebuked by Jesus for questioning his suffering, I have more questions than answers, but I don’t want to sin. I don’t want Satan to use me. Because of this I decided not to preach. My wife called what I was doing an “anti-sermon” but I decided to call it a reflection. The Apostle Paul tells us that this side of God’s kingdom we “see in a mirror dimly” (1 Cor. 13:12). Acknowledging my lack of sight in discerning the clarity of God’s word and the difficulties of our world seems easy enough, but often the older I get the more my sight seems to fade. Even talking about suffering points to our own present fragility and limits, both as subjects and as students of God.
I went on to explain that Jesus defined obedience as being compassionate as God is compassionate. How is such obedience learned?
According to our text, what elements are critical in Jesus’s learning of compassion amidst suffering - obedience to the Father?
1. Jesus learns to acknowledge suffering honestly
He doesn’t pontificate about the causes of suffering, argue a particular view of good and evil, or defend God. The text says that He responds in tears.
On the one hand, Jesus refuses to engage in a common sort of Christian stoicism – indifference to suffering – “keeping a stiff upper lip.” A state of being that I call “holy lying” where due to some vision of spirituality we choose to deny the realities of life. We here it in the “I’m okays” and “fines”. Now, this is a difficult truth. And I in no way wish to chastise those who are suffering for failing to somehow fall apart. What I want to say is that God recognizes that suffering hurts and that Jesus invites us to acknowledge it to God. To do so, is to confess a deeply human truth that we are fragile creatures, vulnerable to things beyond our control.
On the other hand, if Jesus weeps we must remember that not only is such an expression human but also divine. If Jesus weeps at suffering then on a fundamental level it means that suffering is not the way it should be. That God doesn’t revel and traffic in painful circumstance or horror for our good.
If Jesus weeps as one who suffers he also weeps for those who suffer. To weep with those who suffer is to express the fundamental ache of God for those who need redemption. I’m not saying that God is not providential nor in control – I willingly confess that these things are true. But to weep with those who suffer is a fundamental aspect of compassion. It is a form of suffering and a critical part of God’s redemptive plan. BUT the fact that Jesus weeps surely challenges any glib explanation of God’s providence amidst suffering. We must always remember that the God who uses suffering is also the one who weeps over it.
If Jesus’ fundamental response to suffering was to choose to share in our sufferings, to acknowledge the difficulties of suffering, to weep with us and willingly enter the dark uncharted spaces of our lives, then what do we make of the miraculous, the desire to end suffering though acts of miraculous power? What does it mean to be a healer?
Well, if Jesus’ miracles were the central event of the Gospels a cynic might rightly point out that most people during Jesus’ day were not cured. Mark 1:34; 3:10. It is true that Book of Revelation tells us that ultimately suffering will have no place in God’s kingdom where he will wipe away every tear, death will be no more and mourning, crying, even pain will vanish (Rev. 21:3-4). Yet, there are many who are so eager for this reality that they refuse to weep because they want suffering gone right now. They believe that what is required is power and that suffering is entirely evil and irredeemable.
I don’t have an answer for this tension but understand that Jesus’s obedience to the Father, his compassion for those who suffer and the healing of some while others wait brings us back to the mystery of God’s love. He did not cure to prove, to impress, or to convince. His cures can never be separated from his being with us. This brings us back to the great mystery that the expression of God’s love is not that our pain is taken away, but that God first wants to share that pain with us – that our salvation is because of divine solidarity. If God’s compassion in Jesus Christ is located in solidarity first and foremost rather than any expression of great power or authority, then Jesus’s obedience invites us to be as close to each other as God is to us. It means that no matter what happens we are to be present – healing, no healing – the test of our faithfulness as a Church will not be how we respond to suffering but those who suffer. In the movie Patch Adams, Robin Williams character says it well, “If you treat the disease you win or your lose. If you treat the person you always win.”
This side of heaven, what is important is not the cure of the sick, but the deep compassion that moved Jesus to these cures, his presence with us in our suffering. We would do well to remember the response of Job’s friends to his plight:
“Now when Job’s three friends heard of all these troubles that had come upon him, each of them set out from his home . . . They met together to go and console and comfort him. When they saw him from a distance, they did not recognize him and they raised their voices and wept aloud; they tore their robes and threw dust in the air upon their heads. They sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great.” Job 2:11-13.
It is when they stop weeping and start speaking that are confronted by God and called to repent. The same is often true for us.
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