“Proof, power and perfection”
By Rev. Michael Stonhouse
Meditation – Tuesday, January 9, 2024
Hebrews 2:1-10 (Forward, p. 72) CEV p. 1259
The author of the letter to the Hebrews who, unfortunately, is unknown, goes to great lengths in delineating how Jesus is superior to so many things that his readers would have prized from their time within Judaism. Therein he mentions several of them, the angels for instance, or Moses and Joshua, or the Temple, the High Priest and the entire sacrificial system. Jesus, he says, is greater than these, and therefore, is more to be trusted and depended upon.
In today’s passage, our author begins with the question of proof. In other words, how do we know this to be true. First off, he suggests that the message spoken by the angels has been proved to be true. Now, just what that message was, or how it was proven to be true, I don’t have the foggiest notion, but presumably his audience knew. Then he asserts that those who heard the message proved it to be true. Again, we can’t be certain just how that came about. And then, finally, he says that God Himself, Jesus, proved it to be true by ‘working all kinds of powerful miracles and signs, and sending His Holy Spirit. Now, then, these are evidences that we, even today, can relate to and affirm. These latter things are well attested within the Biblical record.
From there, our author continues with the idea of power. God’s power, he alleges, was manifest, not in the angels, but in Jesus Christ. Furthermore, he asserts that we, as Jesus’ friends and disciples, will one day share in this power. Pretty heady stuff, yes? Pretty unbelievable.
And, finally, he says something that, to those of us who are unfamiliar with the Greek, seems quite uncomprehensive. He states that Jesus was ‘made perfect by the things that he suffered.’ ‘What,’ you say, “Was Jesus not already perfect? What in the world can our author be getting at?’ Well, we are accustomed to thinking of perfection in abstract or philosophical terms, but this is not all its sense in Hebrew. In Hebrew it means something or someone who is absolutely fitted for the task at hand, fully adequate, fully able to accomplish it. And our author is saying that Jesus entered into this state simply because of what He suffered.
William Barclay, in his superb little commentary, suggests three ways that Jesus was thereby able to do this:
a) Firstly, that through His suffering He could identify with us in ways that no non-sufferer ever could. Unlike the gods of the Greek and Roman pantheon, who could maintain a detached existence, apart from their human subject, Jesus entered right into it, in all its fulness. There is nothing that we experience that He has not already gone through.
b) Secondly, that though His suffering He can sympathize with us. He knows what it’s like because He’s been there.
c) And thirdly, because of all this, He can help us in ways that no one else can. He has met these trials and tribulations and overcome them, fitted out with none other than the same resources that we have at our disposal, and so can be our model and guide as we face them.
And so, all this said to his original audience—and to us today as well—that Jesus is the only one worth turning to and trusting with our lives. He is superior to every other person or thing that we might be tempted to turn to.
Forward notes: “It was fitting that God, for whom and through whom all things exist, in bringing many children to glory, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through sufferings” (verse 10).
“During a severe bout of depression, I began to read Jesus’s story very differently. At first, I wondered, ‘Why me?’ Why am I afflicted with this pain? But then I looked again at Jesus’s life, the pioneer of our salvation made perfect through suffering, and my question shifted to, ‘Why not me?’
“Jesus pleads with God in the garden of Gethsemane to take the cup of suffering from him. But inevitably, Jesus repeats his mother’s words when she was asked the unimaginable, ‘Thy will be done,’ and he lives into that purpose by God’s grace.
“God does not promise a life without suffering; God promises to always be present even through suffering. God gives humanity the greatest honour by squeezing God’s self through Jesus into a human suit. The psalmist
asks, ‘What are human beings that you are mindful of them?’ We have an answer.”
Moving Forward: “When you struggle, consider asking, ‘Why not me?’ Does this shift in perspective change how you approach the difficulties?”