Prior to the calendar reforms of the 1970s, this fifth Sunday of Lent was known as Passion Sunday, and hence it and the remainder of Lent are called Passiontide. Even the modern calendar suggests marking this season-within-the-season through the veiling of images in the church.
Despite what one might think from the title, Passion Sunday never included, as far as I can tell, a reading of the Passion story itself—for that we have to wait until next week, hearing one version on Sunday and another on Friday. The name comes from a subtler shift in focus. While the earlier part of Lent dealt more with the personal struggle against sin exemplified by Jesus’s forty days in the wilderness, we now turn toward the events of Holy Week, when Jesus’ struggle against sin reaches cosmic heights.
So we don’t get the Passion itself in our readings today, but we get a lot of not-so-subtle foreshadowing of the Passion. Jesus speaks of the need to give our life up for love, and of his own willingness to be “lifted up from the earth” to do his Father’s will, even when his heart is troubled. Even more directly, the Letter to the Hebrews speaks of Jesus’ perfection and obedience through suffering.
“Although he was a Son,” according to Hebrews, “he learned obedience through what he suffered.”
Hebrews is an extraordinary letter—probably my favorite book in the New Testament. It’s really not a letter, but an address, a sermon, even, that gives a sophisticated picture of Christ, taking into account a wide variety of perspectives, from neo-Platonic philosophy to the Old Testament to the contemporary ritual of the Temple at Jerusalem.
How could the Son “learn obedience through” suffering? Suffering, passion, is change. In traditional ethics, the “passions” aren’t just negative feelings, but all kinds of emotions that change us—fear, affection, hatred, joy. And if you know anything about Christian theology, you will know that to speak of change in relation to God is fraught with difficulty. God is by definition unchanging. That is central to what it means for God to be God—perfectly transcendent, entirely beyond all change. And yet when Hebrews speaks of the Son, it speaks of the incarnate Son, who, even while remaining divine, has subjected himself to all of the consequences of existence in time. The Son, as a human being, is subject to change, to experience, to passion.
Thomas Aquinas writes, “Christ knew what obedience was from all eternity, but he learned obedience in practice through the severities he underwent . . . in his passion and death” (See “Commentary on Hebrews,” quoted in The Navarre Bible: Hebrews, 68.)
That seems right. It’s not that Jesus wasn’t obedient before—being the divine Son, there was never a time when he was not obedient. But for Jesus as a human being, obedience had to run its course in time.
When we think about obedience, usually we just think it means “doing what you’re told” when it comes to relationships with authority—whether it’s a child toward his parents, an employee toward his boss, a citizen toward the law and its enforcers. But these versions of obedience make obedience into something entirely external—in a certain way, arbitrary and circumstantial. This is why we’re suspicious of any obedience that presumes something more. We tend to resist anything like universal obedience—the obedience due to a monarch, for example—that rests in a person rather than in an office. With the exception of children and parents, we prefer the kind of obedience that we choose. That is, I freely choose to be part of this society, and so I agree to abide by its rules; I choose to be part of this company, and so I choose to follow its instituted leadership.
Again, those are all legitimate forms of obedience. But they point to something deeper, something that is not arbitrary and external, but that is part of the fabric of reality. When we speak of the divine Son’s obedience to his Father, we do not speak of his obedience to a law exterior to his identity; we speak, rather, of a coherent internal identity that is always ordered to another person. If the Son were “disobedient” to the Father, it’s not that he would be breaking some divine law that he previously agreed to follow; he would simply no longer be who he is.
That’s speaking of God, and the divine nature…. far, far above our highest thoughts. Human obedience is something else, because human nature is not eternal—we can change, and grow, and suffer. But I think the divine Son’s eternal obedience points us to another possible kind of obedience for us as well, and that’s the kind we see prophesied in Jeremiah 31: “I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts.”
God’s final goal for us is not just that we obey the divine law as an external command, but that our obedience become inextricable from our identity as human beings. Our goal is to follow the law so perfectly that we no longer have to follow the law—that we become the law, and the law becomes us. That is the perfection of humanity that Hebrews describes in Jesus. Jesus was already perfect, but human perfection is a perfection in time, and so not all perfection can simply be given from the start; authentic human perfection has to develop and learn and grow, and so it was that Jesus’ obedience through suffering was the perfection of that aspect of his humanity. Jesus didn’t just believe and obey the word of God as an external command to be followed in theory. He followed it in practice, making obedience part of history and experience, part of his identity as a human being.
What does this mean for us?
If Jesus, the incarnate Son of God, had to learn obedience by experience, so must we. It’s really that simple, though we often wish it were otherwise. If Jesus, the incarnate Son of God, had to learn obedience by experience, so must we.
Because we’re suspicious of obedience that we didn’t choose, we think that obedience to God should be somehow clear and straightforward. It should be natural and easy to follow God, and so we get annoyed when people or institutions—or even the Bible—suggest otherwise. We put on our skeptic’s cap and wait to be convinced. Certainly we’re not going to change our habits or suppress our desires or alter our tastes just for the sake of some obedience that we do not understand. But if Jesus, the incarnate Son of God, had to learn obedience by experience, then so must we.
Being human, and being weak, we need to accept the frustrating, difficult-to-understand obedience before God can lead us into the deeper obedience of heaven. It would be nice if our children started out rational, listening calmly to our every instruction, saying, “Yes, Father, I understand what you say, and therefore I will refrain from running out into the street,” or “Thank you, Mommy, for your explanation about burns; I will stay away from the oven because I now know that it is the right thing to do.” Is that how it works? Of course not. We have to grab the kid who’s running into the street; we have to force him not to stick his hand into the oven; we have to put her down for a nap whether she thinks she wants one or not. Hopefully, and with lots of prayers and lots of luck, these little heathens will learn something about the nature of things. They will learn a deeper kind of obedience.
Morally, spiritually, we don’t start out any better. Jesus was, I think, the rational toddler who listened to his mommy. And if even he had to learn, from experience, what obedience felt like, dare we think that our obedience will be easy? Dare we stand around and demand to be convinced when God is trying to rescue us from the hell of our own choices?
Learning obedience is hard. It takes time, and change, and development. That is one of the reasons that our calendar hits us again, year after year, with this step-by-step walk through the life of Christ, with the opportunity to experience what he did for us in his passion, death, and resurrection. It takes time for it to sink in. And in the same way, we dare not imagine that those basic moral imperatives of the Christian life will get easier, or make more sense to us, until we submit to the hard obedience of learning them. Things like sacrificial giving, and loving those we don’t like, and treating the stranger like Christ, and always telling the truth, and treating our bodies as the temple of the Holy Spirit—those are hard things to believe in, much less to practice.
The only option is to do them, with patience. And if we can learn the obedience of a toddler, maybe, eventually, God can teach us the obedience of a grown-up. From there we can proceed to that transcendent obedience that is beyond submission to external rules and in the realm of true love.
We’d like a shortcut. But the only way to love is through obedience. Jesus leads the way.