Discipline.

A Sermon for the First Sunday of Lent

March 9, 2025 at Holy Communion

Hebrews 5:8, Deuteronomy 8:1–10

“As a man disciplines his son, the Lord your God disciplines you” (Deuteronomy 8:5). In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. ☩ Amen.

I have a biblical puzzle for you, one that came up a few weeks ago at the Wednesday Men’s Fellowship, and which has everything to do with our readings today. We were reading the Book of Hebrews. In chapter 5, it says that “although Jesus was God’s Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered” (v 8). Right from the very beginning, Hebrews is very clear that Jesus is not an ordinary man created and born in time, but the eternal Son and Word of God coming into the world. He is God, and becomes man as well to act as our high priest, our representative before God.

So here’s the puzzle: if Jesus is God, how can he “learn obedience”? Normally, if we heard about someone “learning obedience through suffering” we would assume that the person had suffered because if disobedience and learned from experience not to go astray again. But that can’t be the case with Jesus. As the Son of God, he shares a single will with the Father and the Spirit. He already does only and exactly the will of God. How can he learn obedience?

I’m not going to string this out on you. I found an answer in a commentary I almost never consult. It says that, although Jesus was a Son, “yet like his \[human] brethren he must tread the path which attains wisdom through suffering, \[which is] divinely appointed for men. … He learned by his experience of suffering what obedience to God involves in man’s life on earth” (Peake’s Commentary, 1964; p. 1012).

In other words, Jesus learned what it is like for human beings to obediently tread the path of suffering. Suffering is part of the human experience, and human obedience to God involves humility and patience to bear the yoke which life sets on our shoulders. Jesus embraces the human experience of suffering for our sake, so that he can fully identify with us human beings (Hebrews 2:17), so that he can fully and perfectly represent humanity before God.

We’ve heard this morning that, after his baptism, Jesus went into the wilderness for a period of fasting, prayer, and facing temptation. In what is surely a great understatement, the evangelist tells us that “after fasting forty days and forty nights, Jesus was hungry” (Matthew 4:2). Here again we could, actually, identify a Bible puzzle just like our last one: if Jesus is the eternal Word of God, how can he be hungry? How can God need anything? And the answer is the same: no, the Word of God didn’t need anything, but he came into the world to experience everything we experience as one of us, so that he could act as our representative before God.

The point is that suffering is human. Hunger is human. God embraces human experience. By his own choice the Word of God identifies with human beings for whom suffering was not a choice, but just a fact of their existence.

So the question is not so much, “Why does Jesus suffer?”—since Jesus must experience everything that human beings suffer—but “Why do human beings suffer?” And that is a thorny question if there ever was one.

That question came up the week before last when I visited the Manor to lead a Bible study. I’ll tell you what I told them, something I have told many people on many occasions. There is, as you may know, an entire book of the Bible apparently devoted to this question. In Job, the title character suffers profoundly, and it’s not because he has done anything wrong. He cries out to God, but doesn’t get an answer. In fact, no answer is provided. In the Bible’s book on suffering, the question about why people suffer is never answered. It seems that the “why” of suffering is not something God needs us to know, as much as we might want it.

But Job still has a lesson: God is very concerned with how we suffer. When we suffer, do we take it as a lesson in the smallness of human life in the context of the mystery of existence? What Job learns is not why suffering happens, but how to accept that God’s wisdom is beyond our own. In short, he learns humility. That is what Jesus acquires when he suffers in the flesh: he learns what it is to be humbled by suffering. He learns how to suffer and yet not to break faith with his heavenly Father, commending his suffering back to God to the very end.

Our Old Testament Lesson approaches a similar idea by comparing suffering to parental discipline. As the nation of Israel was wandering in the wilderness, Moses says, “he humbled you and let you hunger” (Deuteronomy 8:3), even while he provided for them (v 4). The purpose of this, he says—in words which Jesus himself quotes in our Gospel reading—”that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord” (v 3). And this shows that “as a man disciplines his son, the Lord your God disciplines you” (v 5). For the Israelites, hunger and uncertainty was the way the Lord raised them up into the virtues he wanted for them: humility and dependence on God. He never let their hunger utterly destroy them, but allowed it for a time so that they could learn patience. He taught them obedience by the things they suffered.

Wisdom is “the fear of the Lord,” and “the knowledge of the Holy One is insight” (Proverbs 9:10). And wisdom comes by suffering. The point for us is that we will discover what it means to live in communion with God as we tread the way of suffering with humility and patience.

One application of this principle, of course, is to take on some bearable amount of voluntary suffering as a spiritual discipline. Not only have the great saints of old fasted, as we discussed on Wednesday, but others have voluntarily embraced cold, tiredness, and poverty in the confidence that this would grow in them the humility which is true wisdom.

But we don’t need to go looking for suffering. Suffering, we have already said, simply is what it means to be human. We don’t need to seek out suffering. Suffering will find us. The grace in it is that, when suffering finds us, we can also look for Christ coming to us, seeking us out. He embraces us in our particular suffering just as he embraced all men universally by his representative passion and death. Holy Week will come, and we will read ourselves onto Christ, seeing in Christ’s suffering the mystery of our own humanity, but transfigured and ultimately vindicated by total trust in the Father.