No 3: To Learn Obedience and Be Perfected

Ah, Hebrews.  The two quotations which preface this moving chapter have always stood out in the Bible for me, and the whole letter is so dear to me.  Are we not drawn back again and again to meditating upon the mystery of suffering?  Is it not one of the first questions seekers put to us?  That was certainly my experience when Susan and I had the privilege of running Alpha courses for several years.  One of my favorite teachers, Richard Rohr, writes: "Two universal and prime paths of transformation have been available to every human being God has created since Adam and Eve: great love and great suffering.  Only love and suffering are strong enough to break down our usual ego defences, crush our dual thinking, and open us to Mystery.  In my experience, they like nothing else exert the mysterious chemistry that can transmute us from a fear-based life into a love-based life.  None of us are exactly sure why.  We do know that words, even good words or totally orthodox theology, cannot achieve that by itself.  No surprise that the Christian icon of redemption is a man offering love from a crucified position."

But I also live this truth too: my redemption is God offering love from a crucified position.  Can it be, that God suffers?  Is not heaven, His dwelling place, full of praise, joy, celebration, worship - sheer happiness?  I remember Him once saying to me: "Come and join Me in My happiness".  But long before Jesus showed us the full extent of the Father's grace and love, Isaiah heard this from God: "I dwell in a high and holy place, but also with him who is crushed and depressed" (Isaiah 57:15).  Every one of us still struggles to really see God in this way: as the One who has always taken Himself into the same place as every broken, lost, suffering human being.  Part of God's 'otherness' from us is this mystery: that His suffering and His happiness are not opposites.  He is always perfectly happy, whilst feeling every possible prison of suffering.

But to dwell completely inside the agonies of our human condition, one step remained for God to take: to experience what it was like not to be God.  "He made Himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness" (Phil 2:7).  Once He had done that, there would remain nothing separating us from Him. 

There is nothing now separating me from Him - this is simply how I live now, these last five years.  But just like Jesus, I learn obedience through what I suffer.