Why did Jesus need to suffer?

In Hebrews 2:10, God is “bringing many sons to glory” by “making the author of their salvation perfect through suffering.” 

It was the kind of suffering that at one point Jesus was “so crushed by distress and misery that it felt like life itself was coming to an end” (Matthew 26:38). It hit him out of the blue in the Garden of Gethsemane just before his crucifixion. It was sudden and totally unexpected too. No Old Testament prophecy had said this would happen to him, and no record of God saying anything to him personally about it either. He’d had no warning or time to prepare. 

So God put Jesus through the worst thing that happens to us humans, which is being hit by something we’re totally unprepared for that makes no sense to us – making us wonder, just like Job and Old Testament Israel, what on earth God’s up to. The Israelites’ response, however, was to “turn away from the living God,” Hebrew 3:12. Their “hearts hardened against him” (8). 

But what did Jesus do when he felt his mind was exploding and he was reduced to uncontrollable tears of anguish, and even sweating blood? His response, Hebrews 5:7, was “reverent submission.” Unlike the Israelites, Jesus prayed desperately to his Father to “save him from death” – the death, that is, of his own heart hardening. I imagine in his “loud cries” that Jesus included John 5:20, that his Father loved him and would show him what he was up to; and John 12:50, that in everything his Father commanded him to do or put him through, it was all “leading to eternal life.” How crucial it was, then, that his Father “save him from the death” of losing sight of his Father’s love and eternal purpose. 

And his Father heard him all right, because Jesus’ reverent submission in the toughest of situations was exactly what was needed to make him “the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him,” Hebrews 5:9. That’s because Jesus had done the very thing himself that leads to eternal life: that in the worst possible circumstances to hit a human, he’d turned to his Father as the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him. In other words, Jesus had shown us in his own life the way to go. 

But how on earth is it possible for us to follow in his footsteps? Hebrews answers that: it’s by “Sharing in Christ”….(next blog)