What does it mean to say that even a Son "learned obedience"? Conventional theology often hurries past this scandal — that divinity itself required a curriculum of pain. These reflections approach this passage as a psychological document describing the inner mechanics of transformation: how the higher nature in any person is not given ready-made but must be forged through a specific kind of voluntary endurance, a process as precise and demanding as any discipline known to the contemplative traditions.
First reading
From the letter to the Hebrews — Hebrews 5:7-9
In the days of his mortal life, he poured out prayers and desperate appeals, with loud cries and tears, to the One who had power to deliver him from death — and he was heard because of his reverent surrender.
Son though he was, he learned obedience through all that he endured.
And having been brought to completion through that suffering, he became the source of everlasting salvation for all who yield themselves to him.
— Interpretation —
The passage from Hebrews, brief as it is, contains one of the most extraordinary statements in all of scripture. Let us read it again slowly: “Son though he was, he learned obedience through all that he endured.” One must pause here and let the strangeness of this settle in. He was already Son. The relationship to the higher was already established. And yet — he learned. He was not exempt from learning. He was not finished. Something had to be completed in him, and the word used is striking: “having been brought to completion through that suffering.” The Greek is teleiōtheis — brought to the telos, the aim, the full realization. Suffering was the means of completion.
Now, what does this say to us about the inner meaning of transformation?
We must be very careful here. There is a sentimental reading of suffering that says: suffer, and you will be purified. Endure pain, and God will reward you. This is not at all what this passage is about. The text does not say he suffered and was rewarded. It says he learned obedience through what he suffered. That is, the suffering was the classroom. It was the specific and irreplaceable medium through which a particular capacity was developed — the capacity to yield, to obey, which in its root sense means to hear (Latin ob-audire, to listen toward). Obedience here is not submission to an external authority. It is the development of an inner hearing, an inner receptivity, that can only be born under pressure.
This is something we can verify in our own experience if we are honest. Ordinary life, comfortable life, mechanical life, does not teach us to hear anything new. We hear what we already expect. We see what confirms what we already believe. The first nature in us — what Nicoll, drawing on Fourth Way language, calls the “first man” — is a closed system. It recycles its own reactions endlessly: the same resentments, the same fears, the same self-justifications. It is remarkably efficient at protecting itself from any influence that might change it.
Suffering disrupts this. But — and this is the critical distinction — only a certain kind of suffering, received in a certain way. The text says Christ offered prayers and desperate appeals “with loud cries and tears.” This is not stoic indifference. This is full engagement with the agony. And then the text says “he was heard because of his reverent surrender.” The word often translated as “godly fear” or “reverent submission” is eulabeia — a careful, watchful, attentive reverence. It is the opposite of panic. It is also the opposite of numbness. It is suffering held in a state of conscious attention.
Here we arrive at something very practical. Most of our suffering is wasted. It is wasted because we suffer mechanically. We react, we blame, we collapse into self-pity, we rage against circumstances, we narrate our victimhood. All of this is suffering in sleep. It produces nothing new. It merely deepens the grooves of the first nature. But there is another possibility. One can suffer consciously. One can hold the pain without immediately converting it into complaint or meaning-making. One can remain present to it, awake within it, without either resisting it or being consumed by it. This is what eulabeia points toward — a reverent, watchful endurance.
And what is learned through this? Obedience — which is to say, the capacity to hear something one has never heard before. The capacity to receive an influence from above, from beyond the closed system of the first nature. This is what Nicoll understood as the birth of the “new man” — not a reward for good behavior, but the result of a specific inner work carried out under specific conditions of pressure.
Notice too that the passage says Christ “became the source of everlasting salvation for all who yield themselves to him” (Hebrews 5:9). He became this after the completion. He could not transmit what he had not yet fully realized. This is a law. One cannot give what one has not become. The capacity to help others awaken depends entirely on the depth of one’s own transformation.
And so we are left with a remarkable teaching: that the highest thing in us — the part that is already Son, already connected to what is above — must nevertheless learn. It must pass through fire. Not because God is cruel, but because the capacity to hear, to truly hear, to become inwardly obedient to a higher order of reality, simply cannot be developed any other way. Comfort does not produce it. Knowledge does not produce it. Only the patient, watchful, reverent endurance of what must be endured — only this brings the new man to completion.
The question, then, is not whether we will suffer. That is already determined. The question is whether we will suffer mechanically, in sleep, producing nothing — or whether we will suffer with attention, with that careful inner listening, and allow something to be learned in us that could not be learned in any other school.
Scripture: Unified English Version
