Hebrews is a tough book for many reasons — its imagery and themes are difficult. It is a sermon once delivered to a first-century church suffering persecution. Their lives were getting harder under the formalized, institutional persecution of Rome under Nero. In the fourth chapter, the preacher explains that God would not necessarily take hardship away, but that in Jesus Christ, our Great High Priest, we have someone who understands what it means to suffer. We don’t have a cold and distant God, but one who fully understands what we face, day-to-day and in our worst moments.
It’s good that Jesus sympathizes with our struggles, but that doesn’t necessarily make our pain hurt less. When someone is suffering and you tell them, “I understand,” it’s nice to hear, but it doesn’t take the pain away. How do we face that pain?
I’m going to use the word “pain” because I couldn’t find a better word. C.S. Lewis called it “the problem of pain,” and I’m using that same word to refer to all the hardships of life in various forms — grief, the frustration of spiraling circumstances, or simply the difficulty of doing the right thing. Pain is pain, whatever form it takes, and part of being human is figuring out how to handle it.
The oldest question humans have asked, and perhaps one of the most important, is: What do we do with our pain? In modern life, we have two basic answers. One is to avoid pain — if it’s hard or hurts, run from it, and seek pleasure instead. The second response is to summon some courage and just push through the pain, enduring it without dealing with it. But how well is either answer working for us?
These two answers aren’t new. In the ancient world, the philosopher Epicurus said that the goal of life was to avoid pain and, when you couldn’t, to drown it in pleasure. The Stoics, like Marcus Aurelius, took the opposite view, saying we should tough it out and endure. In Acts 17:18, Paul is in Athens arguing against these philosophies, preaching Jesus and the resurrection as a different answer. The preacher in Hebrews makes the same claim, that Jesus provides a better answer to pain than any priest or philosopher ever could.
Why talk about priests when we talk about pain? In the ancient world, priests acted on behalf of the people, offering sacrifices to God for their sins. They symbolically took the pain and sin of people and dealt with it through ritual and sacrifice. But even priests had their own weaknesses. The Old Testament system could only go so far because priests, being human, had their own struggles and sins. The idea of a priest who could take away pain was ultimately a useful fiction. He could not transfer your pain and sin to a goat anymore than he could his own.
In contrast, Jesus did what no other priest could. “In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence” (Hebrews 5:7). Jesus experienced pain and suffering just as we do. He prayed with tears, asking for deliverance, but although his prayer was heard, the suffering was not taken away. What we learn here is that while God hears our prayers, He doesn’t always remove the pain.
The Epicureans sought pleasure to escape pain, and the Stoics sought strength to endure it. But what no one questioned is whether pain could be useful or good. Pain can be a teacher. “Although he was a son, he learned obedience through what he suffered” (Hebrews 5:8). We often view hardship as something that makes us less. But what if pain makes us more? What if the experience of passing through pain makes us something we could never have been otherwise?
Jesus didn’t just tell us how to handle pain; He showed us. Even in His resurrected body, He still bore His scars, the trophies of his pain. His scars didn’t make Him less; they made Him more. And in the same way, our suffering can perfect us. The Lord’s brother says it this way: “Count it all joy when you meet trials of various kinds, for the testing of your faith produces steadfastness … that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing” (James 1:2-4).
Jesus has not come to take away pain but to show us how to live through it. We can follow Him through our suffering and find strength beyond ourselves in God because Jesus, our Great High Priest, leads the way.