Dionysus on a Bike

Hebrews 2:5-9 – 6/18/2026

This verse from Hebrews presents us with an apparent paradox. Jesus Christ, the second person of the trinity, God the Son, is eternally God, and as such an active participant in the creation of the world. Hebrews 2:9 acknowledges that Jesus existed prior to the incarnation in a state higher than the highest created beings when it says that Jesus was made for “a little while… lower than the angels.” Then the verse goes on to say that “because of [Jesus’s] suffering of death” he was “crowned with glory and honor.”

If Jesus was from all time, from before time began, God in God’s self, a person of the one Triune God, then there was no time at which he was not “crowned with glory and honor” except for the time when he was made lower than the angels during his time on earth in the incarnation. Upon assuming his resurrection body, Jesus was once again fully in the form of the glorified God of all creation. Hebrews says that this glorification of Jesus, Jesus’s return to the honor reserved for God, is because he suffered death. One would have thought Jesus was glorified because he is God and that nothing could add to Jesus’s being God since being God from all eternity is the highest glory one could have. If we take that “because” in this verse seriously, it upends both our idea of what God is and how God relates to time and space.

Since God is not a being like us but rather being itself, God is not subject to space and time. The events that happen in the time of history are for us successive events with one following the other so that we have a past, present, and future. For God, no such division of time occurs; there is no before, during, and after for God, no past or future. All the world simply is. Thus, for God, including God the Son Jesus Christ, the incarnation is not something that happened 2000 years ago. In the same way, when humans and the rest of the temporal-material world were created, it was not the case that the incarnation was some time in the distant future for the eternal God. Therefore, the “because” in Hebrews 2:9 is not a because of temporal causality. We should not understand the verse to be saying at one time God the Son was not glorified and then became glorified because of the suffering of death. Rather, from all eternity God the son was made lower and from all eternity suffered and from all eternity was “crowned with glory and honor.”

Jesus’s suffering death then just is what it is to be God incarnate. God the Son has always been from all eternity raised up from his lowly state to one appropriate to a member of the Godhead. The “because” therefore is not the “because” of causation. Rather it is a conceptual “because” that tells us about the nature of the triune God. What it is to be God the Son is to create the world, to enter time and material world, to suffer death, and to be raised up in glory and honor. It is not as though God created the world and then was taken by surprise by humanity’s fall, which would make the incarnation and death of Christ a kind of ad hoc solution for a creation that had gone wrong. For God, God has always already suffered death and been raised up. Humanity has always already fallen and been redeemed. As it pertains to Jesus, Hebrews 2:9 shows us that what it is to be God, what it is to be “crowned with glory and honor” simply is to suffer and to be made lowly. The low and the high, glory and debasement, are not opposing or contradictory concepts for eternity, each requires the other. To be the highest, is at the same time and in the same respect, to be made lowly.

The time of eternity is difficult to grasp when our lives are caught up in the temporal. To recognize the time of eternity requires setting aside our normal way of thinking about beings who operate in terms of causation and before and after, past and future. Recognizing the time of eternity forces us to reconceptualize what it is to be God, especially when we take into account that God took on the form of a lowly servant, and that humble debasement is a conceptual source of God the Son’s glory and honor.

Reflections of a Dionysian Lutheran, comments on the daily readings of the Revised Common Lectionary by Justin Marquis