In bringing many sons and daughters to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through what he suffered. 

It is as much a heresy to deny the full humanity of Christ as it is repudiate His total divinity.

If a Jesus not quite God is, as someone put it, ‘a bridge broken on the farther side’, a Jesus not quite man is a bridge broken on this side of the chasm.

At first glance, verse 10 may appear strange. ‘But we thought Jesus always was perfect,’ we say. Quite right. He was, and is. But what this is talking about is the perfecting, or completing, of His human experience. The One who was to die to rescue human beings, and then represent them as Priest before God had to be flesh and blood. He had to fully share their humanity. This is something we’re going to see in the remainder of the chapter.

After what has gone before it, it is not surprising that chapter 2 concludes in this way:

 For surely it is not angels he helps, but Abraham’s descendants. 17 For this reason he had to be made like them, fully human in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people. 18 Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.

So it is in this sense that Jesus was perfected – that He was given a fully human experience. He knows intimately what it is to suffer and be tempted. He became like us in every way – apart from the sinning.