Honor Your Father and Your Mother

       Joy Davidman, the wife of C.S. Lewis, retells the old Grimm Fairy Tale in Smoke on the Mountain – her marvelous book on the Ten Commandments:  “Once upon a time, there was a little old man.  His eyes blinked and his hands trembled; when he ate he clattered the silverware distressingly, missed his mouth with his spoon as often as not, and dribbled a bit of his food on the tablecloth.  Now he lived with his married son, having nowhere else to live, and his son’s wife...who knew that in-laws should not be tolerated in a woman’s home. 

       So she and her husband took the little old man gently but firmly by the arm and led him to a corner of the kitchen.  There they set him on a stool and gave him food, what there was of it, in an earthenware bowl.  From then on he always ate in the corner, blinking at the table with wistful eyes.  

       One day his hand trembled rather more than usual, and her earthenware bowl fell and broke.

       “If you are a pig,” said the daughter-in law, “you must eat out of a trough.”  So they made him a little wooden trough, and he got his meals in that.

       These people had a four-year-old son of whom they were very fond.  One suppertime the young man noticed his boy playing intently with some bits of wood and asked what he was doing.

       “I’m making a trough,” he said smiling up for approval, “to feed you and Mama out of when I get big.”

       The man and his wife looked at each other for a while and didn’t say anything.  Then they cried a little.  Then they went to the corner and took the little old man by the arm and led him back to the table.  They sat him in a comfortable chair and gave him his food on a plate, and from then on nobody ever scolded when he clattered or spilled or broke things.

       Davidman comments, “This anecdote has the simplicity of the old simple days – but perhaps crudity is what is needed to illustrate the naked and crude point of the fifth commandment:  honor your parents lest you children dishonor you.   Or, in other words, a society that destroys the family destroys itself.” 

       The fifth commandment is "honor your father and your mother that your lives may be long in the land God shall give you."  This command comes directly after four commandments which lay down our duty to God.  It is the first of six commandments that deal with our relationship to other people.

       That makes sense.  Our fathers and our mothers are the first people we meet.  Before we can know our duty toward strangers we first have to know how to honor our parents.  God says that it our moral duty to honor those who gave us life.  Whatever else we may feel about them, however deep our love or intense our anger, however rich our gratitude or bitter our resentment, we are called to respect the people who gave us existence and who God gave us to be our first teachers and guides.    

       Now I can almost hear the objections that some of you are feeling.  You have had your own experience or know of others who had parents who were anything but honorable.  I agree.  I know all the stories. And as a pastor, I’ve taken a sad part in some of them. But we still have to grapple with what God's word says. 

       We also need to see clearly what the commandment doesn’t say.  The commandment flat-out ignores the warm affection parents often want from their children.  Affection has to be earned in away honor does not.  God does not tell children to feel happy about their parents.  He does not tell them to like being with parents on camping trips or to relish having them over for dinner.  He does not mandate happy emotional relationships.  All that God commands is honor.    

      What is honor?

      Honor is the unsentimental moral center of the relationship between any child and his or her parents.  It’s not a Hallmark Card but a moral commitment to respect and long-term loyalty.  So honor comes a little more from the military academy than dinner at home on Mother's Day. 

       The Hebrew word for honor, kabad, is something like "weightiness".  To honor a person, means to respect them as one who carries a great deal of weight in your life.  You let them have influence and dignity for you.

       This commandment also does not tell parents to honor their children.  Now children do deserve tremendous respect as precious human beings.  Paul talks about this in Ephesians and Colossians.  Those sermons are on our web site.  But this commandment is not about our worth as individuals.  It is about family structure and the role of parents as leaders.

       So what does this commandment mean to us today?

       Well let me recognize right here that we live in a different world than the world where this command was given.  In those days, the mind of youth was often made up for it by the limitations of the age.  The rural society of the Hebrews provided kids no place to go and hardly anything to do – kind of like, I am told, Moorpark on a Friday Night when there’s no football game.  So Hebrew kids were bored.  They sat around wondering why Wii or Guitar Hero hadn't been invented yet. 

       But a Hebrew child also fit naturally into the family.  Children learned to relate to adults as they saw their parent relating to grandparents.  Hebrew children were neither a nuisance nor an emotional luxury, but part of a productive team.  They helped the family make a go of the farm.  Above all, they were the next link between God's covenant of the past and His promise for the future.  A child got his or her selfhood from the family.  He was not just an individual named Derek or Lance but a person identified by his parent's name, Lev-Son-of-Ashur.

       That doesn’t mean everything as always rosy.  The people of those ancient days still had to deal with hostility, objections, and misunderstanding between parents and children.  Think about it.  There’s a reason this commandment was given.  The issues were the same.  It's just that the outward conditions today are very different.

       The key question is why should society be made up of families at all?  Some modern experts say that families are here to provide emotional support in a world that does not much care about us – that the family is a "haven in a heartless world -- a refuge from society.  In the family, they say, we have a place where we can be coddled, cuddled, and comforted in intimacy.

       The Bible, however, sees the family as much more than a therapy center for harried spirits.  The Bible sees the family as the God-ordained place for the nurture of children into what is right and true about life.  Parents are to see to the child's initiation into faith and morals.  The two go together.  Morality has to do with what is truly important and right about life.  And what is right about life completely depends on what is true about God.  So the heart of the family is the parents' duty to pass on the moral and spiritual reality of life to their children.

       What God says in this commandment about the family and parental authority raises a lot of  questions about a modern liberal premise about family life.  Some modern liberal wisdom tells us that we should respect children's sovereign rights to make up their own minds about religion and morals.  In this creed, everyone in the family is an individual with equal authority.  And since nobody is an expert on belief, a parent has no right to foist beliefs on his or her children.  Authority has to rest on proven expertise.  If a mother lacks it, she should defer to an expert who has it.  Only an authoritarian parent, we are told, would send children into the world with a bias about morals and or a prejudice toward any faith.  The role of parents, we are told, is to keep their children in a moral and religious vacuum until they are ready to decide for themselves.  Their idea is that  the only really important thing a parent may teach about these matters is that they are not important enough for a parent fervently to care that the child continue in the faith and morality of the family. 

       But from the perspective of the Bible, this family philosophy is a disaster.  The reason the Bible gives for the family as the basic component of the human community is that the family is the God ordained setting for a child to learn core values.  A   family is not a spill over from our romantic passions.  It’s not a product of society's requirement that parents provide their offspring with bed and board.  It’s not a little circle of people deriving emotional support from living together.  It's not a social means of keeping children in control -- one which could become obsolete if a social planner were to find a better one. 

        No.  The family is rooted in the Creator's design for the ongoing nurture of children who bring faith and moral value into the next generation.  To undermine, neglect, or replace the family is to wreck the core community that makes all other human community possible.  Parents cannot give up authority without robbing their children -- and eventually society -- of strengths neither children or society can do without. 

        The first thing a child loses in a home without authority is a strong sense of his or her own identity.  The fact that suicide is now the second most common cause of adolescent deaths in the U.S. is connected to the loss of authority in the American home.  We all need to know who we are and here we belong.  That gives us a sturdy support against the despair and joylessness of people who can no longer find their real selves among the fantasies of their minds.

       The loss of authority within the family also impacts children's ability to live with authority in other places in society.  There is always authority – even if it’s just a faster gun.  Parents who give strong and purposeful leadership teach their children to live with and recognize true authority -- and to reject authority that is false.  Permissive parents rob society of people who can distinguish genuine authority from its counterfeits. 

        Parents who don't stand for something tend to produce children who fall for anything.  Young people who never live with real authority, and who are not taught the truth about faith and values, are not ready to move into a world in which many pretenders to authority will compete for control of their spirits. 

       Sociologist Peter Berger observes that "Weak families produce uprooted individuals, unsure of their direction and therefore searching for some authority.  They often find it in authoritarian substitutes that are all too ready not only to lead but to control."

       There's an alternative – God’s alternative:  "Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land the Lord your God gives you."  In other words, life lived the way God commands is a fulfilled, gratified, meaningful, complete life.  It is life lived in harmony with God's order.  We don't honor parents because of their accomplishments, or because they were or are great parents, but because we have God's precious gift through them.  Respecting parents is acknowledging the giver -- God.

       The result, the commandment tells us, is God's blessing -- our days will be long.  They will not necessarily be long in many years, but that they will be full.  They will be abundant because they will be filled with the goodness of God.  Like a good meal, the honor we give our parents will come back to nourish us.  And it will be savored long after the meal itself is ended.