Dr. Ron Sumners
March 7, 2004
My father came from a family of seven children and my mother had six siblings. That is probably the case with many of their generation. My generation saw the number of children drop to less than three per family. Today, a family with more than three children is rare.
For untold centuries people have seen large families as a blessing. The children were a resource in an agrarian society, and it was security for the parents in their old age. There would be someone to care for them.
The Fifth Commandment reminds us to honor, or take care of, our parents. When we do so we are actually taking care of ourselves.
The Brothers Grimm put that truth into a rather stinging fairy tale. Once there was a little old man, of trembling hand and feeble eyes, whose uncertain table habits became increasingly offensive to the daughter-in-law with whom he lived. One day she objected to her husband, the old man’s son. They took the old man to the corner of the kitchen, sat him on a stool, and made him eat from an earthenware bowl. He no longer troubled them with his dribbled food; the tablecloth was no longer soiled.
One day, he dropped the bowl and broke it. The daughter-in-law said, “If you are a pig, you must eat from a trough.” And they made a little wooden trough and he ate from it.
The pride of their lives was their four-year-old son. One evening they noticed the boy playing with blocks of wood in a very serious fashion. When the father asked him what he was doing, the boy said with a smile, “I’m making a trough to feed you and momma from when I get big.”
For a while the man and woman just looked at each other, not saying anything. Then they cried: and then they went to the corner and led the little man back to a place at the table. They gave him a comfortable chair, and put his food on a plate. Never again were they troubled by the food that he spilled or the dishes he occasionally broke. They had learned that, in honoring a parent, they possessed their own future.
In many ways, the world that first received the Ten Commandments was very different from our own. Theirs was an agricultural economy, and it was family agriculture, with the whole family working together for a common need. It wasn’t necessary to plan for family time; there was very little time that wasn’t family time.
But we live in an urban culture, where children are lucky if they see their parents, one meal a day. In this neighborhood, maybe one meal a week is more realistic! Our children get their lunch at school and now several million have their breakfast there too. We have a day a year when the child can come to the office and see where daddy or mommy works. It is a far cry from life on the family farm. Parents were the moral compasses for their children. Some modern parents seem to have abdicated that role entirely. We have asked public education to instill values in our children. A cynic might say of the Fifth Commandment, “Honor your father and mother? What is there to honor?”
People who seek help from a psychiatrist are likely to conclude that their problems can be traced to some parental failure. “I skip the first two words to the Lord’s Prayer,” a man tells his pastor, “because I’d hate for God to be saddled with the image of the father I know.” A woman said, “I’m setting out on the worst job of the year. I’m looking for a Mother’s Day card that will be respectful without expressing some affection I can’t imagine feeling.” The attendants at any nursing home can identify several aged patients who are rarely, if ever, visited by their children, even though the children live only minutes away!
The Fifth Commandment is very realistic. It doesn’t ask that a child have greeting card sentiments toward a parent, or that one must love their parents. It simply insists that we must honor them. For some of us, that is an easy task because our parents were kind and loving people. They may not have been perfect, but our memories of them are ones of gratitude. But the Commandment does not say, “Honor your father and mother, if they deserve it,” or “honor your father and mother to the degree that they deserve honor.” The Commandment provides no exceptions and no modifications, because it isn’t speaking of what the parent deserves! It is speaking of the child’s own welfare, and of the welfare of society as a whole.
The fairy tale I shared earlier teaches us that children learn how to treat their parents by watching how their grandparents are treated. The whole foundation of society is based on what is taught in the home. If children do not learn to honor their parents, they are given little basis for honoring anything or anybody: teachers, police, officers, religious leaders, employers, government or any authority.
That is a frightening thought! But that is the wisdom of the Fifth Commandment. Honor your father and mother, not just because it is an idea that appeals to you, and not necessarily because they deserve it: honor them for your own sake and for the sake of the future of the nation and your children.
This commandment comes at an interesting place among the ten. The ancient rabbis felt that the Commandments were divided on two tablets so that one contained the laws dealing with our duty to God, and the other, the laws having to do with our duty to humanity. This Commandment is on the first tablet, as the last of the laws of piety toward God, because for children, parents stand in the place of God. One Rabbi said, “Father and mother should be honored as God is honored, because all three have been partners in their creation.”
Some parents make it very difficult for their children to see them in this way. And, so does our culture. When popular culture pictures sex as a mating game, with emphasis on the pleasure of the moment, children are an incidental result. Sometimes they are an unwanted result! Under such circumstances, it is hard to think of ourselves as products of a divine partnership between woman, man and God. The Psalmist said it was God who formed my inward parts; and knit me together in my mother’s womb. (Psalm 139:13)
Our culture calls that collection of mystery and potential a fetus. Somehow something is lost in translation between the language of the biblical poet and the language of the scientific laboratory.
Our generation has a poor foundation for a belief in honoring parents, because the ideas of conception and pregnancy are trivialized. If God was an instrument in my conception, and attended to my development in the womb, I am of such value that I will honor those who participated in the process. I am not; you are not just a biological consequence. We are the children of human parents, but created in the image of God.
Our generation has another problem; our ambivalent feelings about the past. In one sense, it fascinates us. There are antique shops everywhere. People want to buy things that give them a tie to the past. Restaurants cash in on the nostalgia theme also. But beyond these quick acts of homage to the past, we see it only as something that is outdated. Its truths are more quaint than significant. And since to honor father and mother is to pay respect to the culture they represent, we are content to settle for a washtub that can be converted into a magazine rack.
Strangely enough, Jesus seems to give us mixed signals about honoring parents. On the one hand, we think of the one biblical record of His childhood, His visit to the Temple as a boy of twelve. He became separated from his parents and ended up discussing the law with the learned teachers. When His parents found Him, they were upset and had been worried. Luke realizes that Jesus might easily have asserted some independence from His parents after this experience of recognition and esteem. But Jesus goes back to the village. He does His parents bidding. He honored His father and mother.
On the other hand, Jesus also said, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26). The word “hate” here simply implies a choice. Jesus is saying that His will and His kingdom are more important than all our cherished human ties, even father and mother.
God is the final judge of all of life’s issues. It is the duty of parents to instruct children in the law of the Lord. Deuteronomy 6:7 made it clear that the children were to be taught by the parents. The parents are the tie between the past and the future.
Perhaps no fear in contemporary life is more alarming than the way parents have abdicated their teaching responsibility. It is popular to say, “Our hope is in the next generation,” but that is not true. Our hope is in the values that come through this generation to the next. If we want hope to survive in the future generation, we had better take seriously the admonition to teach truth and moral values to our children as well as faith in Jesus Christ!
Daniel Walker Howe, a professor of history at Oxford University, a secular educator says, “American society needs to find some way to reassert the moral values on which this country was founded, to proclaim and defend them in the family, church, and school, so as to ascribe them to individual personalities.”
That is what the Fifth Commandment promises. Honor your parents, honor your heritage, and your days will be long in the land; your future will be unlimited. The past is not a barrier that fences us in; it is a foundation on which we can build. Honoring the past and acknowledging its gifts makes us greater not smaller. When someone belittles or demeans his parents, he diminishes himself. And when a person excuses their failures by reciting the errors of their parents, I think the proper response is, “Grow up! If you can perceive the mistakes of your parents so clearly, you must surely be perceptive enough to remedy them.
We have a generation of children who are looking to parents for guidance. We have handed the job off to the school classroom, the church, or some social agency. And we can always quote an ancient cop-out, probably the one Adam spoke to Eve when Cain went wrong: “Kids just don’t listen, do they?”
As a matter of fact, kids do listen! That is how they come up with the standards they have. The failure is not in their listening but in our speaking. We must speak winsomely, convincingly, and with integrity because we have to be heard over a bewildering cacophony of competing voices.
Do you want to have a future? Then accept the blessings of the past. Would you like for tomorrow to radiate hope? Then be thankful for yesterday and the people who made it, especially those close to you. They are not perfect, even as we are not perfect. But they are our foundation, and we must build wisely upon them.
Look at your home. It may be a suburban estate, an apartment, a condominium, or a mobile home. The future rests in that home and millions like it. All of our institutions, education, law, government, world peace, rest ultimately upon this fine point of adult-child respect and integrity.
If we honor God, teach our children and honor our father and mother we will dwell long in the land. This is not talking about our individual lives. It is talking about our society. One nation under God is what our pledge says. Honoring father and mother is one of the cornerstones of this nation and of our faith.
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