Copyright © 2002 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
Our art show reminds me of being ungrateful. Years and years ago a friend offered me a painting she had done. Instead of thanking her and accepting it graciously, I made a joke about hanging it over a crack in my wall. I never received the painting.
The principle behind the Fifth Commandment concerns the consequences of gratitude versus ingratitude. It asks that we acknowledge and honor the gifts which we received from those who first gave us anything. It is a command to be grateful.
“Honor your father and mother” marks the complete shift from commandments directed toward God to duties directed toward other human beings. As Thomas Aquinas points out, the Ten Commandments have a deliberate order. Jesus summarized the whole Law: First love God, then second love your neighbor. So the previous four commands were about loving God.
Now we turn to rules for loving each other. And we must pay attention to that order. It is not only that God comes first in priority. It is not only that God is the first one deserving of our love. The order of the commandments is a practical necessity. We have to do the commandments in order. We cannot love our neighbors properly without first loving God. In the language I used a few weeks ago, we must move first through the vertical dimension of biblical ethics and then go on to the horizontal.
However, there is an order even within the horizontal commandments. Honoring father and mother is placed first among them both as a priority and as a practical necessity. It is first in priority because it is only right that we acknowledge our closest relationships before we turn our attention to others. But respect for parents also comes first among our duties to others for a practical reason: How can we possibly learn to love neighbors to whom we owe nothing if we have not first learned to love those to whom we owe everything?
Commandment Five is founded on the most basic facts of our existence. As I told the children, we all have belly buttons. At the beginning of life we are utterly dependent on someone else for our existence. Young human beings are the most vulnerable creatures on earth. We stay helpless longer than any other animal. Leave an infant or even a child of a few years to herself and she will die. As babies and small children, we desperately need the care and protection of our parents.
I remember when our daughter Susan disappeared in the snow. We were unloading the car in a driving blizzard one cold winter evening in Nebraska. I unbuckled two year-old Susan from her car seat and stood her up next to me in her little boots and gloves and snowsuit. Then I turned to get a sack of groceries or something. When I turned around again, she was gone. She hadn’t gone in the house or the garage. The temperature was near zero. Visibility was about five feet and there was already a foot of snow on the ground. Our little girl had wandered off in the dark somewhere. All the Midwest blizzard horror stories of people dying a few feet from their front door rushed into my mind. My was heart pounding and I raced around the side of the house looking for her. Praise God, I came on her right away, trudging along, headed for her swing set. She had no idea of her danger, but I knew she would not survive for long out there in the cold and the dark. She was entirely dependent on me to watch out for her.
Everyone of us was once a two year-old like Susan. We needed our parents to put our Cheerios on the table, to yank our fingers away from the electric socket and to keep tabs on us so that we would not wander into the street and get run over. The rule that we are to honor our father and mother is a call to acknowledge our debt to those who looked after us all those years when we could do almost nothing for ourselves. It is a call to be grateful for the most fundamental gift we have received, the blessing of life.
Therefore, remembering our dependence, which we all experienced at the beginning of life, should shape our understanding of the Fifth Commandment. “Honor your father and mother” sounds like a rule for little children. You might think that it is about obedience, the need for minor sons and daughters to give proper respect to the authority of their parents. And that is part of it. But this commandment is more a law for adult children than for young people.
Ultimately, to honor father and mother is to accept with grace and love the switch in roles which many of us in this congregation are of an age to experience right now. People who cared for us now need our care. The woman who laid awake nights worrying about you now keeps you from sleep as you worry about her. The man who paid all your bills now needs you to pay his. And for some of you will come the deepest irony that the one who fed and diapered you requires spoon feeding and diapers of her own. So we acknowledge our early dependence by caring for parents now dependent on us.
The sad problem is that we have been taught to hate all this talk of being dependent. Our goal as children is to grow up as soon as possible and become independent. Our goal as seniors is to have saved enough to keep that independence as long we can. We hate the idea of being helpless, of being a burden, of depending on anyone, even our parents or our children. We forget that God created us this way, to depend on others at the beginning and at end of life. He made us dependent on each other so that we could not forget that we are dependent on Him.
You see, there is also a reverse flow to the order of the Ten Commandments. Yes, we can only learn to love our neighbor by first learning to love God. The laws are in the right order. But there is also a flow of experience backward into our keeping of the first commandments. As we learn to love others we learn to love God even more.
Thus God commands us to love our father and mother so that we can learn more of what it means to love Him as Father. As we grow in our understanding of what it means to be grateful to those who cared for us on earth, we also grow in our grasp of how we may honor God for His heavenly care. God designed the parenting relationship to lead children to Him. That means parents also have responsibilities.
In Ephesians 6:4, after reminding children to obey and honor their parents, Paul says, “Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.” Children were given parents to love so that they might come to love God. As I said, they learn to depend on mother and father, so that in the long run they will learn to depend on the Lord.
Therefore, I have to freely admit that there is an exception to the this commandment. I know the pain of this exception in my own life. I cannot honor my father. If father and mother are given to lead you to God, you cannot honor them if they lead you away from Him. If depending on your parents is a model for depending on God, you cannot honor them if they are not dependable. It is not mere biology which makes a man a father and a woman a mother to be honored. As Calvin says, if father or mother take us away from God, we do not need to regard them as parents. Without doing what God meant parents to do, a biological father is, as Dr. Laura likes to say, merely a sperm donor, and a biological mother is only an incubator.
But when fathers and mothers live up to their roles conscientiously, bringing their children up as best they can to love Jesus and worship God, then every sort of honor belongs to them. And when children obey the Fifth Commandment and respond with gratitude and care to their parents, then the result is often very good. It should be, because the commandment promises it will be.
This is the only one of the Ten Commandments that promises a reward: “that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you.” God says the result of giving honor to your father and mother will be a long life in a good place.
Whenever the Old Testament offers rewards in this life, which it does often, we as Christians do well to read those promises in the light of the eternal life we are given in Jesus Christ. The long life, the milk and honey, the many cattle, the houses and land, and even the children which the Old Testament promises to the faithful are all images of the blessings we hope for and expect to receive in God’s eternal kingdom through the grace of Christ. They point us toward the salvation we have in Jesus.
However, neither Old Testament material blessings nor the spiritual blessings we expect are rewards we earn. They are gifts, given to us all out of proportion to what we deserve. They are rewards for trust, not for performance. We receive them when we give up trying to justify and take care of ourselves, and place our trust and dependence on God.
Jesus said that salvation comes to those who become like little children. He was not speaking of the innocence of children but of their dependence. God saves us when we admit our helplessness and need and ask for His grace even though we don’t deserve it.
A three year-old boy stands in his bedroom and wrestles with a bright red Pokemon T-shirt. He has loudly informed his mother, “I can do it myself!” Now here he is caught by his own independence, thrashing helplessly with his head through one of the armholes and the crimson fabric tight around his neck. One arm is caught beneath the shirt and the other hand can’t find where to pull. Mom’s first offers of help are rejected with loud wails. It is only when he lies exhausted and sobbing on the floor that he finally gives in to being helped. Only then can Mom free him from the shirt and show him how to put it on right.
It is how you and I so often come to Jesus. His grace is always there to set things straight, but we reject Him in favor of independence. We struggle along on our own and our troubles just wrap more tightly around us. But when we become exhausted little children and turn to Him, He will help unravel the knots we’ve tied in our lives.
That is the importance of the Fifth Commandment. In learning to be good children and honoring those upon whom we have depended so much, we make it possible for ourselves to turn sooner and more easily to the Lord when we need Him. By honoring our parents we improve our spiritual condition. We foster an attitude in ourselves which God can and will reward with the grace of salvation.
Yet I do not want you to go home thinking that all the consequences of obeying or disobeying the Ten Commandments are in another life. Just as in the Second Commandment the punishment for serving idols involves consequences now, the rewards for honoring father and mother are not reserved only for heaven. When parents are honored, it can mean happier, better and even longer life for all concerned.
Two or three times in my career as a pastor I’ve been invited to a fiftieth or sixtieth wedding anniversary celebration for some dear couple in the church. Each of those parties has made a lasting impression on me regarding the rewards that come when family life is lived as God meant it to be.
There in a church basement or fellowship hall are three or four generations gathered around sherbet punch and sticky cake and dishes of mints. You need a cup of strong black coffee just to wash all the sugar down. But the sweetness of the food is symbolic of the sweetness of the moment, as children, spouses, grandchildren and their spouses and great grandchildren, forty or fifty people, all gather to celebrate one elderly couple.
At that kind of time I like to sit down next to the old man and say something like, “Look at this crew here today. You know, you are a patriarch. Did you have any idea what you were starting sixty years ago when you gave that woman over there a ride home in your milk truck?”
And the patriarch will shake his head. He never imagined what would come of falling in love at the age of 19. But he raised his family to honor God and now he and his wife receive honor in return. And the rewards of that honor are being played out in the lives of all those gathered around them there.
There is much I haven’t had time to say. These most fundamental relationships in our lives are full of both pain and joy I haven’t even touched. Mothers and fathers are sometimes taken from us too early. Death and divorce wreak havoc with the kind of pretty picture I just painted. Yet those who love and care for us early remain deserving of honor as their time grows late.
And one Parent remains to us all. He is always faithful, always giving, and always deserving of our honor and praise. In His grace, we may become the children we were meant to be, acknowledging the gifts we have received, and giving ourselves back in return. And our lives will be very, very long in the place He has made for us.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2002 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj