Deuteronomy 5.16; 1 Samuel 2.12–26; Ephesians 6.1–4
The 5th sermon on the Ten Commandments preached at Nedlands Anglican Church 3rd September 2023
This series will be continued early next year. In October and November of this year I will be caring for the church at Kalbarri, Western Australia. I plan to preach a series on the life of Jesus, and will post them to the website as I do. Please direct others to the website if you think they might be helped by this series. You may wish to comment, as we go along, and help me with the writing of a small book.
I am puzzled by this commandment: clearly it’s about family, but why not a command to parents to watch how they bring up their children—or to husbands to love their wives? Today it would be, “Thou shalt not be abusive towards your partner!” Or, “Recognize there are other ways of living together than the traditional family!” What’s so important about children honouring their parents? I couldn’t see it.
While I was in South Africa, I heard a sermon on “You shall not murder.” It seemed too obvious to be worthy of comment—until I realized that the modern world, in eliminating God, was taking over control of life—humans deciding who could live and who could die, in a way which was unthinkable before Hitler’s experiment. A furore erupted at the discovery of a nurse killing new-born babies, while in the very same hospital late-term babies of roughly the same age who survived abortion were left to die. It hit me that the loss of God was doing horrible things to our society, and that the Ten Commandments needed looking at afresh.
Some people think each of the commandments is a doorway into a different area of life—there is much more involved than just a simple commandment. That is true, I think. The first three commandments guide us in how we relate to God. The last four are about how we treat others. The two in the middle are different. The fourth creates an understanding of time, and the fifth of society. The fourth commandment stands over against Hinduism, Buddhism, and all the ancient fertility religions where time goes round and round, and there is no beginning or end. The Bible says there was a beginning. Great events of salvation occurred once, and once only, because the world is moving towards an end, a judgement, a healing, and a new age. The Sabbath Day looks back to the beginning, celebrates the great act of salvation at the Exodus, and looks forward to the close of the age and the coming of the kingdom of God. We are on a journey, and must take time to rest. The fourth commandment orders the way we think about time.
The fifth commandment brings us to an understanding of society. Before we come to considering our wider obligations, we must realize we have a prior responsibility: God has structured things so that we all belong to a family, and we need to care for it. But it still leaves the question, why honouring parents is of such importance.
My difficulty in understanding it got me asking myself whether obedience is conditional on our seeing the sense of the fifth commandment? This is a particularly Christian instinct—because with most of God’s word, we do see its sense. If love is the underlying motive, then, presumably, so is human happiness. So, we will try to understand how such a commandment adds to human wellbeing. But it is not always easy to see.
After the second world war and the horror of the death camps, Christians became aware that some of their attitudes towards Jews and Judaism—their stereotypes—aided the anti-Semitism which fuelled the holocaust. Christian scholars studied Judaism afresh, with a more sympathetic approach. One well-known scholar looked again at the sacrificial system and wrote a book showing how reasonable it was. Surprisingly, it was an orthodox Jewish scholar who took offence. “Mr Sanders,” he said, “we Jews do not keep the law because it is reasonable, but because it is God’s law. We delight in it, even if it seems totally unreasonable.” This took me back, but it is wisdom. Whether I can see the reason for honouring parents, or whether I can’t, I should obey, nonetheless. This is an important truth, and it took a Jewish rabbi to show it to me.
So, here is the commandment, and we need to obey it, before ever we seek to understand it.
Honour your father and your mother, as the LORD your God commanded you, that your days may be long, and that it may go well with you in the land that the LORD your God is giving you.
Having said this, we should also add that knowing how to obey, depends on our understanding of what the commandment is trying to achieve. Moses seems to give a reason: “That you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you.” But what is the connection? I couldn’t see it. Then Alex Moyer, that great English Old Testament scholar, provided a clue in his commentary on Exodus. He suggests it is connected with the maintenance of the covenant.
God made an agreement with his people to be their God and them to be his covenant family. But if this family of faith is to continue, it is critical that children learn it from their parents, and adopt it for themselves. Otherwise, it can be lost in a single generation.
Here then is the answer to the puzzle of the fifth commandment. If the Jewish nation was to maintain its loyalty to the creator God, there had to be continuity between the Exodus and their experience at Sinai, and future generations. That could not be, if children rebelled against their parents’ instruction. Which, of course, is what happened, and led inevitably to the loss of the land, as Moses warned it would.
According to St Paul, the main effect of the law is to expose our lawlessness. It is given us to obey, but we disobey, and it shows us how far we fall short of what God wants us to do and to be. This is particularly so with this fifth commandment. Breakdown between the generations is a problem today, just as it was with Israel. They had just entered into a marriage relationship with the creator God. How will that relationship be preserved without parents teaching their children, and the children accepting and following. It only took a generation from Joshua’s time until things began to break down. “Why follow the LORD? The Baals are much more exciting. Keep your stuffy old religion; we’ll do our own thing!” Children running around looting stores and stealing cars today are a symptom of more than a breakdown of family; our relationship with God has broken down, in a way that is beginning to affect the whole nation.
I want to say something about the family and Marxism, Marxism’s vision is for a new world. Marx was Jewish, and got the idea from the messianic doctrine of Judaism and Christianity. Only, for him there was no God; man is his own master. The golden age must be brought about through revolution. Marx and Engels put the Communist Party in place of the Bible’s saviour. I am talking about classical Marxism-Leninism. One of the major enemies of the revolution was the family. Why? Because the family maintains a society’s tradition—its culture, if you like. The family is a non-revolutionary—anti-revolutionary institution.
Dorothy Lessing in her novel, The Good Terrorist, tells the story of a young woman from a good family who want to help her in every way. She belongs to a group of anti-establishment activists living in a “squat”—an unoccupied house in London—in the sixties when a mutant form of Marxism emerged in Europe. Her revolutionary “family”
dreaming of overthrowing “society” as a step to ushering in the new world. She has been brought up well, and so, does her best to keep the multiple-storey house clean; the sewerage has been disconnected, so this is difficult. She holds things together, partly by forever begging her parents for money, which she uses for the cause. She has only contempt for her parents and their bourgeois ways.
It is different now, but it feels to me like there are forces still making war on the family. I doubt we are looking at some neo-Marxist conspiracy; it is more Zeigeist—spirit of the age—type thing. Whatever it is the idea that breaking down the present order will somehow give birth to a new and better world seems to me still to be a potent force. Marxism in some form or another has always appealed to the young. It is idealistic, promising “heaven” now, and calls on activists to destabilize the current system. The way to do this is to take up any and every cause where injustice is felt, or convince people they are being treated unjustly, and exploit it to stir up hatred between different groups. Everything about the status quo is evil and must go. When the breakdown finally comes, human nature will be freed from its shackles; a beautiful new eera of human flourishing is meant to emerge. But it doesn’t. What emerges is anarchy, because the revolutionaries have never agreed on what the new society will actually be. In Russia the most ruthless of the factions established itself in power, and killed the rest, or sent them to concentration camps to be re-educated. This is still a reality in some parts of the world.
In Israel’s history, subsequent generations abandoned their loyalty to God and experimented with all sorts of alternatives. At the end of the road lay national destruction. Even after Babylon, generational breakdown remained a problem. It doesn’t need Marxism to help it. However, Israel did learn some lessons. Jews are famous for the stability of their families. Whatever is going on around them, they carefully preserve the family— which is the main reason, humanly-speaking, that they survived a second and third holocaust, and are around today.
Generational breakdown shadows the Old Testament from beginning to end. In its very last words God promises to send the prophet Elijah to “turn the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the land with a curse.” (Malachi 4). Four hundred years later, the Gospel of Luke opens with this very promise: John the Baptist came as the new Elijah, to address the problem of children and their parents:
He will turn many of the children of Israel to the Lord their God, and he will go before him in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, to make ready for the Lord a people prepared. Luke 1.17
The New Testament takes up the burden of the fifth commandment:
Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. “Honour your father and mother” (this is the first commandment with a promise), “that it may go well with you and that you may live long in the land.” Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. Ephesians 6.1–4
Paul evidently thinks the promise of tenure in the land is still a valid principle, though, of course, Christians should not only look to this doomed and dying world, but to their promised inheritance in the world to come. To a large degree, God is building his kingdom on the foundation of generational healing in Christian families, where parents are conscious of their covenant privileges, and hand on that understanding to their children.
The fifth commandment is addressed to children and young people—to all of us actually, since we all have parents—to value the family and its special relationship with God. The father and mother should lead, and the children should respect and follow their leadership. Notice there is equality in the commandment: mother and father are equally to be respected. This especially applies to teens. Children are limited in their awareness of what honour means and in their ability to rebel, but with the teens the temptations are considerable.
Respect, obedience, honour: these things create a culture. They did create a culture, which is now very obviously breaking down. Gradually, the role of parents has been surrendered to the state. The state will look after your children’s education. At first, we thought this would mean the children would be educated according to our values. The teacher stood in loco parentis, was allowed to exercise discipline, and was respected (honoured) as the mother and father. But no longer.
At the other extreme, we now look to the state to care for our aging parents. I am not complaining, just observing. Most of us here this morning are on the receiving end; every now and again one of us disappears into an aged-care facility.
When I look back to how it was with my parents I have some regrets. I left home at age 17 and never returned except for a few months. As my parents got old and needed attention I was not there. They didn’t ask for it. Should I have returned to be with them? I honestly do not know, but I am forever grateful to those who stayed around: to my sisters and brother, and to the brother-in-law, who was more a son to my father than I was. It is hard to escape from your culture.
Inevitably, we Christians, if we seek to live by God’s law and take the commandment seriously, will create a subculture. At the moment we have slid into the predominant culture, but we need to wake up.
We all have to work it out as best we can. We live in a broken world and will never get it altogether right. Perhaps this is the value of the word “honour.” It leaves it open to us to decide how we will honour. Willing obedience on the part of children and teens is obvious, and critical. When they leave home, the form of honouring changes. But there is more to honouring than preserving the tradition. Jesus was scathing in his criticism of people who used religion to avoid helping their elderly parents. (Mark 7)
Whatever form it takes the call to us as Christians is to value family, and honour parents. What can we do whose children are grown up, and quite independent of us? Perhaps more than we think. I owe my salvation to the prayers of my grandmother, which began before I was born, and later to my mother’s prayers, when she came to know the Lord Jesus. In South Africa’s townships family life is dire; grandmothers are the commonest parents, and many is the young man or woman who comes to faith through their love and prayers. God answers prayer, and he uses the witness of his children to achieve his purposes. Never give up praying for your children and your grandchildren—or your parents! But remember that the chief purpose of the commandment is that God might be known—from generation to generation, and that the world might be saved. We are not living in an ideal situation. Our society is broken, and so are we. The world has turned away from God; children are rebelling, as we once did ourselves. But Jesus is building his kingdom; we are part of a rescue mission.. And the painstaking attention of parents and grandparents and children to knowing God and making him known are a huge part of this.