While we have been working backwards through the Ten Commandments, it is important to note that if one reads them in order commandments one through four speak particularly to our relationship with God, then the fifth commandment speaks to our primary and fundamental unit of relationship – our family and the vital need to honor our father and mother
March 13, 2011
Exodus 20:12, Mark 7:5-15, Keep the Peace with Your Parents
Douglas Scalise, Brewster Baptist Church
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As Paul points out in Ephesians 6:2 the fifth commandment is also the only one with a promise. “Honor your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.”
Like a number of the Ten Commandments, this one isn’t necessarily easy for many people. Let’s begin with the obvious truth that none of us gets to pick our parents. We don’t get to choose our parents, the country we’re born in, the era in which we’re born, whether our parents are rich or poor, happy or hurting, none of that is up to us. We also have to acknowledge that every parent is not created equal. Some parents are loving, committed to their children’s well-being, and provide a safe and nurturing environment for their offspring. Sadly there are also parents who are neglectful, abusive, cold, or distant. Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown’s recently released autobiography Against All Odds, describes in painful detail the incredibly difficult family situation in which he grew up. His mother and father each divorced and re-married three times. He had to deal with terrible abuse and he is an example of how a person can overcome a difficult family environment that no one would choose to grow up in.
Honoring our father and mother can be challenging not just in situations where there has been actual abuse like Scott Brown faced. How do we respond when our parents’ expectations are so out of line, we feel we can’t possibly live up to them? When our parents continually criticise our appearance, our choice of career, our spouse, our lack of a spouse, how we raise our children, and how often we call or visit? I used to joke with my mom when I’d call on the phone and she’d say something to me about how long it had been since I had called. I’d say, “You know the phone lines work in both directions.” Later in life, how do we honor our parents when their health begins to decline and they require more from us, than we may know how to provide?
No matter how strained our relationship with our parents might be there is always the possibility of improvement. For some of us one or both of our parents may no longer be living. However, whether our parents are alive or dead, we can still honor them, granted in different ways, by how we live.
We honor our parents by accepting them. For some of us, this has not been difficult. We are grateful for our parents as people and thankful for what they’ve done for us and for the relationship we have or had. Professor Randy Pausch, in his memorable The Last Lecture, given when he was dying at the age of 47 remarked how he had “won the parent lottery.” What a blessing it is when we feel that is the case for us too.
Regrettably, this has not been the situation for all of us. The sooner that parents and children can accept that neither is perfect the better off you’ll be. Parents who complain about their children are far from perfect themselves. Children, who go off about all that is lacking in their parents, have plenty of their own weaknesses. An exasperated father said to his son, “When Winston Churchill was your age, he worked hard all day and studied his books at night.” His teenage son replied, “Yeah, and when he was your age, he was Prime Minister.”
One reason so many people feel weighed down and burdened by the idea of honoring their parents is that they have unresolved resentments toward their parents. Even if your resentments are justified, you can still choose to forgive, in order to allow yourself to open up to the possibility of better feelings toward your parents. Many people are reluctant to forgive their parents. It is deeply painful to be betrayed or belittled by your own parents. Many people hold back from forgiving, because they incorrectly assume that forgiveness means, they have to forget the painful things that happened to them because of their parents.
We can forgive our parents without down playing the pain they caused. The word “forgive” implies three actions:
- To pardon or release from punishment for a fault or offence.
- To give up anger, resentment, or the need for revenge.
- To show mercy or compassion.
In other words, forgiveness, allows us to build something positive in the present, while still making sure not to repeat what happened in the past.
The single most transforming thing that can happen in parent-child relationships is mutual acceptance of one another’s humanness, frailty, and imperfections. When parents and children can have compassion for one another and forgive one another for not being perfect, then the door opens for understanding and the possibility of a healthier relationship.
If we are unable to accept our parents for who they are, if we can’t forgive them for not being everything we wanted or needed, then we are setting ourselves up for relational failure with our parents and perpetual despair. It is truly sad when parents and children are unable to accept each other. God is not asking us to pretend parents or children are perfect, when they are not. Regardless of our parent’s faults or failings, we are instructed to honor them.
We honor our parents by appreciating them. Acceptance is, “I accept you in spite of your negatives.” Appreciation is, “I respect your positives.” Even if we find our parents difficult, we can still appreciate them for their effort. Parenting is a difficult, time‑consuming and demanding responsibility. Let’s appreciate our parents for their effort and sacrifice. A science teacher introducing the theme of magnets asked the class: “My name starts with an ‘M’ and I pick up things. What am I?” One boy replied, “A Mother.” What I wrote in the mother’s day cards I sent to my mom changed significantly after Nathan was born. It is hard for us when we are young to understand or appreciate all that our parents do for us in terms of our basic needs of love, nurture, food, shelter, and education.
Parenting is costly in time, energy, self-sacrifice and money. The financial cost of having children is perhaps the highest it has ever been. According to a Department of Agriculture report posted on Foxbusiness.com, it now costs as much as $475,680 to raise a child to age 18. That doesn’t count college. Financial aid expert Mark Kantrowitz of FinAid.org estimates that parents will need an additional $127,683 (in 2009 dollars) to send a child born last year to a median-priced state university when he or she is 18. Add to that a few travel team tournaments, the post-college boomerang kids, and that whole keep-them-on-your-health-insurance-until-they-are-26 plan, and it gives new meaning to the expression “million-dollar baby.”
Two fathers were discussing the cost of raising children and one said, “I know the costs are great, but it’s worth it to me, just to have someone in the house who knows how to operate our computer and DVD.” We honor our parents by letting them know how much we appreciate all they do for us and give to us.
We Honor Our Parents by Affirming Them
Proverbs 3:27 says, “Do not withhold good from those who deserve it, when it’s in your power to help them.” Affirm what your parents are doing or did right.
“Mom, that was really good what you said.” “Dad, that was great what you did.”
After they recover from fainting ‑ they will be appreciative. This is the only Commandment that does not last a lifetime. A day may come when we will not be able to make amends, when we can’t seek reconciliation or give or receive forgiveness or express appreciation. It is tragic, that some people wait to give honor to their parents only at their funeral. No degree of expense put on a funeral is equal to a thank you, a visit, a letter, and a phone call, a repaired relationship – while we have the opportunity.
We Honor Our Parents by not Abandoning them
How to juggle our aging parent’s needs with our own responsibilities is a complex problem for some people. However it’s important to offer support and assistance in their older age. For most of us our parents raised us and cared for us until we were at least 17 or 18 years old so if our parents need similar care, love, and attention in the final years of their life, I believe, we owe it to them. We honor our parents by not abandoning them, but by accommodating and assisting them positive and practical ways.
While this commandment is about honoring our parents, for those of us who are parents, it is crucially, vitally, awfully important for us to live as people who are worthy of honor. Many of the parents portrayed on television, for example, are more deserving of ridicule than honor or respect. They are undisciplined, unprincipled, selfish and stupid. A mother heard her children, shouting so she went in and asked what they were quarrelling about. One daughter replied, “We’re not quarrelling, we’re just playing Mommy and Daddy.”
One of the best ways to correct children is to correct the example we are setting for them. Parents make it a lot easier to be honoured if they fulfil their responsibilities as parents. Children need their parents to act like responsible adults.
Children also know when they are a priority and when they are treated more like an annoyance or an inconvenience. Someone sent me the following email. A teacher from an elementary school asked her students to write an essay about what they would like God to do for them. At the end of the day while grading the essays, she read one that made her very emotional. Her husband, who had just walked in saw her crying and asked her: “What happened?”
She answered, “Read this. It’s one of my student’s essays.”
“Oh God, tonight I ask you something very special: Make me into a television. I want to take its place. Live like the TV in my house. Have my own special place, And have my family around me. To be taken seriously when I talk…. I want to be the center of attention and be heard without interruptions or questions. I want to receive the same special care that the TV receives when it is not working.
Have the company of my dad when he arrives home from work, even when he is tired. And I want my mom to want me when she is sad and upset, instead of ignoring me… And… I want my brothers to fight to be with me. I want to feel that the family leaves everything aside, every now and then, just to spend some time with me. And last but not least make it that I can make them all happy and entertain them. Lord I don’t ask you for much. I just want to live like every TV.
At that moment the husband said: – “My God, poor kid. What horrible parents!”
She looked up at him and said: “That essay is our son’s!”
The best way for children to honor their parents, the best way for parents to be worthy of honor is to live a righteous life. There is a scene in the Gospel of Mark 7:5-15 that unfolds this way, “5 So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, “Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” 6 He said to them, “Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written, ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; 7 in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.’ 8 You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.” 9 Then he said to them, “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition! 10 For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother’; and, ‘Whoever speaks evil of father or mother must surely die.’ 11 But you say that if anyone tells father or mother, ‘Whatever support you might have had from me is Corban’ (that is, an offering to God)— 12 then you no longer permit doing anything for a father or mother, 13 thus making void the word of God through your tradition that you have handed on. And you do many things like this.” 14 Then he called the crowd again and said to them, “Listen to me, all of you, and understand: 15 there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.”
The relevance and importance of the Ten Commandments for Christians can be seen in the fact that Jesus refers to them in his own teaching while always emphasizing the importance of a heart that hungers to be close to God’s own heart. Jesus reminds his hearers that honoring our parents is more important than lesser human traditions, including an accounting scheme that enables us to tell our parents we can’t afford to help them.
The older we get we will likely either come to resent or appreciate our parents more. Whichever approach we choose will have a significant impact on our relationship. Mark Twain wryly observed, “When I was 14 my father was so ignorant I could hardly bear him, but by the time I was 21, I was amazed to see how much he had learned in 7 years.”
Jesus was one child who actually knew more than His mother and stepfather, yet he obeyed them. God says, honoring our parents, not only impacts them, it impacts us and is a recipe for blessing and prosperity. The key to being good parents is to treat our children the way God treats us.
God Listens to Us
“God is close to all who call on Him.” Psalm 145:18
God Understands Us
A common complaint children have about their parents is, “They don’t understand me.” Proverbs 24:3 reminds us,
“Homes are built on the foundation of wisdom and understanding.”
The proof that we understand our children is that we are patient with them.
Two of the best things we can give our children are roots and wings.
Are we perfect? No. But God accepts us. That’s called grace.
God wants us to exercise grace with our children.
God loves us The Bible is full of examples of God’s love for His children.
How do we express love that our children can understand?
Through Affection Through Affirmation Through Attention
How often do we just sit with our children and give them attention.
Listening with our ears and eyes and letting them set the timetable.
Many people claim that the family is the most important thing in life, but surveys show that most people put their careers, personal freedom and possessions before family responsibilities. How much time do those of us who are parents spend in conversation with our children each week?
Let us remember it is easier to build children, than to mend broken adults.
Prayer: Forgiving God, help us to extend forgiveness and grace to our parents, to our children, and to our selves. Enable us to accept one another with all our imperfections and failures. Assist us to remember and appreciate what we have to be thankful for in our family relationships. Inspire us to be women and men who are honorable and worthy of honor. We ask this in the name of your Beloved Son, Jesus, Amen.
Blessing: Now may God, who has created us for fellowship with him and with each other, give us courage to cross over every bridge that would unite us in divine love both now and forever. In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
