I started reading science fiction when I was 11 or 12, I think. My father brought home a couple of Heinlein juveniles from the library, Red Planet and Space Cadet. I don’t remember which one I read first, they’re both still favorites. All the Heinlein juvies are good reading. The plots were all different enough to hold your attention, and the characters are a nice believable mix of characteristics - not too unbelievably brilliant or heroic.
Anyway one of the things that intrigued me about science fiction was the idea of weighing less on Mars or the moon, and all the different things you could do. Our heroes studied free-fall etiquette in the Space Academy and cleared enormous obstacles in single leaps on Mars and went out for low-gravity acrobatics in school. As an unathletic kid with asthma, low gravity looked really good to me. Especially with my athletic sister making the gymnastics team in the club across the street. So freedom from the constraints of gravity has always appealed. And it did to a lot of other science-fiction writers besides Heinlein. Ben Bova did a series centering around the settlement of the moon. The hero was motivated by the thought of getting free of earth’s bloody history: its feuds, its nationalism, ideologies, politics and wars, and starting new, with none of the old baggage. And a low-gravity environment for people with heart problems and other ailments was a big selling point for getting the project off the ground (pun intentional).
But their longed-for freedom from the past turned out to be illusory, temporary, fickle; all the feuds, all the rivalries, all the old animosities and ambitions that had plagued earth’s people for millenia came right along with the colonists.
Well, that was fiction. Fairly perceptive fiction, I think. But the more interesting twist on the tale is what happened to the low-gravity therapy for heart patients. In Bova’s book, it was simply assumed that it would work. They didn’t have any data at that point, theoretical or otherwise, to suggest that it wouldn’t.
But in the years since, we have learned that weightlessness isn’t good for you after all. According to the National Institute of Health, weight-bearing activity, or any activity that is done while upright, requiring the bones to fully support the body’s weight against gravity, is necessary to keep the bones strong. And what that means is that space travel is equivalent to prolonged bed rest. Even with strict exercise regimes, astronauts and crews on the space station and shuttles are at risk of permanent and significant loss of bone mass.
So the twin ideas of freedom from gravity and freedom from the past both turn out to be fantasies. Freedom from the past is simply impossible: we carry it in our genes, in our memories, in our cultures and values and goals. And freedom from gravity turns out to be hazardous to your health. Who would have thought?
Anybody here remember back to the sixties, the heyday of the hippie era? Those were my teen years so I remember them with exceptional vividness. Remember the dawning of the Age of Aquarius? It was going to be a whole new world, a whole new era. Harmony and understanding, sympathy and trust abound... All we had to do was reject everything our parents stood for... Don’t trust anyone over 30, make love, not war... We are the people our parents warned us against.
The underlying assumption was, “everything your parents stood for is wrong.”
And the fallout from that assumption is the culture we see around us.
In The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom said that there is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: “almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.” And in the years since he wrote this book, the moral and intellectual climate in the country has steadily declined, and not just in the past decade. In the 1980’s a humanities teacher in California reported in alarm that an exercise in values clarification she had been assigning for 20 years has taken an alarming turn. The gist of the exercise is that a village becomes sufficiently inflamed by an incident which has been blown out of proportion by gossip and innuendo that the villagers stone the offender to death. The teacher has always been able to get a good discussion going over the nature of right and wrong, of moral responsibility. But this year the consensus in the classroom was that we have no basis to judge the morality of the acts of another culture. “What’s wrong for us,” the students said, “might be right for them.” How big a step is it from “It’s ok for them,” to “If it’s ok anywhere, why shouldn’t it be ok everywhere?” Why should anything be forbidden at all?
It might surprise you to realize that the direct descendent of this point of view is that 54% of millennials believe that jail time would be an appropriate consequence for “hate speech.” Because if nothing is forbidden, you may not condemn any belief or behavior. If you do, you are a “hater.” And Christians – from Canada to Finland, and increasingly in the US – are falling under that category. Because we still believe in truth.
And what has this got to do with the 10 commandments? I hear you say.
Well, as Paul reminds us in Ephesians, the fifth commandment is the first one that comes with a promise: “Honor your father and your mother, as YHWH your God commanded you; that your days may be prolonged, and that it may go well with you, in the land which YHWH your God gives you.”
The reverse is also true: “If you stop honoring your father and your mother, as YHWH your God commanded you, your days will be shortened, and it will not go well with you, in the land which YHWH your God has given you.”
It is with this commandment that Moses turns our attention from our obligations to God to our obligations to our parents. It’s a bridge connecting the two, as our attitude towards God is reflected in our attitudes towards our parents. It is the commandment which takes us from the fact of being a people bound in covenant to our sovereign creator God, to the nature of the community in which that covenant is lived out, the covenant made flesh, as it were.
This commandment does not take place in a vacuum. We experience the fulfillment of the promise of the covenant God only as and if parents teach their children, and only as and if children honor their parents and learn from the faith of their parents.
Most of Moses’ commentary on the Decalogue has to do with relationships between contemporaries: neighbors, business associates, master and servant, husband and wife. The only place in the five books of Moses where the obligation of parent to child is emphasized is in the teaching of the law (except of course the absolute prohibition against sacrificing children to Moloch, or Baal, or the other Canaanite gods). But of course that, too, is a matter of the parents’ duty to their children under the sovereign rule of God. So there are two sides to the commandment. “Honor your father and mother” is given in the context of the parents teaching their children the ways of God. This is borne out by the echo of the promise:
“Keep his statutes and his commandments, which I am commanding you today for your own well-being and that of your descendants after you, so that you may long remain in the land that the Lord your God is giving you for all time." [Dt4:40] "Only take heed,” said Moses, “and keep your soul diligently, lest you forget the things which your eyes have seen, and lest they depart from your heart all the days of your life; make them known to your children and your children's children how on the day that you stood before YHWH your God at Horeb, YHWH said to me, ‘Gather the people to me, that I may let them hear my words, so that they may learn to fear me all the days that they live upon the earth, and that they may teach their children so.’ [Dt 4:9-11]
What does this mean for us, today, then?
I think that before we answer that question, we need to clarify two things.
The first one is, “what does ‘honor’ mean? Does it mean obey, slavishly, whatever the parent commands?”
And the second is, “does this apply only to children, or also to adults?”
The answer to the first question, “does ‘honor’ mean ‘obey’?” is, yes and no. It depends. Isn’t that helpful? The reason it is “yes and no” is that there are some things a parent does not have the right to command. Parents do not have the right to command a child to break the laws of God. Parents do not have the right to tyrannize over or abuse their children. And from Genesis 2:24, parents do not have the right to interfere between husband and wife. But parents do have the right to expect obedience from a child - whether of age or not - living in the household and partaking of the household’s bounty.
Obedience also had more immediate long-term application in the usual OT context of a young man or woman belonging to the extended household of nomadic sheepherders; sons and daughters would still be under the roof and authority of their elders, who were not only parents, but also bosses, supervisors, CEO’s and managers. It’s like a son or daughter coming to work in the family business.
So, yes, in that context of mutual dependence, to “honor” does means obedience. You live by the rules, you do your part, and you respect management’s authority. But there is still plenty of room for exercising initiative, for suggesting improvements, for arguing a different point of view, for being an individual.
Which pretty much illustrates that the answer to the second question - is this directed to children or adults - is, mostly adults, because not until a child comes of age does he or she take responsibility for obeying the commandments on his or her own. That’s what the term Bar or Bat Mitzvah means, as a matter of fact; it means “son or daughter of the Commandment.” It’s the parents’ responsibility to teach these commandments, as well as Israel’s history, to their children, but none of the commandments suddenly become void when the child takes over his or her own religious and civic duty.
OK. This isn’t just for kids, and it’s not simply “do what you’re told.”
What “honor” primarily mean is to respect, or to value. The Hebrew word means, literally, “to be heavy.” So it would be reasonable to translate it “don’t treat your parents lightly.”
Don’t take their care and raising of you for granted.
Don’t ignore them when the tables turn and they start needing your care and support as once you needed theirs.
Don’t blow off their values and opinions, their knowledge and experience as irrelevant or outdated.
And above all, never, ever, ever assume that something is better just because it’s new.
What God entrusted to Moses on Sinai, and charged the people of Israel to teach to their children and their children’s children, are the eternal things, the things that do not change. These are moral absolutes. What was moral then, is moral now. God’s character and requirements do not change from age to age, or from culture to culture. We may have traded in our clay jars for Tupperware, but the contents of God’s teaching remains the same.
But - wait a minute.
Does this mean that we’re only to honor our parents as long as they are Christians?
Well, of course not.
That is, of course, the ideal. In a perfect world, parents would teach their children about Jesus, and about God’s will for his people, and children would learn eagerly and follow whole-heartedly. In a perfect world, parents would neither tyrannize over their children nor neglect them, neither abuse them nor abandon them. But it doesn’t happen like that.
Parents fail. Parents fail all the time, even good parents fall short of their own highest ideals. Parents make all kinds of mistakes, large and small, from ignorance or lack of resources or just the sheer inescapable fact of human imperfection. And sometimes parents completely betray the obligation that God has laid upon them. And especially in those terrible cases the child’s obligation to his or her parents does not - indeed it cannot - come simply from a simple balancing of the accounts.
The commandment does not say, “Honor your father and mother when they deserve it.”
I believe that the key to understanding this commandment lies in what it reveals about ourselves. As I have been emphasizing over the past few weeks, I believe that It is important to understand that each commandment, in addition to giving instructions about how we are to live out our covenant life with God and one another, reveals something fundamental about ourselves.
And the fundamental fact about human beings that this commandment uncovers is - once again - that all-powerful desire to be free of ties, free of obligations, free to be and do what we want without reference to anything beyond or behind or above ourselves. And our society has, in the last few generations, managed to replace a reverence for tradition, for roots, for our elders, with a newer-is-better, design-your-own approach to everything from marriage to religion.
Breaking tradition - getting away from the past - has become identified as a positive good, leading - so it is said - to a future where the only limit is our imaginations. Look at Outback Steakhouse’s motto: “No rules, just right.”
But that is not how God designed us.
God binds us in community. God places us in a community with a history, with a story, with values and traditions and memories. God embodies that community and that tradition in our parents. But it is the whole tradition that we are to honor. And even when individuals fail in their duty to their children, the child can - indeed must, for the sake of the covenant - continue to honor the tradition - the eternal truths, the history and commandments - that their flawed parents betrayed. In this way the frayed patches in the tapestry of human existence are mended, and the community continues to uphold and nurture its children for another generation.
When either the parent or the child so breaks faith with their sacred history that it cannot be reclaimed, the kind of chaos that characterizes our post-modern society is the result.
Remember the prodigal son? He is the classic example of failure to honor parents. Why do you suppose he left? I imagine that he felt stifled, confined, as if he couldn’t reach his full potential where he was. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he didn’t occasionally say to his father, “You just don’t want me to have any fun.” He wanted to be free of all restraints, free of rules of prudence, of chastity, of diligence and sobriety. He wanted not to have to be accountable. And what happened?
Right. Crash and burn.
It is, of course, possible to overdo the tradition thing. Just because we’ve always done it that way doesn’t mean we always ought to do it that way. But a living tradition grounded in God’s truth provides a solid base from which people can be nourished, and stretch and grow. We interact with a living tradition as our bodies interact with gravity, it helps us grow strong and keeps us centered as we go about our lives. The tallest trees have the deepest roots. But the tumbleweeds, which have no roots at all, live a life of aimless adventure, whisking across a desolate landscape in a sad parody of freedom.
Truly it is said that parents owe their children both roots and wings. The blessing of God is that both are found in obedience to his word.
