"Honor thy father and mother"

Thomas Wolfe said, "You can’t go home again." In a real sense we never completely leave. Regardless of whether we are proud of our beginning or spend years trying to escape it, where we began our life’s story stays with us. In reality we never dispense with our parents.

In the middle of the 10 commandments is this one: "Honor thy father and mother." What does it mean?

Perhaps most obviously it names an ongoing social obligation we have to look after those who cared for us in our vulnerable childhood, a responsibility for the elders in society. The story is told of a man who was put out with his elderly father who was weak and unable to eat without making mess. After things didn’t improve he started building a pen in which to keep his father. Looking around he saw his toddler with a small hammer. "I’m going to build a pen to put you in when you get old, Dad," he said proudly. The man put up his tools and abandoned the project. To protect the dignity of elders is a part of this command.

I think the command can also be understood broadly as instructing us to honor tradition. The experience of past ages should not be wasted. Some assume that scientific methods eliminate the need for authority and tradition, but the "scientific method" itself is a tradition we have learned by accepting it on authority. There is nothing wrong with this. All knowledge is by way of apprenticeship to those who got here before us. We may later discover that their knowledge was partial, their truth incomplete, their method limited, but it is impossible to make a beginning without the benefit of those who were here before us. Why waste precious years reinventing wheels, and devising alphabets and grammars, exploring dead ends. Whether in morality, or the arts, or scientific discovery, life is too short for us to ignore the work of the generations that preceded us.

"History is bunk" Henry Ford said. America so prides itself as a place of brand new possibilities, that we often have made the mistake of thinking we don’t need the past, that tradition is mainly an obstacle to progress. It would be better for us to see that the fruitfulness and longevity of our culture depends in part on stewardship of the resources of tradition. "Honor thy father and mother that thy days may be long in the land."

The command has a narrower meaning as well. In an old Peanuts cartoon Lucy wrestles with an assignment on church history. After mulling it over she begins, "Our pastor was born in 1942." History and tradition begin for each of us with the people who bent over our crib or greeted us the first day of school. We are part of a more particular story within that larger cultural story.

And it is about this particular and very local story that we must say what honoring means. Honoring does not mean idolizing. Parents like the rest of us were a mixture of good and bad, weaknesses and strengths.  Honoring our parents does not require that we falsify history. But one does not have to be perfect to be good, thank God. As adults we honor our parents by celebrating their virtues and forgiving their failures. But, more than that, our parent’s story is not over as long as we live. Part of the meaning of their life will be what we make of ours. To honor father and mother is to live a life that takes up their story and writes a good next chapter in it.  We honor our father and mother by showing their investments in us paid off.

One last thing ought to be noted. The placement of this commandment within the ten, after commands about piety toward God and before those about respect for fellow humans, suggests a connection between our relation with parents and our other relationships. Perhaps it is this: we may learn through honoring parents both to treat other humans with respect and also to  reverence God.  Let us explore the latter.

Honoring our father and mother may help us understand God. It is no accident Jesus used the family to teach how things are between God and us.

In the parable of the prodigal son, the younger of two sons dishonors his father and throws away his heritage. But one day he comes to himself, realizing he has made a great and terrible mistake. He feels what it is to be orphaned. In throwing away his home he discovers he has thrown away his own life. He misses it. "I will arise and go to my Father." the prodigal says. Not thinking that it is possible he could be more than a servant now, this son returns to try to honor his father in whatever distant way the father might be now permit, only to be surprised by a love scandalously more than he had any right to expect. The father smothers his son's repentance in a deep embrace. Such love is, the gospel says, is a picture of God.

There is a deep yearning in all our human hearts for home, for a human home where we are loved, for a God who loves us. We may sometimes wonder, "Are we orphans in this universe? Spawned by accident, abandoned to chance, with no eye upon us while we live, and none to mark our death?" However often we may be tempted to think that "we can’t go home again," or that there never really was any home, there is a sense in which we can never go beyond the love of our Heavenly Father. The practice of honoring our father and mother imprints on us piety toward God; and honoring God, in turn, prepares us to know the God who yearns for us.

Honor thy father and mother. A commandment with a promise inside.