Trouble With “The Ten”
Discipleship, Missional / Emerging Theology, Spiritual Formation and Education May 1st, 2008As you have probably already seen, I’ve been working on a new discipleship curriculum for our church - a curriculum which I am hoping to publish eventually.
The second chapter of the curriculum is an introduction to Christian lifestyle and commitments. Thus, I am working on a basic summary of the Ten Commandments, taken from the perspective of Jesus. Therefore, two of the Ten have become rather complicated.
The fourth commandment, that to keep the Sabbath, is difficult to work out, but here’s my general drift so far: in light of Jesus’ healing on the Sabbath and pretty much his out-and-out provocation of the Pharasaic approach to the Sabbath, it seems that God is commanding Sabbath so that his people will have time for healing, restoration and rest. It’s not so much a commandment against work - it’s more a commandment to genuinely rest and experience God’s restoration and sustenance. Jesus’ healings, occurring as often as they did on Sabbaths, are somehow very significant for his interpretation of the Sabbath, and I know I’m missing something here.
The fifth commandment is also difficult for us. First of all, this commandment was written as much to adults as it was to children - if not more so. The adults are the ones to be honoring their parents, not just the children. Only secondarily is this taught to minors. That’s the first thing we have to get straight in our interpretation of the commandment to honor parents.
But the big question for our day and time comes from the context in which I minister. Many teens and young adults - as well as many other older adults - come from families that are just plain dysfunctional. How do you honor a father whose presence in your life was over before the cells that became you were even fertilized? How do you honor parents who are verbally (or otherwise) abusive? How do you honor parents who are acting like total fools?
Understanding an “honor and shame culture” such as the Old Testament might shed some light - but it’s hard to describe this commandment negatively. We could write it “Do not shame your parents” instead of “honor your parents,” and that could lead us to understanding, but does it still miss the point? For in the OT culture, honor and shame were opposites - and there was no middle ground. If you do not shame your parents, that makes some sense, even for this culture.
I’d appreciate some dialogue and feedback on these two commandments, since I think they have deep significance for being truly Christian in our culture. I don’t want to see us go back to even the Pharasaic laws of the 19th century Christianity that kept the world shut down on Sundays. That doesn’t make any sense to me at all. Then your doctors and other emergency personnel have to break the Sabbath to heal - and that seems to go against Jesus’ own practice. And we all need to find ways to honor parents - even when they’re totally disrespectible. I don’t know how to deal with that: I grew up in a (relatively) sane family and my parents are pillars of the community, honorable on all fronts. Yet somehow this “honor one’s parents” must speak both to me and to the fatherless kids I deal with regularly.
Help?
May 1st, 2008 at 16:53:24 (-0500)
As per the Sabbath, I think one reason God called for a Sabbath was to have us take a break from worrying about provision. He did the same thing with the year of Jubilee- trust that he would provide during that time.
I once talked to a farmer who never missed church even during the most pressing planting and harvesting work. Some farmers feel they must take advantage of all good weather, even if it falls on Sunday. He did not. He felt that God would provide enough good-weather days for him to get his work done, if he honored him by going to worship. He had a very productive farm, by the way.
May 28th, 2008 at 13:17:47 (-0500)
I agree that honoring your father and mother can be extremely difficult in this fallen world that we live in. I have personally struggled with this one in the past. It seems to me that all of the commandments, and especially this one, fall into the category of “things to strive towards” rather than things that are wholly achievable on our own. (This is why we need the grace of Jesus.) And as any good ethics professor can tell you, intentionality determines much of what is “right” and “wrong”. If we start with those two presuppositions, then we can begin to see some possible ways to view this commandment. It is not necessarily something that we can actively do with another person in all cases, but can be something that we can strive toward in our hearts and minds.
How do you honor a parent that is absent? Particularly if that absence is not due to death, but uncaring? I think in that case your idea of not shaming certainly applies. However, I would also say that it would mean not spending the rest of your life blaming your own mistakes on that parent or finding fault with the bad choices that they made with no forgiveness. It is easy when your life has been hard to point fingers and lay blame rather than laying everything at the feet of God and getting the healing that we need. Our culture, in fact, teaches us to do just that. It is always someone else’s fault. Perhaps the most honoring thing one could do in this situation is simply to forgive.
For that matter, forgiving one’s parents for the mistakes that they have made is a good ingredient in honoring those who have been good, bad, dysfunctional or absent.
I used to think that honoring my parents meant keeping their secrets and continuing to play the co-dependent role that I learned as a child. When I really began to get healthy a couple of years ago (through the help of a couple of wonderful Christian counselors) I began working on cutting those co-dependent ties. Amazingly, I discovered that getting healthy myself was the most honoring thing I have ever done. My own path to healing, within the grace and mercy of Jesus, actually has led my parents to begin a healing journey of their own. Our relationship is better than it has ever been.
Now I realize that in a lot of cases this is not likely to happen. However, I don’t think that restoration of an earthly relationship is the ultimate goal of this commandment. If we are the type of people who can honor our parents, either through becoming good, healthy people ourselves or through forgiveness or through actually holding up the things they have done that deserve honoring, we are focused on the right kinds of things. We stop looking for the ways to lay blame and point out faults and begin searching for the ways to cover our relationships in graceful love.
This is what God has chosen to do with us, when we are covered in the blood of Jesus. We stop being these sinful, unlovable people who deserve no forgiveness and no honor and become instead the forgiven, loved children of God. We are not called, therefore, to honor only those who deserve it. That would be easy. Even those who are not Christians can honor those kinds of people. We are called instead to honor the un-honorable. It’s not easy and it’s often impossible without the help of God, but we can strive towards it and in the process become more Christlike.
May 28th, 2008 at 21:57:28 (-0500)
I think Debra’s comments are tied to the Sabbath commandment as well, both through the issue of healing/restoration and through the fact (ever-present, once you start to recognize it!) that we cannot wholly achieve anything on our own. I completely agree that understanding Sabbath as a positive time for rest, healing, and restoration is key to how Jesus practiced Sabbath. I also think one of the underlying functions of Sabbath is to help us live out the truth that we cannot accomplish anything on our own, no matter how hard we work, but that we are wholly dependent on God. Taking a day to not work means we are choosing to trust that we will not “lose out” in the rat race, choosing to believe that the God who cares for us will keep us and provide for us. To tie back in to the commandment to honor father and mother, Debra talked about letting God heal us to the point that we are the kind of people who are able to honor our father and mother, even when they haven’t been the kind of father and mother perhaps they ought to have been…and that kind of forgiveness and grace depends on the ability to trust God, to receive what we need from Him rather than from our own energy or from others. And the ability to forgive rather than blame, to let go, is in essence the same as the ability to take a day off (or whatever you consider Sabbath) and let go of the need to work, or to take care of things yourself, or to be in control and responsible.