Last Sunday was Father’s Day. As a church we’ve chosen to not recognize and honor anyone but Jesus during our worship services. (If you’d like to know more, see this article.) Still, many of us celebrated Father’s Day that afternoon. For many, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are a joy and a delight, whether for being mothers and fathers or for having wonderful mothers and fathers. These are days our culture designates as days to honor parents. This intersects nicely with the Scriptural command to honor one’s father and mother. We should not think of this as being kept simply with a nice card and perhaps dinner at a nice restaurant. Rather, to honor one’s father and mother is a way of life.
This instruction, of course, makes a significant assumption: the father and mother are honorable. The fifth commandment doesn’t nuance this, however. It simply says, “Honor your father and mother”. Surely in Israel there were fathers and mothers who were not honorable, yet God commands his people to honor them.
The Hebrew word for “to honor” means “to make heavy”—to give weight to. It is to highly prize one’s parents, to respect them and to exalt them to their rightful place. It is a word often used of the Lord. He is to be honored, to be given the weight that is due him—and that is key. As the psalmist wrote:
There is none like you among the gods, O Lord, nor are there any works like yours. All the nations you have made shall come and worship before you, O Lord, and shall glorify your name. For you are great and do wondrous things; you alone are God.
Psalm 86:8-10 ESV
God is holy. There is none like him. He is exalted above all things, for he is the creator of all that has been created. God stands alone. To honor him is to give him the weight that is due him. Therefore all honor and glory and praise is to be given him, for he is worthy. Here’s the thing, and this may be hard to comprehend: it would be wrong to give God honor that is not due him. That is, it would be wrong to ascribe to God a weightiness that is not his. The difficulty in comprehending this truth is God is worthy of all honor and glory, so let me illustrate.
Imagine an office employee. He shows up on time, does his job, and leaves on time. Nothing stands out about his performance or his productivity. He does what he is paid to do—nothing more and nothing less. He is the sort who simply doesn’t stand out as being great as his job nor as being terrible at his job. He does what he’s supposed to do. Now imagine it’s time for his annual review. It would be wrong for his manager to write on his evaluation, “This guy is great! He’s an incredible asset to the team! He is one of our finest employees!”
We’d all love to get a glowing review like this, but if, deep down, we know it’s not true, it would ring quite hollow. The manager would be doing a disservice to the employee and to others for giving this employee too much “honor”—too much weight, for to honor his performance in such glowing terms necessarily dims the honor due to those who give so much more to the job.
It happens that the Lord cannot be given too much weight. In fact, the opposite is true: we cannot give him enough weight! I hope you see my point here. The honor that is given to a person, whether to the Lord or to one’s father and mother must be commensurate with the honor due that person. When it comes to ordinary folk, we must strive to give neither too much nor too little honor. Old Testament scholar Terence Fretheim clarifies what is meant by the commandment to honor one’s father and mother.
The positive formulation, along with the use of the wide-ranging verb ‘honor,’ means that there is no one specific behavior that is commanded. It is an open-ended commandment, inviting children [of all ages] to respond in any way that honors parents.
Terence E. Fretheim, “Interpretation Commentary: Exodus”
Rather than specific details, the Lord simply says to give weight to one’s father and mother. Not every parent should receive the same weight, in the way that not every employee should receive the same glowing annual review.
When the Lord issued this command to his people there was the general assumption that parents would provide for and protect their children, that they would instruct and guide and give wisdom to their children. In response to this, honor is to be given to those parents.
We can see the difficulty of this command given how some parents are simply not honorable. Parents are in a sense like emperors. In 1 Peter 2:17 Peter tells the exiles—Christians who are suffering and enduring persecution—to honor the emperor. Emperor Nero was not honorable. The Greek word Peter used means to set a price on something. The idea is for Christians to highly value the emperor. Nero was a despicable man. He was cruel and utterly self-indulgent. One cannot speak of his self-indulgences and how they harmed others for they are truly wicked. He tortured and killed many Christians, yet Peter says to honor him.
To honor Nero by exclaiming how great and wonderful he was would actually be to violate the very command to honor him, for this would not honor Nero any more than telling the very average employee he was the greatest of all time would honor the employee. What was there to honor Nero for? As despicable as he was personally—he had his own mother killed and was largely known for his tyranny and cruelty and excess—he was still the emperor.
Nero initiated reforms to reduce corruption among tax collectors. He came up with building codes after the fire in the city of Rome—a fire he may have started—requiring buildings to be made of fireproof materials and for streets to be made wider. He promoted the arts and the theater. He personally funded rebuilding efforts in the city of Rome. He successfully negotiated an end to the Armenian War in the year 63. He also “married” a young boy named Sporus who resembled his late wife.
When Peter’s recipients received his letter instructing them to honor the emperor, this was all current events. They knew the emperor’s character did not deserve honor. What they were to honor, then, was not his character but his role. Whether he fulfilled his role properly or not, God had given Nero the responsibility for wise and beneficent leadership of the empire. The emperor was to be given weight for his role in fulfilling God’s assignment given to him, commensurate with how well he actually fulfilled that role.
We don’t have emperors today yet Peter’s instruction to honor the emperor applies to anyone in leadership, especially the highest level of leadership. Imagine being told to honor a president of the United States who appointed friends and supporters to government positions regardless of their qualifications. Imagine being told to honor a president who hid his numerous mistresses and fathered a child out of wedlock. Imagine being told to honor a president who gave favorable government contracts to businesses whose owners paid him bribes. Imagine being told to honor a president whose own cabinet members were imprisoned for crimes committed while in office. This is what Peter was saying to Christians in the 1920s when Warren G. Harding was president, whose presidency was filled with such scandals!
How are we supposed to honor those who are not honorable? We do not honor them by lying about them, claiming they are great when they are not great. We can honor their role in our lives without giving their character weight it should not have. Let me give you a practical example. I know a man whose mother wants nothing to do him. Desiring to see her and spend time with her he often invited her for a visit. She usually said yes, but at the last minute something always came up. One year he spoke with her on Christmas Eve and she assured him she would visit the next day. The next day, however, something came up. Later, when speaking with his sister he learned his mother had told her the week before that she was not planning to visit.
You can imagine the devastation this would bring. This man decided the best way to honor his mother would be to not put her in a position where she would be compelled to lie. He realized that all those times “something came up” she had been lying, not wanting to admit she didn’t want to visit or spend time with him. To honor her, to give her the weight she deserved, he decided to never again put her in a position in which she felt it necessary to lie. This means he stopped inviting her. He would tell you that at the very least she gave him life and regardless of his childhood experience, he’s alive, which means on some level she raised him to adulthood, which was a significant part of the responsibility God had given her. He knows he can honor this, her role.
The truth is all parents fail in some regard, and so in some sense all parents act in dishonorable ways. They are human. They are sinners in need of grace. We grant them the respect and honor Scripture requires of us in spite of their shortcomings. If you’ve heard my marriage homily before you know that I instruct the bride and groom to do what Scripture says, but not because of the person. A husband must love his wife, but not because she is lovable. Christ is always worthy of love so a husband must love as Christ loves. A wife must respect her husband, but not because he is respectable. Christ is always worthy of respect so a wife must respect her husband. Their love and respect are rooted in Jesus, not in the spouse, which frees each of them to love and to respect.
By rooting honor in the Lord and the role he has given parents, we experience freedom to not hold onto the unmet expectations that disappoint us and anger us even years into adulthood. When God the Father becomes the standard we are free to recognize the ways in which fathers and mothers fulfilled their roles and the ways in which they utterly failed. We do not give weight to their failures; we give weight to their successes—even if their success is merely our surviving childhood!
Many of us had fathers who were AWOL—whether “absent without leave” or “absent without leaving“. Many of us had mothers who did not nurture and care for us as a mother should. Many others had mothers and fathers who were closer to fulfilling the roles God gave them. None of us is exempt from honoring our fathers and mothers. This simply means we give them the weight that is due them. For some this will be a great weight—great honor is due them. For others, the honor—the weight—we give parents will be a like a bag of helium, pulling us up like a negative weight. We can both recognize the tremendous failures of parents and celebrate their successes. Sometimes the success is little more than passing along a set of chromosomes that make up you and me. At the very least we can thank God for giving us life.
When it comes to Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, we must honor what is honorable. We are not called to honor that which is dishonorable, recognizing what we honor is the role. Even if there is almost nothing to honor, we can still honor the Lord, for at the very least he has given us life through these two people. Life is a gift from God and if God gives that gift through two people who have nothing else about them that is honorable, we can cling to this. Most, however, will have more than this to honor. We must give weight to that which is weighty, understanding the Lord is worthy of all honor.