The Honour Due One's Parents

“Honour thy father and thy mother.” So runs the fourth commandment—or fifth, of you are Orthodox or Reformed.

But that is not the complete commandment, either. The full passage, in Exodue, reads, “Honor your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.” And in Revelations, it reads: “Honor your father and your mother, as the Lord your God commanded you, so that your days may be long and that it may go well with you in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.”

The extra bit is important, I think, and ought not to be dropped—this is demonstrated by the fact that it appears in both versions of the list. It is needed to make the true meaning clear.

Without it, the commandment is often quoted to children to suggest a divine obligation to obey their parents. But that is not what is meant at all. Jesus makes this clear in the New Testament when he says the true Christian “despises” his father and his mother, that we should call no one father but our Father in heaven, and that, rather than respectfully mourn our sire, we ought to “let the dead bury their own dead.”

We cannot, of course, assume all families to be benevolent, any more than we can assume all governments to be benevolent. This being true, the common interpretation of the commandment can be profoundly harmful in the case, for example, of abused children. But more: the pressure for solidarity within a family can be the first and the worst example of “peer pressure” as an assault on the individual conscience—of “the world” as it appears in that ungodly trio of tempters, “the world, the flesh, and the devil.” And then there is the danger of nepotism, of family solidarity as collective selfishness.

The commandment is, in any case, superfluous in the case of young children. They have no option, after all—their very survival depends on keeping their parents happy. They have no free will in the matter.

It is, accordingly, only to adults that the commandment is addressed. And the word, after all, is “honour,” not “obey.”

What the commandment means, rather, is a moral obligation to look after our parents' needs in their old age. It is precisely this obligation, if socially recognized, that ensures that “our days may be long.” No euthanasia, as is indeed practiced by some cultures, no mocking of the old, of the sort Ham was indeed cursed for, and no “elder abuse.” It is of a piece with the commandment, elsewhere, “not to forget the wife of your youth.”

This meaning would be much more apparent in cultures that, unlike ours, do not have social security to tend to the old. Even without this, is is easy for the young and strong to become reckless of the interests of the old farts and has-beens.

Our own culture is not exemplary in this regard.