1. They mess you up, your mum and dad…

The English poet Philip Larkin once wrote a poem about parents.

They #&@# you up, your mum and dad.

They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

And add some extra, just for you.

I’ve found that this poem – and I’ve read it out many times - makes people sigh.

Because the relationship we have with our parents is one of the most complex and fraught of all human relationships. And ever since Sigmund Freud, we’ve blamed our parents for our faults, flaws, and limitations. Many an hour on the therapist’s couch has been spent detailing how our mother and father have hurt us by their absence or emotional distance, or their demands that you succeed, their helicopter or tiger parenting, their indulgence, or their neglect. Perhaps even by their abuse.

Knowing how we can mess up our kids has produced a deep anxiety in us about parenting. At least in the middle-class West, we are so hyper-sensitive about the mental health of our kids that we’ve come to believe that the point of parenting is to produce happy children, rather than mature and robust adults.

And yet at the same time as we know they’ve messed us up, we do tend to love our parents! We’d hate to be parentless. So many of the great stories of children’s literature, from Oliver Twist to Harry Potter, start with lost or orphaned children – because to be without parents is to be without love, safety, or identity.

If we do find ourselves shaped by our parents’ vices, then we’re also embossed with their virtues, too. I can’t tell you how many tearful and heartfelt eulogies I’ve heard honouring parents in this very place – recounting with gratitude the blessings that have been handed on down the generations.

2. The command to honour your parents

Which takes us to the fifth commandment:

Honour 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.

a) Human beings in their finitude

Now, there is no human being that is excluded from this command. Not all of us are parents; but all of us are children. There’s no such thing as a self-made man or woman. We did not create ourselves. We all emerged from the physical bodies of our parents – mostly from that semi-voluntary act that combines the flesh of male and female, and from the bloody struggle of our mothers to give us birth. We came from sex, blood, muscle, placenta, and birth canal. We’re not clones of others – simply derivative of them. We have a uniqueness that comes from the combination of male and female that produces us.

And we share this condition with vast majority of animals, and even some of the plants. Like them, we’re biological creatures, emerging from the soup of genes and DNA that has been bubbling away in the bodies of our ancestors for millions of years.

As children of parents, we take our place in the endless roll call of the generations. We may feel as if history has led inexorably to this point and to our existence, but our nature smashes this egotism. For the generations pass on. Now is our time; but our time will pass.

And so: the command to honour our parents is in part a humble recognition of our biological reality. You are a finite creature. As a human being, though you’re made in the image of God, you’re also formed from the dust of the ground.

b) The natural authority of parents

And this command reminds us that there is a natural authority given to human parents over their children. We see this at work in the natural world, too, for parenting is not just a human thing.

This week we had a baby magpie in our garden just leaving the nest. It looked a little wet. Its parents were watching carefully from the trees and occasionally swooping down to feed it by regurgitating into its beak – and to show it how to feed itself. It’s not yet learnt how to fly and needs to learn from those who’ve gone before it. They are protecting it, feeding it, and teaching it.

It’s natural that the older will teach the younger. We need to know how to live in our bodies from those who’ve lived in bodies like ours before us. God has given us human parents of both sexes to teach us, by word, discipline, and example. They name us; and in a sense we belong them, for we are their responsibility. They will give account to God for their parenting of us.

This command then tells us what our mission as parents is. We’re not just the providers and the nurturers of our children. We’re their teachers.

And what are parents to teach them? Parents teach them how to live as human beings. They humanise us. Now this is a big task, and God has arranged it so that, in the ordinary scheme of things, we have two physically and psychologically different adults to help us with this. We call them ‘mum’ and ‘dad’.

Lots of this has to do with the material business of keeping alive: with food, work, and relationships.

But father and mother are also specifically called to teach us to walk in the ways of God – which is an essential part of flourishing as a human. Like their parents, children are made in the image of God. So it’s vital that children learn who made them and their parents. And parents derive their parenthood from the heavenly Father. Our children are more his than ours. We are to honour our parents ultimately because we trace our origins back to God himself as our first parent. And so we must teach this to our children. We cannot have the fifth command without the first.

As Martin Luther says:

Parents should consider that they owe obedience to God, and that, above all, they should earnestly and faithfully discharge the duties of their office, not only to provide for the material support of their children..., but especially to bring them up to the praise and honour of God.

As a parent or grandparent, are you carrying out your mission to lead your children into the knowledge and love of God?

c) What are children to do?

But what are we children to do?

We are to honour our parents, father and mother. The word ‘honour’ is sufficiently clear and broad to cover all the phases of our life as the children of our parents. We can even continue to honour them after they are gone.

In the first instance it will mean obeying them. They are set over us as our teachers, so that we might learn, and flourish. That is certainly how the New Testament interprets the command – we see this in Ephesians 6:1-2 and in Colossians 3:19.

Now in ordinary circumstances we should not be afraid of this command, because parents are called to instruct and discipline us in the context of parental love and nurture. They desire that we thrive. That’s the promise that comes with the command – honour your parents so that it will go well for you, and you’ll live long. The rebellious child, on the other hand, imagines themself their own parent, and flirts with self-destruction.

This means, by the way, that as parents we should be unafraid of lovingly instructing our children and expecting them to obey us.

But for most of us here, does the command apply? We’re no longer children, but we do remain the children of our parents. What it means to ‘honour’ our parents will then change. Rather than obedience, it will mean respect. It will hopefully mean listening to a valuable – though fallible - source of advice and support, adult to adult.

In time, as parents age, it can mean a reversal of the order of care and protection. To honour a parent into advanced old age may mean inconvenience and expense. But it’s a mark of our dishonour of the elderly when they feel forgotten or like a burden.

And even when they have gone: how we continue to speak about and remember the generation above us will be a signal to those who come after us about how our own wisdom and example should be heeded. This is one of the real insights of this command: intergenerational respect benefits everyone, especially the young. So: a great way to parent is to model respect for your own parents.

d) the parent as sinner

But one thing that is never denied here is that your parents, like you, are sinners. They’re not divine or perfect. They will have messed you up, even in the best of cases. They’ve filled you with the faults they had.

For this command does not say to us that Mum and Dad are god. They are to be honoured, but not to be worshipped.

This is a crucial distinction. And it helps us understand what it might be to honour our parents when our parents are not simply imperfect, but particularly bad as parents. Your relationship to your parents or a parent may be a matter of deep wounds for you. A parent may’ve been – or is right now - a bully, a manipulator, a narcissist, an addict, or an abuser. You may’ve been abandoned by a parent. To be in an intimate and dependant relationship with someone is to be the sufferer of their sins.

What then?

We need to recall the connection of the fifth commandment to the first one. Remember the mission of parenting – which is to bring children up in the fear and the knowledge of Lord. A parent is most honoured when their child calls on God as Father and obeys him – even when that hasn’t been learnt from the parent. In extreme circumstances, honouring a parent may mean going against them, if what they command is evil. For example, it honours a criminally abusive parent to take them to the police. You honour your parents to become a Christian, even if they forbid it.

3. God as Father, Jesus as the Son

a) our true Father

But the limitations and sins of our parents remind us of the deeper truth that the command teaches us: that God is our true parent from whom all parenthood derives. And we obey this command in obeying him. This command is a channel through which we are meant to learn obedience to God.

We honour our parents ultimately because we trace our origins back to God himself as our first parent. It’s interesting how the Bible doesn’t speak of God’s paternal and maternal qualities as an echo of what we see in human beings, but the other way around. His parenthood – his loving authority, his nurture and sustenance, his protection and his loving care - is the template for ours. Our parenting is meant to be a sign pointing our children to his character. We are meant to see God’s qualities in our parents.

b) Jesus the Son

But who has truly obeyed this command? Just as our parents are sinners and fail as parents, we have to admit that so are we. We do fail to honour them, since we sin.

But just as the one we know as Father is the true parent, so Jesus the Son fulfils the fifth commandment for us by being the consummately obedient Son of the Father. He is the one in whom God is well pleased

Jesus knew both earthly and heavenly parents. Even though we know he was a loyal son – he even remembered to take care of Mary when he was on the cross - there are moments in the gospels where there is apparent tension. When he was young, his parents lost him at the temple, for he said, he needed to be at his Father’s house. A woman once called out to him ‘Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts that nursed you!’ and Jesus replied ‘Blessed rather is those who hear the word of God and obey it’. He called his disciples to leave their earthly families behind. When his mother and brothers once came to do an intervention because they thought he was nuts, he pointed to the listening crowd and said ‘these are my mother and brothers’.

c) A new family

Jesus points us again and again to the Fatherhood of God. And by dying for us, he brings us into God’s family, as our elder brother, so that we too can call God ‘Father’. In Christ by the Spirit, we can say ‘Thou my true Father, and I thy true heir’. Though we like prodigal children we are did not honour our parents, we find that by faith in Jesus Christ, they are truly honoured. When we turn to him, our parents’ mission is complete.

This does not mean that our earthly families disappear. We are still to honour our parents. Still to parent our children. But also we’re given a new family in Jesus Christ. His people may or may not be genetically related – but they are related to one another by the Spirit. And so, we gain, as Jesus promises, new mothers, and brothers, and sisters, and fathers.

And just as the people of Israel were told to teach and to learn, and to pass on the faith from older to younger, so we are to be a community of generations passing on the word of God. Which is why, by the way: we must be a community that is excitedly committed to sharing Jesus with youth and children.

4. Keeping the command

So: how will you honour your father and mother?

First, give thanks for them for what they’ve shown you. Give thanks that they gave you the gift of life. Determine where it’s true and possible to speak well of them. Learn from them when what they teach you is wise and true. Learn to see God’s qualities in their virtues.

But second: honour your father and mother by obeying the heavenly Father, and by become his child, in Jesus Christ, his true Son.