“Honor your father and your mother, as the Lord your God has commanded you, so that you may live long and that it may go well with you in the land the Lord your God is giving you. (Deuteronomy 5:16)

Both the Word on Sabbath and this Word on the honouring of father and mother are transitional words. They stand in the middle of the Ten moving us outward from loving, relational commitment to God toward a matching love of fellow human beings.

These commands stand out as different from all the others, not only because they are in the middle, but also because they come with additional clauses attached. Sabbath is the only word given with a rationale, and the honouring of parents is the only word that comes with a promise.

Sabbath gives a boundary in time for loving not only God, but also our neighbours as we set them free in the same freedom that we ourselves enjoy. Honouring fathers and mothers places our first full human act of love in our most intimate and primary of human relationships: that between us and our parents. And it commands that honouring of parents in words not dissimilar from the honour due to God from the first commands. So again, both of these are transitional commands, showing us how love of God is the foundation and impetus for that love to flow outward to our neighbours.

Of course, speaking specifically of this 5th command, we recognize that this parent-child relationship is sometimes also our most fraught. One of the commentators on this passage, Miller, notes that this command was not intended for small children still growing up under their parent’s care—it was intended for adult children navigating that odd relationship as equals-but-not-quite with their aging parents. Do you estrange yourself, exert control, grin-and-bear it when things do not go well in this relationship? The 5th word would suggest that keeping relationship with God demands a different path: one that honours these elders in our lives. No doubt for some of us that will require confession, forgiveness, prayers for a softened, healed heart, and a harder act of love than we may know ourselves capable of.

The word for honour means a dignifying, treating as weighty, valuable, and worthy these elders in one’s life—and doing so as an act of relational fidelity not only to them, but also to God. In a land without pensions where families live on ancestral inheritance together across generations, this is indeed a way to “live long” and have it “go well with you” in the land. To model to your own children what it means to love, honour, and eventually also care for those who are older and aging is a good way to treat as you yourself might hope to be treated when you yourself are the aging elder.

Even though we deal with each other primarily through systems now (like that of pensions, old age security, retirement and nursing homes) rather than through in-law suites that put us on the same plot of land together does not mean this command has lost any of its relevance. Perhaps it even holds more. The way that we—you and I—deal with our aging and dying parents says a lot about who we are as people, perhaps also as a society. People that no longer honour their elders in loving, intimate, relational fidelity begin to lose touch with their past and perhaps reveal that they have grown cynical or even fearful of their future. What life is there then to “live long” and “go well” into?

The catechism broadens the force of this command, using parents as a prototype that envelopes any authority that is set over us. That’s well and good. The family is indeed the most basic building block of society. But in this societal, systems-level thinking, it is also important not to lose the intimate, incarnate relationships of family.

We all have (had) parents. This word of relational honouring must first be personal before it can become universal. As John will later write in a slightly different, but relevant context from 1 John 4:20—"whoever does not love their brother or sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen.” The same can be said of parents. The practical nitty gritty reality of love always starts at home.