[My mother died when I was 17… My dad had injured his hand a few months earlier so he happened to be home for the last couple of months of her life – the longest I ever remember him being home – but a week or two after the funeral he left to return to his ship. Before he left, he invited his sister (my aunt) to come and live in the house along with her boyfriend. (She had left her husband and taken up with this big blond German guy.) It wasn’t long before we had some differences of opinion which ended up with my aunt’s boyfriend throwing me down the stairs and me leaving home.
God was watching over me. I didn’t end up on the street. After staying at friends’ places for a while I moved in with my sister while I hunted for a job and got on my feet.]
We live a couple of blocks from Notre Dame House, “a 24-hour emergency shelter and multi-agency resource centre for homeless and street-involved youth 16 to 21 years of age.” Most of them are there because the streets look better than the abusive situations they come from. I could just as easily have ended up in that situation.
At the beginning of the summer I asked for suggestions about topics that people would like me to speak on. And so, for the next few weeks I will be trying to respond to some of those questions, especially those that centre around the topics of abuse, forgiveness, the reality of evil in our world – you know, all the easy stuff!
I had originally intended to tackle two questions this morning but, as it turns out, I’m only going to be able to address one: “Does God still expect us to follow the commandment ‘honour your father and your mother’ when they are abusive and not honourable?” It’s impossible to give yes/no answers to questions like this. They are far too important, and, for many people, far too painful, to simply try and give a glib answer. So, what I want to try and do this morning, is to place our relationships with our parents in the larger context of power relationships as they are defined in the Bible and seek to discover what scripture says about those relationships.
Some people, including many Christians, have such a high respect for authority that they think we should always obey people in authority, even when we know they’re wrong, just because of their position. They believe in absolute authority in relationships.
What do I mean by that? Well, at one point
most of the countries in
There’s a strong tradition in the church that applies this kind of thinking to all kinds of authority relationships. They tell wives that they have to submit to everything their husband tells them to do, just because he’s the husband. And, unfortunately, they often tell children that they have to submit to their parents’ abuse, just because they’re the parent.
But does the Bible really teach that we always have to submit to the authority figures in our lives? Let’s look at what the Bible says about relationships of power.
In a monarchy no-one is more powerful than the king, right? So, if we want to see how God views relationships of power let’s start at the top, with the king.
In the Old Testament the king was not an
absolute ruler. In fact Deut 17:18-20 has some pretty explicit instructions for
the king. 18 When he takes the throne of
his kingdom, he is to write for himself on a scroll a copy of this law, taken
from that of the priests, who are Levites. 19 It is to be with him,
and he is to read it all the days of his life so that he may learn to revere
the Lord his God and follow
carefully all the words of this law and these decrees 20 and not
consider himself better than his brothers and turn from the law to the right or
to the left. Then he and his descendants will reign a long time over his
kingdom in
The king couldn’t just do what he wanted. He had to act as God’s representative. That means that he had to act as God would in a given situation. And one of the key things that we learn about God in scripture is that he acts to protect the vulnerable, usually expressed in the form of his care for widows and orphans.
The Lord watches over the alien and
sustains the fatherless and the widow, but he frustrates the ways of the
wicked. (Ps 146:9)
The Lord tears down the proud man’s
house but he keeps the widow’s boundaries intact. (Prov 15:25)
The Bible assumes that the powerful can look after themselves, but, according to God, those in power have a responsibility to protect those who cannot protect themselves. When they don’t, they come under God’s judgement. In Isaiah 1:23 God makes it very clear how he feels about people who abuse authority.
Your rulers are rebels, companions
of thieves; they all love bribes and chase after gifts. They do not defend the
cause of the fatherless; the widow’s case does not come before them. 24
Therefore the Lord, the Lord Almighty, the Mighty One of
And what does it look like when God turns
his hand against those who abuse their authority? All over the ancient world kings
were referred to as shepherds, so listen as God speaks through Ezekiel against
the kings of
The word of the Lord came to me: 2 “Son of
man, prophesy against the shepherds of
7 “
‘Therefore, you shepherds, hear the word of the Lord: 8 As surely as I live, declares the
Sovereign Lord, because my flock
lacks a shepherd and so has been plundered and has become food for all the wild
animals, and because my shepherds did not search for my flock but cared for
themselves rather than for my flock, 9 therefore, O shepherds, hear
the word of the Lord: 10 This
is what the Sovereign Lord says:
I am against the shepherds and will hold them accountable for my flock. I will
remove them from tending the flock so that the shepherds can no longer feed
themselves. I will rescue my flock from their mouths, and it will no longer be
food for them.
This is how God feels about people who abuse their position of authority over others. Leadership of any kind; over a nation, a corporation, a church or a family, should always be for the benefit of those being led, not for the benefit of the leader.
As I read this passage I realized how accurately it describes the experience of those from abusive families. Listen to what God would say to abusive parents.
3 You eat the curds, clothe yourselves with
the wool and slaughter the choice animals, but you do not take care of the
flock.
You’re happy to take the child benefits from the government but you don’t take care of the flock. You serve yourself and make sure you’re OK but you don’t look after the children in your care.
4 You have not strengthened the weak or
healed the sick or bound up the injured. You have not brought back the strays
or searched for the lost. You have ruled them harshly and brutally.
Instead of being there for your kids to be a safe place of healing, you have actually been the source of brutal hurts.
5 So they were scattered because there was no
shepherd, and when they were scattered they became food for all the wild
animals.
So, because they had no shepherd, no parent, they left home as soon as they could, either literally by hitting the street, or by checking out into drugs and anti-social behaviour. And when they did, they became victims of all the predators out there, predators that their parents, the shepherds, were supposed to protect them from.
6 My sheep wandered over all the mountains and on every high hill. They were scattered over the whole earth, and no one searched or looked for them. And no-one cared!
And
God’s response to shepherds who care for themselves rather than for the flock?
Verse 10 says, I am against the shepherds and will hold them
accountable for my flock. I will remove them from tending the flock so that the
shepherds can no longer feed themselves. I will rescue my flock from their
mouths, and it will no longer be food for them.
According to God authority or power is
given for a purpose. The purpose of the shepherds, of the kings of
What makes someone a parent? Is it simply providing half the DNA for a child? Or is it something much more costly?
In the movie “The Bridges of Madison County” Meryl Streep has to explain to Clint Eastwood why she can’t leave her family and run away with him. “You don't understand, no-one does. When a woman makes the choice to marry, to have children; in one way her life begins but in another way it stops. You build a life of details. You become a mother, a wife and you stop and stay steady so that your children can move. And when they leave they take your life of details with them.” By the standards of this movie, never mind God’s standards, many people have never had parents.
So, with that in mind, let’s look at the text that was read this morning.
Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. 2 “Honor your father and mother”—which is the first commandment with a promise— 3 “that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life on the earth.”
4 Fathers,
do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and
instruction of the Lord.
This can’t be a blanket command to obey
parents irrespective of how they behave. For one thing, this whole section of
Ephesians is an explanation of Paul’s command to the Ephesian believers to be
submitted to each other (Eph 5:21). It’s about mutual submission, which would
have been a really strange idea in first century
So he doesn’t just say “Children, obey your parents” and leave it at that. He says, Children, obey your parents in the Lord. It’s not an absolute command. It’s modified by bringing Jesus into the picture. So what do you think would happen if an Ephesian child became a Christian and their parents insisted that they sacrifice to the Greek and Roman gods? Obviously they would have refused, even though the father of the household could then actually kill them and not be prosecuted. If you think that’s a bit far-fetched, it happens all the time in the Muslim world. Marilyn had a friend whose mother tried three times to poison her because she had become a Christian. Was she supposed to obey her mother and die? Of course not! Because the reason that children should submit to parents is that it may go well with [them] and that [they] may enjoy long life on the earth.
In general, that works. If you learn to obey your parents and they shout “stop!” as you are about to run in front of a car, and you stop, it’ll save your life. Parents have authority in their children’s lives in order to care for them, so that it may go well with [them] and that [they] may enjoy long life on the earth.
Just as the authority of the kings was
there to enable them to care for the people of
The second half of Paul’s command has the same tone. Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.
Don’t exasperate your children, don’t make your children angry. Don’t demean them, embarrass them, or tell them they’re stupid or ugly or that they’ll never amount to anything. With the authority of a parent comes the responsibility to bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord, not to use them to bolster your own ego. According to the Bible, authority is always linked to responsibility for the well-being of the people you have authority over; whether that’s in leading a family, leading a team, leading a church, leading a company, or leading a country.
And that’s not just some kind of rhetorical flourish. How we experience leadership in our families as children affects how we experience authority figures for the rest of our lives. If your parents abused you, you will expect bosses or teachers (or pastors) to abuse you.
If you had a parent or parents for whom nothing you did was ever good enough, you will transfer that experience to other authority figures. I’ve had the experience of leading a person like this, and it didn’t matter if what I said was 95% affirmation and only 5% correction. All he ever heard was the correction. Because that’s all he ever heard from his father.
The hard truth is that it takes years to learn those kinds of responses, and it usually takes years to unlearn them. But it is possible to move beyond the pain, as God brings healing to your life. He does that, at least partly, by grafting us into a new family, his family, where old patterns can be reworked and healed and new responses learned.
Now, my standing up here and preaching on these kinds of things may set some kind of framework for that change to take place, but it’s only as wounded people learn to trust again that real change takes place. That’s why I am so committed to this vision for transformational housing. So many of the people on the margins of our society are there because they were deeply wounded as children. These homes that we hope to see established will be places where the wounds of past abuse can be healed, where, to use the words of Ezekiel, there will be an opportunity for the weak to be strengthened, the sick to be healed, and the injured to be bound up. That’s what it will take to see people set free from their pasts.