Commandment 5

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Old Testament Context

When the people of Israel assembled on the outskirts of the promised land and received for a second time the stipulations of the covenant God made with them, Moses warned the people in the following words: these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children. . .You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates” (Deut 6:6-7, 9).^[1]

God envisioned his covenant stipulations (the Torah) to be passed on from generation to generation through faithful families. “As for me and my house,” Moses’ successor Joshua would later say to the people, “we will serve the LORD” (Jos 24:15). The Israelites were not a collection of atomized individuals but rather families, households, which served the one God in the land he promised. This is evident enough in the covenant sign given to Abraham’s offspring: circumcision to eight-day old males. They did not get any say in the matter. Faithfulness to the one God was not something chosen but something given, a gift to be received and guarded.

Honor thy father and thy mother, then, signifies for the Israelites not just a private moral principle but instead sets forth a program for fidelity to God’s covenant. This is hinted at in the promise affixed to this commandment: “that thy days may be long in the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.” And so, as Moses later warns at the end of Deuteronomy, the curse for infidelity to the one God will be removal from the land, the plundering and oppression of the people (see the distressing warnings of Deut 28).

Honoring father and mother is a kind of apprenticeship to wisdom (inasmuch as father and mother themselves are faithful to the one God). This model is set forth in the book of Proverbs which opens as an address from a wise father to his son and ends with the vision of a wise wife and mother. In the wisdom literature, reflection on fidelity to the Torah is brought to bear on the specific occasions and temptations of everyday life. The fifth commandment, understood in the context of the apprenticeship model of Proverbs, encourages prudent fidelity to the covenant in the lives of ordinary Israelites. Honor your father and mother means, in the light of the wisdom literature: your father and mother offer you a pattern of fidelity to the one God in the world he has created.

Finally, in the Old Testament’s internal development itself, it is clear that the commandment to honor father and mother extends beyond the obligations each particular Israelite has to his biological kin. Honor thy father and thy mother means, by extension, honor the king (Ps 2). Father and mother, like all those in spiritual and political authority in the Israelite community, are representatives of God to those in their care. So, consider David’s reticence to slay King Saul even in his murderous rage (“I will not put out my hand against my lord, for he is the Lord’s anointed,” 1 Sam 24:10). In this context, it is instructive to see that David calls Saul “my father” (1 Sam 24:11). It is no surprise, then, when Christian reflection on the commandments immediately expands the context of the fifth commandment to include our obligation, in the words of the 1928 BCP Offices of Instruction, “to submit myself to all my governors, teachers, spiritual pastors and masters.”

Fathers and Mothers in the New Testament

“Call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven” (Matt 23:9). So goes the way of the New Testament regarding the fifth commandment, it would seem. Social distinctives are radically reinterpreted in the light of Christ, the authority of the religious leaders is decisively challenged by Jesus, and family ties are relativized in a most shocking way. “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple” (Lk 14:26). Additionally, we are told to love our enemies and pray for our persecutors. “For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same?” (Matt 5:46-47). Thus says the Master himself.

But not so fast. At another point, Jesus explicitly derides the Pharisees and scribes for breaking the commandment of God by their tradition. “For God commanded, ‘Honor your father and your mother,’’ and ‘Whoever reviles father or mother must surely die.’ But you say, ‘If anyone tells his father or his mother, ‘What you would have gained from me is given to God,’ he need not honor his father.’ So for the sake of your tradition you have made void the word of God. You hypocrites!” (Matt 15:3-7a). St. Paul later writes, “if anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever” (1 Tim 5:8). What are we to make of this double emphasis in the New Testament?

Again, we must return to that programmatic saying of the Lord in his Sermon on the Mount for all Christian reflection on the Law: “Do not think I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them” (Matt 5:17). God himself, the Father of the Lord Jesus, gave the commandment to honor father and mother in the Old Testament. It was through his own faithful Hebrew mother and father that Jesus himself was instructed in the faith as a youth, and it was through the long family line of Abraham and David that the promise of the Messiah came to fulfillment in the son of Mary and (adoptive) son of Joseph.

Yet we must not underplay the tension created by Jesus’ teaching and mission. His disciples left their fathers and mothers to follow him. His coming would divide families against themselves (see Matt 10:34-39). The point is expressed well in Rabbi Jacob Neusner’s critique that Jesus’ claims for himself sometimes require his Israelite disciples to (apparently) break the fifth commandment. The question for Neusner on this point is the perennial question of faithful Jewish readers of the New Testament: it turns on the person of Jesus. Neusner writes, “only God can demand of me what Jesus is asking.”^[2]

More on these concerns below. For now, it is worth highlighting the fact that the fifth commandment is related to the gospel in much the same way that the other commandments are: in Christ the law is deepened, fulfilled, and expanded. Honor thy father and thy mother in the Law of Moses initially meant unflinching fidelity to the covenant community, and therefore to the one God of the covenant. This is still the case in the New Testament’s reflection on the fifth commandment. However, it is seriously qualified by the new allegiance the disciples are called to make to the person of Jesus, the Son of the one God, who in himself has taken up the vocation of Israel and opened it up to all the nations. In the (hopefully) rare instance when father and mother stand in the way of this allegiance – as was, we can assume, much more common in the earliest days of the Church – ties of kinship must take a back seat. The meaning of the fifth commandment, as in the case of the other commandments, has always meant fidelity to the one God and therefore can never mean denying the one God. This is the case even if fidelity to God and his Messiah involves some rupture with family, as was (and still is in many contexts) the experience of many followers of Jesus.

Christian Significance of the Fifth Commandment

Any serious contemporary reflection on the fifth commandment must acknowledge the technological and cultural developments that have put us at a distance from the commandment’s initial significance. This is hinted at in the promise affixed to the command: the Israelites were told to honor their fathers and mothers that their days would be long in the land which the Lord their God was giving them. Our society is organized in a radically different way than ancient Israel: they were a largely agrarian people; we, a highly mobile, technologically advanced industrial society. The differences these social factors have on the application of this commandment are hard to overstate.

One especially poignant difference between the two societies is the different meanings of the household. Despite the dangerous (or at best naïve) statist critiques of “the nuclear family,” there is at least one important point in this largely confused critique of “traditional family values.” The nuclear family, imagined exclusively as a mother, father and (maybe a couple) children, really is foreign to the ancient household economy. Indeed, I use the word economy quite precisely here. In the words of C.R. Wiley, the word economy, “is derived from two Greek words, oikos, meaning ‘house,’ and nomos, meaning ‘law.’ An economy was the law of the house. It directed the labors of people in a house toward their common good.”^[3]

To the ancient Israelites, the bonds of kin were the glue of society. This did not just mean the sentimental glue binding the people most beloved to you. It was much more concrete than that. The household was the locus of economic, educational, medical, and communal life. Wiley again:

Once upon a time, the natural family was a school for children, a nursing home for the aged, and, most importantly, a productive and largely self-sufficient economy. But with the rise of the factory and the exchange of the family’s most physically productive member for money, the center of economic life moved out of the home. Fathers now spent most of their time someplace else.

This weakened the natural family and made it dependent. Eventually, many of its traditional social-welfare functions were outsourced: education to public schools, care for the aged to nursing homes. Households were downgraded to outlets for recreation and personal expression. Children were no longer valued for their contributions to the household, but now rather resembled pets—creatures to lavish ourselves upon, but unnecessary. With the industrial revolution, religion was called upon to justify the burden of these little, clinging liabilities.^[4]

I don’t mean to bemoan industrialism per se or offer a broad critique of the reduction of the modern household to a place of private entertainment and relaxation.^[5] The point is simply to highlight that we experience the fifth commandment today in the context of an entirely different social-cultural world from the original hearers. Faithfully applying the commandment today may well require a critique of certain technological and economic cultural forces that endeavor to attenuate our obligations to our natural kin. No matter how far removed we may feel from our dependency upon the natural ties that bind us to mother and father, grandfather and grandmother, and even to the very land on which we have been raised, we are duty-bound to attend to them, according to the fifth commandment.

Before considering a few Christian applications of the fifth commandment for our time, a brief reflection on authority is in order, since the fifth commandment is particularly concerned with the nature of human authority and man’s obligations in light of that authority. The teaching of the gospel is simple: “Render to all their dues” (Rom 13:7).

Humans are born into a world of debts and obligations. We belong to families including the mother and father who begot us, along with our respective families. We belong, likewise, to the local and more distant ruling government. We belong, in many respects, to the communities into which we are born, the local church we attend, the schools, clubs, grocery stores, and many other societies in which we participate. Each of these societies run by means of authority: individuals and groups authorized to facilitate free human action in a given society. These authorities are necessary for the functioning of any community of people. Authority is not a product of the fall: every ship needs a captain, and the deck officers cannot be the deck officers without one.^[6]

Two Applications

The first duty enjoined by the fifth commandment is, of course, to honor our biological fathers and mothers. Following from that, we are commanded to honor those under whose care divine providence has placed us: teachers, pastors, government officials, and representatives. Finally, and most importantly, all of these relationships are ordered to our supreme authority, God himself. This accounts for the ambiguity among theologians over whether this commandment belongs to the first table or the second. Does it pertain to loving God or loving our neighbor? A worthy question, and I think the answer is basically yes to both. The reason why this commandment seems to straddle the two tables is because lawful authority is the creaturely participation in the divine authorization of free human action. God’s authority is the cause of the human capacity to act. God’s authority is given, in limited modes, to human authorities who, in accordance with God’s rational order of things, conduct the human symphony along and render communal human action possible. Honoring God-ordained authorities is, in a rather direct way, honoring God through his intermediaries. It is no accident that God is addressed as “father.”^[7]

The Church

In the case of the Church, the obligation to honor father and mother takes up a spiritual key. Above all, our father is God (“from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named,” Eph 3:15) and he has entrusted the saving message of the gospel to his Church. The famous dictum of the third-century father of the Church, St. Cyprian of Carthage, is apropos: “He cannot have God as his father who does not have the Church as his Mother.”^[8]

Here we encounter an extremely important though often repeated critique of especially American forms of Protestantism, which are marked by a profound impiety. I mean the word in the classical sense: pietas referred to one’s duty to the gods, to one’s people, to one’s family members. Impiety means, in this light, a refusal to pay one’s debt.^[9] I don’t blame contemporary American forms of Protestantism too much for this; it is in our very DNA as a society.

This caveat notwithstanding, Christianity is essentially a religion of tradition. I mean tradition in the broadest possible sense here: tradition as that which is handed down from one person to the next. Jesus to the Apostles to the first churches all the way down to us. When Paul wanted to remind the Corinthians of the gospel he preached to them, he wrote, “I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve” (1 Cor 15:3-5, emphasis added).

Many Christians fail to realize that the very Bibles we read are the material products of tradition, generations of faithful Christian people copying, spreading, and preserving the sacred writings of the Apostles. These Scriptures, of course, were housed in the Church, the bosom of the Word, and always read according to the regula fidei, the rule of faith. The Scriptures are never naked, no nuda Scriptura, as the Reformers often insisted. Their interpretation was always set within the context of the Church’s liturgical practice, and the doctrinal convictions of the Church were the result of the tension between contrary teaching and the witness of the Scriptures and the liturgical life of the Church.^[10]

Allow me to share a couple of quotations from the great twentieth-century theologian of tradition, Yves Congar. “Tradition,” he wrote, “is the sharing of a treasure . . . it represents a victory over time and its transience, over space and the separation caused by distance.”^[11] He continues:

Indeed, if ‘tradition’ is taken in its basic, strict sense, signifying transmission, or delivery, it includes the whole communication, excluding nothing. If, then, we consider the content of what is offered, tradition comprises equally the holy Scriptures and, besides these, not only doctrines but things: the sacraments, ecclesiastical institutions, the powers of the ministry, customs and liturgical rites—in fact, all the Christian realities themselves.”^[12]

This is not the place to hammer out a whole theology of tradition. Indeed, the waters we are wading in here seem to require a theology of the Church, which I am unprepared to give here. The most relevant point for our reflection on the Decalogue is this: honoring father and mother means, with respect to the Church, acknowledging our debt to her past, to the vast inheritance of Christian wisdom with which we have been entrusted. We have been given a treasure; it is ours to invest wisely.

Notice, however, that we must invest the treasure, per the dominical parable (Matt 25:14-30). That means that our obligation to tradition does not mean “burying it in the ground” to preserve it (cf. Matt 25:25) but putting it to use. That is, putting it to use by allowing ourselves to be formed by the wisdom of the tradition and then by bringing it to bear in this particular moment in divine providence. We are not “pallbearers at the funeral of the past,” but the living conveyors of tradition.^[13] It lives in us who are baptized. Tradition will grow, develop, and mature so long as it is living, and it can only live in human persons, communities, churches which faithfully guard and kindle the flame.^[14] That is one way we honor our father, the one God who has given us his gospel, and our mother, the Church, who has preserved that gospel in her bosom throughout the ages.

The Family and Society

When the gospel broke forth into the Mediterranean world, it converted households. Think about it: the households of Cornelius (Acts 10), the Philippians’ jailer (Acts 16), and Crispus, the ruler of a Corinthian synagogue (Acts 18). Churches met in homes, and bishops and elders were to be selected from among those whose households were faithful (1 Tim 3). The Church’s eventual universal embrace of infant baptism bears witness to this fact: the household itself can be a recipient of the gospel. It does not simply address atomized individuals, though it certainly does that, but it even addresses the household economy, and calls for repentance and faith (remember Joshua’s exhortation? “As for me and my house…”).

All this means that natural family ties are not abolished by the gospel. Neither are our broader societal ties (contra my Anabaptist brethren on both points). Indeed, there may be times when our allegiance to Christ requires a radical break with these natural ties, and it surely requires some renegotiation of priorities, but it does not throw out the natural order of things. Baptized Christians still have duties to their natural family and communities.

In our impious age, we of all civilizations would do well to heed the wisdom of the fifth commandment. It would almost certainly require for us, based on the above reflection on the modern household, to make our homes sites of hospitality again. Rather than exclusively spheres of private entertainment and withdrawal, the household should be a realm of deep family bonds which open out to the wider community.

The first place the modern home might be hospitable is with our own aging family members. It is worth asking ourselves to count the cost of secluding most of our aged and sickly folk off to nursing homes and communities of professional hospitality and care for the elderly. What have both children and the aged missed out on in this arrangement? I don’t want to naively imply that most families have the financial or time resources to welcome the elderly into their homes, and certainly some situations call for full-time professional support in hospice care and nursing homes. Yet we must never lose sight of our fifth-commandment obligations: it is our duty to honor our fathers and mothers.

Finally, we should consider how this commandment addresses our engagement with the local and state/national political community. Honor thy father and mother means here, at the least, honor thy fatherland.^[15] This is done by prayer for those in authority, political action to lawfully reform our communities, and even by investing in the welfare of our local communities through volunteering and service.

Conclusion

The fifth commandment means, essentially, to return our debts. For the Israelites, it meant honoring the covenant that the one God graciously made with the family of Abraham. It also ordered the life of the Israelite community as they were called to submit to the authority of judges, rulers, priests, etc. Finally, the fifth commandment was meant to facilitate an apprenticeship to wisdom, as seen in the wisdom literature where father and mother serve as models of wise engagement with God’s world.

In the New Testament, the fifth commandment is fulfilled and is opened up further by means of Christ’s summons of all men, including their households, to repent and believe. Christian tradition has always taken this commandment to enjoin reverence for all lawful authorities from the civil magistrate to local leaders, teachers, pastors, and, of course, biological parents and elders.

These debts are rendered more difficult both to recognize and to pay in the highly industrialized individualist society in which we live. A recovery of fifth commandment obedience today will mean challenging certain ways of thinking and organizing the home, bearing the burdens of elderly family members, and cultivating a rich enough home life for it to be a space hospitable to the wider community.

Finally, our obligations to those in authority over us include the debt we owe to our Mother, the Church, through whom God has given us new life in baptism and nourishment through word and sacrament. We should also think carefully about our obligations to our superiors within the church, as in the wider world, and see that the honor they are due is, at the last, honor which they have received from God.

Notes

1. Unless otherwise noted, biblical references in this post will be taken from the The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. Crossway, 2001. ↑
2. Jacob Neusner, A Rabbi Talks with Jesus, 68, cited in Joseph Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration, trans. Adrian J. Walker, (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 115. ↑
3. C.R. Wiley, “Make Men Pious Again,” in Touchstone Magazine, 32.5 (September/October 2019), accessed April 26, 2025: https://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=32-05-030-f. ↑
4. C.R. Wiley, “Fallen Family,” Touchstone Magazine, (January/February 2014), accessed April 26, 2025: https://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=27-01-047-b. ↑
5. Such critiques, however, can and should be attempted by those more competent than I. ↑
6. For an excellent introduction to a philosophy of authority, see Victor Lee Austin, Up with Authority, (New York: T&T Clark, 2010). ↑
7. Allow me to clear my throat at this point and urge that these words are not meant to imply that there is a one-to-one correspondence between human and divine authority. It is, rather, to suggest that human authority, when properly functioning, mediates the truth and goodness of God to human beings and therefore merits a deference analogous to the deference we owe to God. ↑
8. St Cyprian of Carthage, The Unity of the Catholic Church (De Catholicae Ecclesiae Unitate) in On the Church: Select Treatises, trans. by Allen Brent, Popular Patristics Series 32, (Crestwood, NY: St Vladamir’s Seminary Press, 2006), 157 [chp. 6]. ↑
9. To my mind, the impiety of American religion is outlined well in the classic work by historian Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). ↑
10. Lex orandi, lex credendi, the rule of prayer is the rule of belief, really is a useful formula for understanding the doctrinal controversies of the first centuries of the Church. Christological and later Trinitarian debates really were resolved, often, by appeal to liturgical practices. One such example from the Cappadocian fathers (Basil of Caesarea if memory serves) is the following: if we baptize in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, how could any one of them be anything other than divine? ↑
11. Yves Congar, O.P., The Meaning of Tradition, trans. A.N. Woodrow, (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 12. ↑
12. Congar, Meaning of Tradition, 13. ↑
13. I get this quotation from A.G. Sertillanges’ superb The Intellectual Life, trans. Mary Ryan, (Washington, D.C.: CUA Press, 1987), 15. Here is the longer quotation: “[The intellectual life] excludes a certain archaeological tendency, a love of the past which turns away from the present suffering, an esteem for the past which seems not to recognize the universal presence of God. Every age is not as good as every other, but all ages are Christian ages, and there is one which for us, and in practice, surpasses them all: our own . . . Let us not be like those people who always seem to be pallbearers at the funeral of the past. Let us utilize, by living, the qualities of the dead. Truth is ever new.” ↑
14. I allude here to that famous saying, often attributed to Gustav Mahler, “tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.” ↑
15. Cue the recent ordo amoris discourse surrounding the immigration debate. All I will do here is quote a few sections of Augustine’s de doctrina Christiana, from which the doctrine arises. Note that it would be rather silly to think of the ordo amoris, as a Christian concept, as somehow justifying a kind of disdain for the outsider. Natural bonds do have a priority, but the priority should be understood in terms of divine providence (that is, though you should in principle love all men, the people you can actually love are the ones you should love first, and you can actually love the people who are near to you by means of family ties, shared communities, and even providential circumstances [for example, the Good Samaritan]). Here’s Augustine:“All people should be loved equally. But you cannot do good to all people equally, so you should take particular thought for those who, as if by lot, happen to be particularly close to you in terms of place, time, or any other circumstances . . . [commenting on the Good Samaritan story] It follows from this that a person from whom an act of compassion is due to us in our turn is also our neighbour . . . Who can fail to see that there is no exception to this, nobody to whom compassion is not due?” Augustine, On Christian Teaching, trans. R.P.H. Green, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 23 [I.xxx], paragraphs 61-70. ↑