Restaurants were packed, flower shops put on extra staff, greeting
card racks were picked over as we honored our mothers. Next month we will fire up the back yard
grills and head to the lakes to honor our fathers. We know intuitively that this is right.
Regardless of our nationality or ethnicity; regardless of whether we are rich
or poor, we have this urge inside of us to keep the fifth commandment: “Honor
your father and your mother.” It is, as the Apostle Paul reminded us, the first
commandment with a promise: “that your days may be long upon the earth.”
My father was diagnosed with multiple
myeloma and died when he was 53. I
remember sitting at the kitchen table with him and asking him what he
expected. He said he expected a year of
health and a year of decline. His faith in Christ and the resurrection was
strong. As it turned out he had less than four months before he lay dying in a
hospital bed while I held his hand.
I never heard one word of profanity from his lips. He loved
our mother and he loved us. He was
always full of laughter. I saw him repeatedly choose to be wronged rather than
to risk wronging someone else. The night
before he died, he sent a get well card to a friend who was on another floor of
the hospital.
My mother likewise loved God and sought to serve others. She
lived as a widow after my father’s death for 35 years. She chaperoned special-needs kids on the bus
and sat with them at church. The day before she died my children gathered
around her bed and she blessed them. Most people, like me, have fond memories
and great admiration for their mother and father.
Of course not all fathers and mothers are good. The relationship between parent and child can
be the source of life’s greatest joy as well as its greatest pain. Some live
their lives, even into old age, haunted by resentment and anger toward their
parents.
We somehow sense, as witnessed by our obsession with the
parent-child relationship in books and movies, that this relationships is
essential to health and wholeness. We hear it in King Lear’s complaint, “How
sharper than a serpent’s tooth is a thankless child!” We find it in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, Luke Skywalker’s discovery
that Darth Vador is his father, or Ray Kinsella building a baseball diamond in
his Iowa corn field to “ease his pain.”
All of all these stories, and
thousands more, reflect our urge to be reconciled to those who gave us
birth.
Health and wholeness for each of us starts with obedience to
the fifth commandment, “Honor your father and mother.” There are no exceptions. We are not exhorted to “honor those who
deserve to be honored.” Regardless of
past hurts, oversights or failures, regardless of our parents’ response, we are
to honor mother and father because we are honorable. In this relationship above all we must apply
the admonition of Scripture: “Be kind to one another, tender hearted, forgiving
one another, just as God in Christ also has forgiven you.” (Ephesians 4:32).
No comments:
Post a Comment