Honour Your Father and Your Mother

31 Aug

Exodus 20:12, Luke 14:25-26

The fifth commandment feels like one of the easier ones. Honour your father and mother. Sure. Done. Next.

Until it isn't. Until your parents aren't Christians and they're not exactly enthusiastic about your faith. Until family is complicated in ways that don't resolve neatly. Until authority has been abused, or absent, or simply confusing. Until you're sitting at the Christmas table thinking: honour, honour, honour.

And then Jesus makes it harder. Luke 14:25–26: large crowds were travelling with Jesus, and he turned and said, if anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters — yes, even their own life — such a person cannot be my disciple.

What is going on?

The Ultimate Authority Behind All Authority

The first thing to understand is that the fifth commandment has never been primarily about parents. Parents are a delegated authority, a signpost, a living and imperfect picture of a deeper reality: that God is our Father. Honouring our parents is, at its root, about learning to live under God's rule and authority.

This is why the commandment still matters whether you have parents, whether they're still alive, whether you are a parent, or whether the relationship is fractured. Rejecting all authority isn't just rejecting people, it's resisting what God has put in place. And good authority can become ultimate too. Family can become an idol. Even the best relationships can quietly move into a place that only God should occupy.

The fifth commandment sits below the first for a reason. You shall have no gods before me — and everything flows from that, including this. We don't honour our parents instead of God. We honour them because of God, and under him.

This is actually freeing. It means we don't have to pretend our parents are perfect. We don't have to obey sin. We don't have to give ultimate allegiance to anyone but Jesus. But we do have to learn what it looks like to honour rightly, which is where the commandment gets genuinely challenging.

Honour Is a Heart Posture

It's easy to reduce honour to behaviour. Do what you're told. Don't talk back. Obey. And there's something real in that, particularly for younger people. But in Scripture, honour is a much bigger word. It's a posture that includes respect, gratitude, humility, and care, and it doesn't expire when you leave home.

Jesus deepens this in Luke 14. He's not interested in external compliance. He's after a heart fully aligned under God, which then reshapes how we relate to everyone else.

This matters pastorally, because for many people, honour is genuinely complicated. Some carry warm gratitude when they think about their parents. Others carry wounds. Some both at the same time. The commandment doesn't ignore that reality — it calls us to something bigger than it.

Honour doesn't mean enabling sin. It doesn't mean ignoring abuse, tolerating harm, or pretending that everything is fine. That's not what this commandment asks. But it does mean refusing to let bitterness take over your identity. It means recognising God's providence even in painful circumstances. It means seeking to reflect Christ even in the most difficult relationships — which is often the hardest thing anyone is asked to do.

When Jesus is our ultimate authority, we're freed from needing the other authorities in our lives to be perfect. We can treat people with dignity not because they've earned it, but because we understand who they are under God.

Jesus Reorders Everything

Jesus says if anyone comes to him and does not hate their father and mother, they cannot be his disciple. In the original Hebrew way of speaking, hate doesn't carry the emotional weight we give it in English. It means to love less by comparison, to reject something in favour of something else. It's a contrast term about priority, not feeling.

Jesus isn't calling us to hate actively, but to hate comparatively, so that all our other attachments look like hate by comparison. You have to love Jesus so much that your love for your family looks like hate.

That's a staggering claim. And in the ancient world, it was even more confronting than it sounds to us. Family wasn't just emotionally important, it was your identity, your security, your economic future. There was no safety net outside of family belonging. And Jesus says: I come before even that.

Which means that following Jesus will sometimes create tension in our closest relationships. It may mean disagreements, misunderstandings, even rejection. It may mean making decisions that the people who love us most don't understand. But the call isn't to disrespect those people or love them less. It's to properly order our lives — because when Jesus comes first, we can actually love our parents better, not worse. We can honour authority more deeply, not less. We can approach the hardest relationships with humility rather than bitterness or rebellion.

This is the paradox. When Jesus is not first, authority either becomes oppressive or irrelevant. But when Jesus is first, where he belongs, authority can become meaningful and rightly placed.

The early church worked this out in real time. They honoured parents, rulers, leaders. But when those authorities conflicted with Jesus, they said: we must obey God rather than men. That's not rebellion. It's recognising right order.

What It Looks Like

For younger people, honouring parents often looks like listening, obeying, and showing respect, not because parents are always right, but because God is forming us through how we relate to the authority he places in our lives.

For adults, the commandment doesn't expire. Honour can look like staying connected, showing gratitude, caring for parents as they age, even as the relationships don't necessarily get simpler.

For those in genuinely difficult family situations, wisdom is needed. Honour doesn't mean tolerating abuse or denying reality. It may mean setting boundaries with grace, refusing bitterness, and trusting that God holds ultimate authority and justic, while seeking to live in a way that reflects Christ in every relationship.

For all of us, the deepest question is the same: who is the ultimate authority in your life? Because the answer to that question shapes every other relationship we have. If it's ourselves, we'll resist authority and put ourselves first. If it's other people, we'll be controlled by the need to please them. But if it's Jesus, if he is where he belongs, then we can honour everything else rightly, because everything is in the right order.

The fifth commandment isn't just about family. It's about learning to live as disciples — under God's good rule, in a way that leads to life. Jesus doesn't lower the bar in Luke 14. He raises it. But the invitation underneath it is one of the most freeing things in the New Testament: when Jesus is first, we don't lose our relationships. They're redeemed.