(Exodus 20:12, Deuteronomy 6:1-9; Ephesians 6:1-4)
You may have heard the story about little Johnny in Sunday school one day, when the teacher holds up a picture like this one and says, “Now class, what is this?” Johnny raises his hand, and when she calls on him, he says, “Well, it looks like a squirrel, but I know the answer is supposed to be ‘Jesus.’” We laugh at that because it’s silly, and probably many of us know someone who’s very sure that Jesus is the answer but has forgotten what the questions are; if Jesus is the answer just because that’s the answer you’re supposed to give, obviously, that doesn’t mean much. At that point, we’re right back to Doug in Up: “Squirrel!” But as my friend Jared Wilson pointed out in a blog post titled “Squirrels that Look Like Jesus,” when you move beyond “What has four legs and a bushy tail?” to the deeper questions of life, the questions with which the Scriptures are concerned, the answer really does come back to Jesus in the end. It always comes back to Jesus, because we’re all imperfect people, we all have parts of our lives that are really messed up, and we need grace—we need forgiveness, and help to get back up when we fall, and a way to get free of the junk in our lives—and we only find that in Jesus.
As an example of that, take this commandment, “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land the Lord your God is giving you.” That gives each of us a responsibility to our parents—even if our parents are dead; this doesn’t just say obey your father and mother, it says to honor them, which doesn’t end with their death. For those of us who have children, it gives us a responsibility to them, too: the profound responsibility to raise them to be the sort of people who will honor us, not because we require it from them, but simply because of who they are. God tells our children to honor their parents, and in so doing he hands us the job of raising them as people who will give honor, and who will themselves be honorable.
Which is, if you take it seriously, terrifying. How are we supposed to do that without screwing up? Tell truth, we can’t, not all the time. Of course, we aren’t the only ones who screw up—our parents did too, and most of us mostly survived the experience. We all do our best, and we all need grace for the times when our best ain’t that great; that’s just the way it is. But how do we make our best better—and maybe even something that looks sort of like good enough?
The answer is, not on our own. Hillary Clinton, back in the day, made famous an African proverb that says, “It takes a village to raise a child”; you may not agree with what she did with that, but it doesn’t change the fact that the Africans had a point. In my experience, they usually do on those sorts of matters. There is no one of us, and really no two or three or four of us, smart enough to raise a child well; we either need to get very, very lucky, or we need a community. We need the knowledge and experience of others who have been through this before and who have learned from mistakes and successes alike, and who can pass on the good advice they received from others; we need the wisdom of a community that can show us the things we’re missing, and help us fix things we’re doing as parents that are wrong or unhelpful; and we need the support of a community that can keep us on our feet when our burdens are bringing us to our knees.
Of course, not every community will serve us equally well. Oliver Twist offers an excellent illustration of that; Oliver finds a community with Fagin and his pickpockets, but it’s a community headed toward destruction. Sometimes, if we all gather together and bring only what we have in ourselves, what we end up with is nothing more than our collected foolishness. We need a community which is founded on true wisdom—not merely our human “conventional wisdom,” which is proven wrong about as often as right, but on the wisdom that comes from God; which must necessarily mean a community founded on the everlasting and faithful love and grace of God.
That’s why, in Deuteronomy, Moses tells the people to love God with everything that’s in them, with all their might—to be completely sold out for God—and then to take God’s commandments and teach them to their children, not just once in a while, but throughout the day, every day, in every situation and everything they do. That’s the necessary foundation for a community that loves and faithfully follows God. It might sound like a tall order, but think about it: those of us who are parents are always teaching our kids, when we’re at home and when we’re on the road, when we go to bed and when we get up—we’re teaching them by everything we say and don’t say, by what we tell them to do and don’t tell them to do, by what we let them get away with and what we enforce. Everything we do teaches them something, and helps shape them into the kind of people they’re going to be. In biblical terms, by the things we say and the things we do, whether we’re intentional about it or not, we are most assuredly making our children disciples, followers, of something. The only question is, what?
In the end, everybody comes up with their own answer. Some people answer it by not bothering to answer it, or by not even considering the question; that very rarely ends well. Some answer it just by going along with what the world around us thinks; that also often doesn’t end well, since the world is fickle and unstable, not to be trusted. Some answer it by imposing laws and rules and harsh punishment; that may produce good behavior, but it often produces rebellion in the end, and it does not breed love, because it does not know grace. Children need grace. We all need grace, children are just more aware of it; we adults aren’t really any better, just better at faking it.
People come up with a lot of answers, but the Bible’s answer is consistent: if you want children who honor you, raise them to honor God. Bring them up, Ephesians says, in the discipline and instruction of the Lord; do it, Deuteronomy says, not just every so often, but throughout the day, as you find teachable moments. And don’t just tell them about rules and what they can’t do, either; that’s part of the picture, but not the central part. Tell them you love them, and God loves them, and that he made them special; tell them when they do something wrong, yes, but also admit it when you do something wrong, because we all need God’s grace and forgiveness—and by his grace, he’s always waiting to forgive us. Tell them that they don’t need to earn God’s love, that he loves them no matter what; and most of all, tell them about Jesus, who showed us just how much God loves us: so much that he was willing to become human and take the punishment for all the bad things we do, so that we wouldn’t have to, so that he could set us free, and make us better.