Family Bonds and Social Order
By Sean Innerst

The Ten Commandments begin with three that delineate how we ought to act toward our God. We are to worship Him alone, revere or keep holy His name, and worship Him in a particularly solemn way on the seventh day, our Sunday. The rest of the seven commandments have to do with how we ought to treat other (human) persons. The hinge between the two groups is the Fourth Commandment which requires that we honor our fathers and mothers.

Likewise, the first two chapters of Sirach are largely concerned with what we owe to God. According to Sirach, it is that gift of the Holy Spirit which we call fear of the Lord that guards and guides our relationship with God. Unlike ordinary human fear, this holy fear is the beginning, root, and crown of wisdom, Sirach says, and directs us to offer God the reverence He is due. In short, fear of the Lord aids us in following the first three commandments of the Decalogue.

Sirach 3:2-6, 12-14

In the third chapter of Sirach, from which our reading comes, he discusses the importance of honoring one’s parents as required by the Fourth Commandment.

For the Jews, the bond between parents and children was not merely one of mutual obligation or even affection, as good as those are. Connection to one’s parents established one’s claims to the covenant promises of God. Genealogies, such as the ones we see for Jesus in Matthew’s and Luke’s Gospels, were maintained to demonstrate these covenant claims. For the Jew the genealogy guaranteed that one could be identified with the corporate personality of Israel. This became a particularly prominent practice after the Babylonian exile. We see John the Baptist responding to this by declaring in no uncertain terms in Matthew 3:9 that lineage is not so important as grace: "God can raise up children to Abraham from these very stones."

In this context we can better understand Sirach’s claims that honoring one’s father and mother brings with it a whole host of spiritual and material benefits. All of these were believed to come through the covenant, and one’s parents represented the source of that covenant relationship with God. For a Jew, failing to honor one’s parents was the covenantal equivalent of cutting off the branch one hoped to sit on.

Colossians 3:12-21

In this reading, St. Paul gives advice to families and to the Family of God, generally. He tells us, because you are "God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with heartfelt mercy, with kindness, humility, meekness, and patience" (3:12). Those attributes are hard to cultivate anywhere and, sometimes, the hardest to cultivate in a family. When we live close enough to others to see all their faults at close range, it can be tremendously difficult to defer to them. It’s sometimes easier to be a good Christian with strangers than with our closest friends and family.

The key to success in Christian living is, as St. Paul points out, love. "Over all these virtues put on love which binds the rest together and makes them perfect" (3:14). Later in this passage St. Paul will tell husbands specifically to love their wives, but it is clear that everyone—husbands, wives, children, friends, even enemies—are called to love. The realization that love is a universal injunction clarifies another injunction that St. Paul mentions: "wives, be submissive to your husbands" (3:18).

That one chafes us a little today. Some have suggested that phrase has no relevance today, and is merely the residue of a different age when women were expected to be subservient. Even if this were so, we ought to try to come to grips with St. Paul’s meaning in a way that we can be sure that we are not guilty of the same kind of temporal bias that we are accusing St. Paul of exhibiting. Putting aside all our sensitivities about relationships between men and women today, what might St. Paul mean here in saying that wives ought to be submissive to their husbands?

As loving is not an injunction only for husbands, but for everyone, so, too, is submission. In Ephesians 5:21 St. Paul says, "Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ," and then goes on to repeat the same injunctions to husbands and wives that we find here in Colossians.

One commentator makes the point that it is only in this context of mutual submission that the following requirements for husbands and wives make sense. (That commentator, by the way, is Pope John Paul II.) It may well be that St. Paul is expressing a keen insight in regard to marital psychology. If, as St. Paul says, everyone is called both to love and submit in the Christian life, why would he single out husbands to be reminded to love and wives to be reminded to submit? Might it be that men, generally, more often stumble in their responsibility to love and that women, again, generally, more often stumble in their responsibility to submit? Whether or not that is the case (this is only one possible interpretation), we owe this controversial text an honest appraisal. We believe that it represents the Word of God to us, and so are obliged to not too readily dismiss it as irrelevant to our day.

One thing has to be kept in mind when considering this passage. The model in all our actions is Christ who St. Paul, in conformity with the whole witness of the New Testament, likens to the husband of the Church. If His modeling of the role of the husband is normative, then we must recall that He made Himself subject to us in loving us to the end. Likewise, the bride of Christ must be subject to Christ, to be true to her love for Him.

St. Joseph is a fascinating and enigmatic figure in the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke. Like an earlier biblical figure by the same name, he is the recipient of divine direction through dreams. In a set of three dreams he is told, first, to take Mary as his wife, secondly, to take Mary and the Christ child to Egypt, and, lastly, to return to Palestine with his family. Matthew connects each of these events with a fulfillment formula. Raymond Brown calls this a "nota bene technique" by which the evangelist highlights the event by connecting it with a prophetic utterance from the Old Testament.

The first two connections are fairly clear, the cross references in most Bibles connect the first dream of Joseph with Isaiah 7:14, and the second dream with a fulfillment of Hosea 11:1. The last nota bene event is a little less clear. In regard to Joseph’s decision to go and live in Nazareth, we read in the last line of our Gospel passage, "In this way, what was said through the prophets was fulfilled: ‘He shall be called a Nazorean.’" In this case, the cross reference in the Catholic RSV cites Isaiah 11:1, which reads, "There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots." Many commentators flatly confess ignorance in regard to the reference meant in Matthew 2:23, since neither the citation in Isaiah nor anything else in the Old Testament seems to have much to do with it.

The citation in the RSV to Isaiah 11:1, however, does seem to preserve an obscure connection. The word for "branch" in Isaiah 11:1 is the rarely used Hebrew word "netser." It does mean a green shoot or branch but also has the connotation, because of its linguistic root, of hiddenness or even the guarding of something hidden. It is suggested that rare Hebrew word may be the root for the name Nazareth (which would mean "branch-town"). It is interesting to note that Nazareth is an out-of-the-way place where Joseph feels he can guard the hidden branch of the root of Jesse.

Scripture Study Lesson:

As was mentioned in the commentary on Sirach above, the Fourth Commandment, "honor your father and your mother," is for the Jews a kind of hinge for inclusion in God’s covenant with Israel. Since membership in God’s chosen people came through one’s parents, it is natural that honoring one’s parents would ensure one’s continuance in the blessings of the covenant with Yahweh. That is explicitly stated in the formulation of this commandment in Exodus 20:12: "Honor your father and your mother, that you may have long life in the land which the Lord, your God, is giving you." The land of Israel, the Promised Land, was the place of particular blessing for the Jewish people and was associated with the covenant promise of God to be with and care for His people. It is interesting that honoring one’s parents was understood to guarantee the fulfillment of God’s covenant promise.

In the New Covenant, the Ten Commandments remain in force. That includes, of course, the Fourth Commandment. In fact, obedience to this commandment takes on an even greater urgency in the New Covenant. In the Old Covenant, one’s covenant relationship with God was mediated through the national tribe of Israel and, particularly, through one’s parents by whom one would be born into the nation of Israel. Parents were important because they demonstrated one’s link to the covenant going back through the generations of Israel.

When Jesus comes, He fulfills the whole of the history of Israel—He collapses it into Himself, we might say. We can see this in a passage from our Gospel reading this week from Matthew. What was said in Exodus 4:22 and Hosea 11:1 in reference to the whole of Israel, namely, "Out of Israel I have called my son," is now referred to Jesus Himself by Matthew. In the New Covenant in Christ, all those generations of parents are not so important to our inclusion in the covenant because they are all summed up in Christ. As St. Paul makes clear, through Him we have been adopted as children of God the Father. Our membership doesn’t depend so much on who our forebears were as it now does on our relationship directly with the Father, as made possible in Jesus (see Gal. 4:6).

In the New Covenant our fathers don’t guarantee our membership in the covenant, but rather the Father is our common Father and it is our relationship with Him that is of paramount importance. Stated simply, in the New Covenant we are all sons and daughters of one Father. It would seem at first, then, that honoring our earthly fathers and mothers is not so important as it would have been under the Old Covenant. But, in fact, St. Paul suggests that our new status as adopted sons and daughters of God the Father sheds new light on the character of the family itself. He says specifically in Ephesians 3:14 that all families take their name from the Father.

In the Jewish conception, names mean more than they do for us. They are not merely labels but they describe, almost define the being or essence of a thing. So for Paul to say that families are named for God the Father is to say that their being somehow participates in His being. We could say, then, that families mysteriously image or represent to us who God is. Therefore, our familial relationships don’t become less important, but more so.

When we give honor to our parents, as the Fourth Commandment instructs, we don’t merely protect our position in the covenant, but we give a special kind of honor to the God who is mysteriously represented by our parents. We also honor the creative power of God which He exercises in concert with the procreative capacity of men and women. God directly creates each human soul, but He leaves the production of the bodies that He unites to those souls to the beautiful generative process that flows from human marital love.

In Ephesians 6, St. Paul comes back to the importance of the Fourth Commandment and reminds us that there is a promise attached to it: "that it may go well with you, and that you may have long life on the earth" (6:3). The decay that we see in modern society owing to the dissolution of families may be a kind of negative proof of that promise. If parents and children do not honor each other and don’t remain faithful to the obligations that their relationships demand, then it cannot go well for society.

Indeed, the Catechism says that "the fourth commandment illuminates other relationships in society. In our brothers and sisters we see the children of our parents; in our cousins, the descendants of our ancestors; in our fellow citizens, the children of our country; in the baptized, the children of our mother the Church; in every human person, a son or daughter of the One who wants to be called ‘our Father’" (no. 2212). In a very real sense, all our relationships—in the family, Church, and society—are based on the primary relationship that we have with our parents. If that one is healthy, the others will have a much better chance of being so as well.

If those relationships have gone awry today, if little respect seems to be paid to parents, teachers, or pastors, the best answer may be to turn to God’s gift of the fear of the Lord which guards and guides our relationship with the Father from whom all families are named. Even if our own fathers or mothers have fallen short of their vocation to be an image of the love of God to us, we can be confident that the one Father of us all is a perfect Father. If we learn to honor Him as we ought, He will give us the grace to learn to honor our earthly parents and lead us into that good, long life in the land that He wills for His people.

Reflection Question

Explore the connection between God’s Fatherhood, parental authority and love, and the other relationships we have with those in society. How might disruptions in one set of relationships negatively influence the others? What might be some possible solutions?

Click here to view past issues.