There’s been a question dripping off my chin for the last year, something I’ve been trying to make sense of in my own life and I hope that me unpacking it might serve some of you as well. And it all centers on my relationship with my parents.
But first, a bit of backstory.
Family Matters (aka family business)
I turned 49 on November 1 last year. As I launched into my 50th trip around the sun, I’d publicly stated my intention to do fifty things involving the number five to celebrate the journey. I had goals on time with my kid and nurturing my relationships. There were fitness goals and side hustle work goals. I even had goals that surrounded self-care and relaxation. It was an ambitious plan, but one that I was excited to take on. Then, just three weeks into the challenge, 53 weeks ago today, I received a phone call from my dad.
He’d developed some odd polyps on his scalp and his doctor wanted him to get a biopsy. He did and the phone call relayed the results … skin cancer. A couple weeks later we learned that he had a very aggressive and advanced stage three melanoma that was going to require immediate and intensive treatment.
The Treatment Phase
His first treatment, immunotherapy, seemed to be working wonders until we discovered that it triggered an autoimmune response and his body started attacking his liver. It took two weeks in the hospital to shut down the hyper aggressive immune system that we’d spent the previous three months kicking into overdrive.
The next treatment was an 11-hour surgery to remove as much cancer as possible from his head and neck. While the surgery and recovery consumed the entire month of May, things seemed to be looking up as June began. But by the time June ended, scans revealed the cancer and metastasized throughout his body.
Oral chemo was the next on the list. When it started, the hope was that it would keep the cancer at bay and grant time for a 77-year old body that’s been beaten and bruised over the previous six months to regain enough strength that we could try an experimental treatment that might kill the cancer sometime in 2025.
But rather than see his body strengthen, we watched it wither. As his body battled the side effects of the chemo, the weight loss that started with treatment accelerated, today, someone who’s spent most of his life fluctuating around 180 lbs. is now only 135. He’s gone from sleeping a standard 8 hours a night to sleeping 12 and napping for another four.
The Shift to Hospice
As October came to an end we had to come to the grips with the reality that the chemo that kept the cancer at bay, was killing him just as fast as the cancer would if we let it be. So after 11 months where everything has focused on fighting cancer, we shifted goals and are now seeking to make the most of the time he has left.
As we fought the cancer I drove to their house in Arvada, taken them across town to the VA and back, I don’t know how many times. There have been hours sitting in the hospital, be it to comfort my mom while dad is in treatment or visiting him as part of a hospital stay.
He’s been in the hospital multiple times for falls and pneumonia, we had a stint in a physical rehabilitation facility, and I had to move my parents into an independent living center that offered the assisted living services my dad needs … with only one week notice.
His doctors now follow up any call with him with one to me in hopes that I can help them make sense of what he said. They speak directly to me in appointments because neither of my parents can remember what happened in the appointment they just walked out of.
And I’ve all too often found myself as the facilitator if not the therapist as the two of them seek to process everything that’s happening.
Becoming My Parents, Parent
In other words I am now in the odd place where I am now my parents’ father, but rather than guiding them towards independence, I am doing everything I can to help them maintain some sense of independence even as they require more and more support.
In the midst of this what happened to my 50 goals involving the number 5 to celebrate my fiftieth trip around the sun? I cast them aside to spend the year focused on my parents.
So what’s the question I been seeking an answer to? “Why?”
Why Ask Why?
That might seem like a strange question. At first, asking it didn’t even dawn on me, I mean, obviously, I love my dad and want good for him so I’m going to do what needs to be done. But the truth is, I didn’t need to do it. My dad has done well enough, saved well enough, and has everything in order to a point he and my mom could have figured this all out.
Then my parents started talking about my being there as fulfilling my duty as the oldest son and I had this deep visceral objection to the idea. I wasn’t there because I felt obligated, I was there because I wanted to be. But at the same time, when I look at our history, I can’t help but wonder why I wanted to be.
My Family History
My parents and I aren’t particularly close. As I was scanning through pictures in my phone, the most recent pre-cancer pictures I have of my dad were taken 4.5 years ago. And in the year that led up to my dad’s cancer diagnosis, I saw my parents maybe twice, even though they live a mere 25 minutes away.
Now I’ve heard enough from other people to know that my parents weren’t the worst parents ever, but if you know my story, you know I’ve done a lot of healing work over the years, and directly or indirectly, my parents had a hand in a lot of the wounding.
Healing Childhood Wounds
In fact, two years ago this week, I spent a few hours processing the grief of core needs I never received as a child, things like feeling seen and unconditionally loved. It started by writing basic psychological childhood needs on sheets of paper. Then, using my non-dominant left hand, I wrote what I experienced as a kid. So much pain and hurt poured onto those sheets of paper.
Then, reading what I wrote, I spoke the truth that my inner child needed to hear and, one by one, took those pages of grief, placed them inside this candle holder, and burned them to ceremonially let go of what happened decades ago.
Two years later, this candle holder still sits on my desk at home to reminds me, not of what I’ve released, but that what happened to me then doesn’t have to define my life today and that divine love can heal all wounds.
But even with that healing, I’ll admit, much of the reason I rarely saw my parents in the year before my dad’s diagnosis is that they don’t get how much I hurt and how painful it is that they didn’t see me then, and in so many ways, don’t see me now.
Given all that, perhaps the best way to describe our relationship is, “Complicated.” so it’s not like the past year flowed from a joyful response to all the love I felt from them over the years.
The Bible On Family Matters
So why drop everything and focus on their wellbeing? I wondered what the Bible might have to say on the subject.
The easiest place to start was the 10 Commandments, after all, right there is says, “Honor your father and mother.”
But there are two problems. First, this surface reading only reinforces the loveless and duty-based mindset that my parents highlighted, the one that made me so uncomfortable. If nothing else, we could say that if God is love, then Godly behavior is always motivated by love, so any action that is motivated by a sense of duty or obligation is, fundamentally, ungodly.
Second, I deeply believe that interpreting the Bible is rarely that easy. What do I mean by that? In 2,000 years, nobody is going to know the difference between a butt dial and a booty call. For that very same reason, without engaging in some linguistic and cultural anthropology, the original intent of the Bible is really hard to understand, and far too often, we read an ancient text through a 21st Century perspective and we completely miss the point.
So how do we tend to miss the point of, “Honor your father and mother.”
How To Honor Your Mother And Father
First, we need to note that there’s more to the commandment than just those words. The full commandment is, “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.”
Those extra words are a promise, making this commandment the only one of the ten with a promise attached to it. Why should you honor your father and mother? So that you may live long in the land. But how does honoring your father and mother result in living long in the land?
Living Long In The Land
Let’s flip forward a few books in the Bible to Judges chapter 2:
“And Joshua the son of Nun, the servant of the Lord, died at the age of 110 years. And they buried him within the boundaries of his inheritance … And all that generation also were gathered to their fathers. And there arose another generation after them who did not know the Lord or the work that he had done for Israel.” – Judges 2:8-10
So we start with a commandment that contains a promise about living long in the land. Then we have a generation who does not know the Lord and if we read on in Joshua we learn that they worship other gods and are quickly conquered by their enemies.
If we unpacked everything in between Exodus and Joshua, we’d see that parents were supposed to teach their children about the works of Yahweh and how God brought them out of slavery and into the Promised Land, and if they were faithful to Yahweh that they would get to remain in the land, but if they were not faithful they would be conquered.
So the command to honor your parents doesn’t have anything to do with obeying whatever they say or taking care of them in their old age, rather, the command is about each generation faithfully passing on the story of God’s wondrous acts to the next generation, so that each generation can know who they are and what it means to be God’s people.
This means the Commandment also comes with a huge responsibility for parents to accurately teach their children. After all, if your parents teach you to worship false gods or leave you with some other impression about who Yahweh is, then honoring their teaching will shorten your life in the land.
This forced the question, “What did my parents teach me?” What did your parents teach you?
The Faith I Was Given
Perhaps the best summary of what my dad taught comes from well after my childhood when I was a seminary student. During those years I worked at Lutheran Hour Ministries and did a number of writing projects and some early attempts at Lutheran online community for young adults.
As a part of the online community we invited readers to share their written reflections to go along with a number of pieces that I was writing. My dad, wanting to participate, produced a piece centered on the Parable of the Talents, which shows up in both Matthew and Luke.
An Overview of the Parable of the Talents
In both versions, a master gives his servants money to manage while the master is away. The more skilled servants use the money to make more money and offer it to the master upon his return. The master rewards them accordingly. The less skilled servants hold on to what the master gave them in fear of losing what he entrusted to them. The master punishes them accordingly.
The easy interpretation is rather meritocratic and reinforces the idea that, if you have wealth or some kind of material blessing it is because you earned it through hard work and/or faithfulness. Similarly, those who have little are struggling because they lack faithfulness.
That was the teaching that my dad offered, and it very much fits with his broader perspective on faith and life. It also works out really well for him as he did well at work, saved wisely, and has both VA and Medicare benefits so the one thing we don’t need to worry about as my parents head into old age is how we will pay for their care.
But is that what Jesus is getting at in those two parables, or is that another example of confusing a butt dial with a booty call?
The Parable of the Talents in Matthew
Matthew places the parable amid a larger discussion concerning the end of the age and between two parables about faithfulness until Christ returns. This means the meritocratic reading of the Parable of the Talents fits the theme of faithfulness, but it misses the cultural context. Specifically, First Century Israel did not operate as a capitalistic society nor did they measure success or faithfulness using monetary gain.
However, there is a cultural clue in how the wicked servant describes the master upon his return.
In Matthew 25 the servant says: “‘Master, I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you scattered no seed, so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here, you have what is yours.’”
Unseen Context In Matthew
In ancient times, there were two kinds of masters. One was the nobleman who ran a farm that produced a crop. The other was a Bedouin raider who stole what the noblemen produced.
With this distinction in mind, the parable tells the story of a master who comes to three servants and tells them he is going away for a while. Then he gives them each a huge sum of money and tells them to use it as he would until he returns. The first two operate as if their master is a nobleman, while the third assumes he is a Bedouin raider.
The master reprimands the third based on his failure to understand the nature and character of the master, with the master’s response being something like, “You see me as someone who reaps where I do not sow and who gathers where I do not plant? You think I am a Bedouin and not a nobleman!”
He then goes on to point out the inconsistency in the servant’s behavior. Because Jewish law forbids earning interest, ancient Jews saw burying money as one of the safer ways to protect wealth. This means what the servant did was consistent with faithful Jewish practice. However, a Bedouin has no interest in obeying Jewish Law and would happily take the return on the investment. So even in acting out his perception of his master, the servant lacked faithfulness.
What Is Matthew Saying?
The point of the parable is that we are all called to use whatever skills, talents, gifts, and resources that we have at our disposal as Christ would use them if he were us, and how we use them reveals what we believe about God’s nature and character.
For Matthew, the parable is not about faithfulness that acquires wealth, but being faithful in how you use whatever you have.
The Parable of the Talents in Luke
Luke in contrast places his telling while Jesus and the disciples are on the road to Jerusalem which ultimately leads to the cross. First, Jesus heals a blind man. Then he dines with Zacchaeus, the wealthy tax collector, prompting his generous act of repentance. Before leaving Zacchaeus’ home, Jesus tells the parable.
Luke adds a helpful caveat that Jesus tells this parable to stress that the kingdom will not fully manifest right away, despite what his followers just saw in the healing of the blind man and the conversion of Zacchaeus.
This time, some of the unique details of Luke’s account help us see beyond our meritocratic thinking. Specifically, Luke identifies the master as someone of royal lineage going on a journey to receive his kingdom. In the First Century, this would remind the people of the trip Herod’s son Archelaus made to Rome in hopes of receiving kingly power from Caesar. The people would also know that Archelaus faced opposition before Caesar from both his brother and the Jewish leadership, so there was no certainty he would return as king.
So while he is away, what should those following Archelaus do? If you honor his rule and he returns as king you will certainly receive a reward, but if you honor his rule and his brother receives the crown, you could very well loose your life. So do you live as if he will return as king, or do you lay low knowing Caesar might honor his brother’s claim?
For those who heard Jesus parable, it was an invitation to faithfulness even when it doesn’t look like Jesus is Lord.
The Heart of Both Parables
So when I bring the meaning of the parables together, I am challenged to use whatever resources I have to faithfully walk the way of Jesus even when it means going against the cultural flow.
As a few examples, I hear a call to think about our neighbors as opposed to just ourselves, to embrace persuasion in a world the focuses on force, to find peace with enough in a world that says you need more, to choose love in a world that highlights power. In other words, faithfulness does not result in my gain, but everyone’s good. And that is a message radically different than the one my dad sought to pass on.
So going back to the 10 Commandments and honoring your father and mother, this means that if I honored them, if I embraced the faith I was raised in, one where material blessing was a sign of faithfulness, one that inspires me to pursue material gain, maybe even to the point of embodying an 80’s “greed is good” mentality, I would not receive the blessing of living long in the land.
Leaving Home To Honor My Mother and Father
Reading the 10 Commandments with understanding creates a dynamic similar to that of Jesus in Mark 3 where the crowd says, “Your mother and your brothers are outside, seeking you.” and Jesus replies, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” and, “For whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and sister and mother.”
In other words, the 10 Commandments in context leave me needing to find new parents to honor, ones who will teach me the will of God rather than the will of the American economy and culture.
So honoring my father and mother is not why I dropped everything I had planned for my 50th trip around the sun to take care of my father on his cancer journey.
Family Matters and Mark 3
But there’s another possible answer the flows from one interpretation of that text in Mark 3 that I ran across in one of my favorite commentaries, “Binding the Strong Man” by Ched Myers.
To set the stage for this possible answer, we need to understand what makes Mark different from the other Gospel accounts.
The Uniqueness of Mark
On one of my commentary bookshelves at home is Jack Dean Kingsbury’s, “Conflict in Mark.” As a scholar, Kingsbury’s interest is highlighting the uniqueness of any given text. The title emphasizes the unique place of conflict in Mark’s Gospel, conflict that manifest between Jesus and the demonic, the natural world, human sickness, religious and social structures, and even Jesus and his disciples.
Mark opens his Gospel with a reference to Isaiah 40, a time where Israel found itself no longer living in the land, but in Exile. Whether it was because the parents no longer taught the children the way of Yahweh or the children failed to honor their parents’ faithful teaching, they had lost their place in the world.
Mark bases his Gospel on the idea that humanity is living in a spiritual exile and Jesus has come to lead us home, but both the world around us and our own hearts and minds are resisting this journey. It’s what Peter would frame and Mesus vs. Jesus. As a result, conflict takes center stage, a conflict between the way of Jesus and the way of this world.
Ched Myers embodies this in his title, “Binding the Strong Man,” where he explores how Jesus engages in this conflict by binding the forces that keep us trapped in exile so he can bring freedom to the captives.
Jesus’ Family in Mark 3
By the time we get to Mark 3, this conflict is already firmly entrenched and Jesus’ family claims he is crazy while the religious leaders accusing him of being demonic. Both are accusations aimed at dismissing Jesus’ authority in hopes of defusing the effectiveness of his teaching. In other words, both were aimed at assuring everyone remained in spiritual exile.
But this, “We’re your family and we know better.” spoken to the adult Jesus is just a reenactment of what often happens to us as children in the midst of family systems that work to keep us feeling unseen, unheard, and ultimately, unwanted.
The Silent Drama of Children
Unpacking this idea, Myers points to the work of philosopher and psychoanalyst Alice Miller who talks about the “silent drama” of children which includes the following stages:
- to be hurt/dominated as a young child without anyone knowing;
- to be unable to react to or process resultant anger;
- to internalize the sense of betrayal by rationalizing or idealizing the parent’s “good intentions”;
- finally, to so repress the painful memory as to forget;
- to later, as an adult, discharge the unconscious store of anger onto either self or others.
Do you see that end result? It’s a vicious cycle where our childhood pain leads to us hurting others, including our own children, so that they too will hurt others, including their own child, making sure that no generation gets to inherit the promise of Exodus 20:12 because no generation fully grasps their own belovedness or the goodness of Yahweh.
So how do we break that cycle?
I see it as coming two stages. First, we heed the words of Jesus and say, “For whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and sister and mother.” In other words, we find a new family, one that teaches us who God is and how we are God’s beloved children.
Finding a New Family
My new family initially took the unusual form of my doctoral dissertation, which had me looking for a new way to read and understand who God is and resultantly, who I am in Christ. It was an outflowing of that work that shapes who I choose to spend my time with and brought me to The Sanctuary. It’s what had me ritually releasing my childhood pain.
But sometimes, in order for deep healing to take place, you need to open old wounds and apply the life-giving balm of God’s love to the infection underneath.
One of my doctoral professors used to say, “When it comes to family, you are always 16 years old and your parents will never die.” It was his way of pointing us back to the “silent drama” of children, and how we all tend to emotionally revert when we go home.
Going Home to Face Family Matters
This makes going home one of the best ways to stir up forgotten memories, the ones that subconsciously drive our behavior. But when we have a new family, one that speaks the Gospel to us, when those memories come to the surface, when we are tempted to believe that we are unworthy, they can speak healing into our lives. As they do, the unconscious store of anger lessens, giving us less violence to put back into the system.
After this past year, I can confirm that spending time with your aging parents is a fantastic way to stir up all of your childhood crap. For me, nothing embodies this better than the performance-based acceptance mentality at the core of their comment about me being a dutiful oldest son.
Healing, Moment by Moment
But every time that’s been brought to the surface, whether it comes through the voice of a friend, a sermon I hear either in person or on the podcast stream, in the midst of meditation, or just because it’s how I’ve rewired my brain to think, that notion that I need to do something to earn love is drowned out by the knowledge that I was God’s beloved child from before the foundation of the world. And as I’m reminded of my belovedness, anger stored deep within my bones is released, and I can approach all of life with more grace and peace.
So perhaps I dropped everything to walk this cancer journey with my parents, not for their benefit, but for mine. Maybe this year has been all about my ongoing healing.
And while there might be some truth to that, I don’t think we can stop there, because the Gospel never stops with the individual, but always moves on to the whole world. In other words, it’s not just about me, and it’s not about you, but it’s about all of us … including my parents.
So how do we take this all one step further?
Family Matters (As In My Parents Matter)
I believe it all starts with the true meaning of the Parable of the Talents. As you recall, the parable is actually a call to faithfulness using the resources you have, with Luke emphasizing that this faithfulness happens amid cultural opposition to the way of the king.
God has been good to us, and revealed to each of us the way of the king. God declares us beloved and invites us to live from our belovedness so we can escape exile or, as the commandment promises, live long in the land. The question is, how are we going to use whatever resources we have to help others discover their belovedness, especially in a world where everything needs to be earned? That is a faithful use of our talents.
Using Your Talents
Over the past year, one of the talents I’ve been blessed with is a job that has just enough flexibility to give me time to attend appointments, to have meals, and to be present with my dad and mom on this journey.
Another talent is the healing I’ve experienced in my own life. Without that foundation, there is now way I could have stepped into this season of life where I am my parents’ parent with the kind of presence, love, compassion, empathy, and care that I have shown them. There was just too much anger there before.
And while they initially assumed that I was there out of duty or obligation, over the year, I hope they’ve come to realize, that it’s actually flowing from a desire to be there, not because they were the world’s greatest parents who earned my love, but because I love them and in my love for them I want them to know what I’ve discovered, that there is nothing to earn, because they too were God’s beloved from before the foundation of the world.
In other words, everyone is worthy of love and care. Everyone deserves to have their dignity honored. Everyone needs to know their belovedness. And often, it’s the people who haven’t earned that love and care from us that need it most, and because they haven’t earned it from us, us giving it to them is uniquely potent.
Why I Took on Family Matters
For me this love compelled me to cast aside my plans so I can show my parents how beloved they are.
Like I said, at the beginning, when this whole journey started, the question of why I dropped everything to care for my parents didn’t cross my mind, I just did it.
But as I look back and reflect on why, I think it really all starts here at the table and with the candle holder.
At the table, I take in Jesus and ask him to live in and through me. And using the candle holder, in my own small way, I did something akin to what Jesus did on the cross.
As he hung there, he took all of the pent up anger and violence humanity had upon himself. But rather than unleashing it on someone else and continuing the cycle we so often find ourselves trapped in, he took it to the grave.
Two years ago, as those sheets of paper burned, the anger I’d carried for decades went with them, which allowed me to walk with my parents this past year not because they earned it or because I felt obligated, but because I love them and they are inherently worthy of love.
So come to the table. Take in the bread and wine. Receive the body and blood. Take in Jesus, and invite him to live through you.
Dark cups are wine, light cups are juice.
Benediction
In Galatians 2:20 Paul writes, “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”
In other words, Paul is saying, “It’s not me doing it, it’s Christ in me.”
I think that’s Paul’s way of saying, “I believe the Gospel.” and inviting his readers, both then and now, to do the same.
So believe the Gospel. Amen.