The fifth of the “Ten Commandments” (Exodus 20:12: “Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you) is affirmed in the New Testament. In Mark 7, Jesus criticized the Pharisees and teachers of the law for finding a way around this commandment. “Honoring” parents has many aspects, but one aspect is making sure their physical needs are met as they age. But the Pharisees and teachers allowed people to make a donation to “God” (in actuality, to the priests and temple worship) in place of providing for their parents. The reality is that many of the people who took advantage of this loophole probably had other money they could have used to support their parents; there is no indication they were required to donate all of their available cash. This show of honoring God in fact dishonored God by disobeying His commandment.

And yet Jesus and His disciples did not make this one commandment absolute but balanced it against other requirements of God. When the “rich young ruler” came to Jesus in Mark 10 and asked what he needed to do to please God and receive eternal life, Jesus listed this commandment along with several others among the Ten Commandments. The ruler said he kept these commandments, but Jesus pointed out that this man’s real problem was that, while he was keeping the letter of the law, his primary devotion was to money. This, in turn, led to a discussion with Jesus’ disciples about how hard it is for rich people to give up their possessions in order of follow Jesus. The Twelve asserted that they had given up everything to follow Jesus. Jesus responded that those who had given up “home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel” (Mark 10:29) would be rewarded. Is there a contradiction here? Jesus condemned the Pharisees for not caring for their parents in order to contribute to the temple but here commended His followers for abandoning their parents and other family members to follow Jesus. The difference is that the Pharisees were refusing to give to their parents, while the emphasis in Mark 10 is that Jesus’ followers were giving up the opportunity to receive from their parents.

God still commands us to honor our parents, but this command is not absolute. In Mark 10:7, Jesus had noted (in another context) that “a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife.” The command to honor parents does not take precedence over the command for husbands to honor their wives. The context of this is that Jesus was condemning those who abandoned their wives. Men should not abandon their responsibilities to their wives or to their parents.

We should also recall that Jesus told His followers to “seek first” the kingdom of God, with the promise that “all these things will be given to you as well” (Matthew 6:33). Jesus also said that the greatest commandment was to love God and the second was to love our “neighbor” (Matthew 22:34-40). Love of God should take precedence over love of human beings. This is illustrated by Jesus’ attitude in Mark 3. Jesus’ mother and brothers had decided that He was crazy (because he was claiming to be the Messiah) and wanted to take control of Him and stop Him from continuing His ministry. Jesus refused to even see His family members, saying, “Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother” (Mark 3:35). Jesus stated this principle even more forcefully in Luke 14. Jesus wanted to correct those who thought they could receive Jesus’ blessings without it costing them something: He 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. And whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26-27). Again, the emphasis was not on Christians refusing to give to their parents but on Christians giving up the right to receive from their parents. There is also the idea here that if our family demands that we stop following Jesus, then we must disobey our family; the situation is not God telling us not to love our families but our families telling us not to love God. The fact is that if we don’t put God first, we won’t have anything which we can give to other people.

It is important to emphasize that while Jesus was teaching that loving God should take precedence over loving people, this in no way negates the command to honor mother and father. The church that Jesus founded often made a point of meeting the needs of elderly people who were not being cared for by their children (Acts 6:1 and 1 Timothy 5:3-16). Jesus Himself did not abandon His own parents. When He was dying on the cross, Jesus made a point of commanding His friend John to fulfill Jesus’ filial responsibility to His mother Mary (John 19:25-27).

Finally, in Ephesians 6, the Apostle Paul told Christian children to honor their parents and obey them “in the Lord” (that is unless the parents interfered with the children’s primary responsibility to obey God). Paul also balanced the command to children with a command to fathers to not exasperate their children but to “bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4). Even in the Old Testament, the command to honor parents was not absolute but was predicated on the understanding that parents would teach their children to follow God (Deuteronomy 6:1-9).