That commandment is addressed to adults. It commanded adult sons, in particular, to attend to their elderly parents, to treat them with respect, to see that they are properly cared for and socially secure, and in the end to bury them respectfully and honorably. Tobit 4:3-5 illuminates this very concrete content of the commandment quite welclass="underline"
[Tobit says to his son Tobias] “My son, when I die, give me a proper burial. Honor your mother and do not abandon her all the days of her life. Do whatever pleases her, and do not grieve her in anything. Remember her, my son, because she faced many dangers for you while you were in her womb. And when she dies, bury her beside me in the same grave. Revere the LORD all your days, my son, and refuse to sin or to transgress his commandments.”
Evidently the fourth commandment was urgently necessary for this purpose. The Torah, and the Old Testament Wisdom literature, both reveal that it repeatedly happened that weak and vulnerable parents were taunted by their sons (Prov 30:17), cursed (Exod 21:17), beaten (Exod 21:15), robbed (Prov 28:24), mistreated (Prov 19:26), and even driven from their own property (Prov 19:26). Such excesses were, of course, also related to the fact that in Israel, as throughout the ancient Near East, the father of a family possessed a power over his children that is unimaginable to us; it could not fail to provoke a reaction. Add to this that in Israel the security given to aged parents by the cult of the ancestors was a thing of the past. For that very reason, the fourth commandment of the Decalogue fulfilled an extraordinarily important social function.30 Its role was completely different from the one it serves nowadays, when it is mainly addressed to young children who are supposed to behave well and be obedient to their parents.
When Jesus says to someone who wants first to go home and bury his father, “let the dead bury their own dead!” it must have been very disturbing to those who heard him. It was fundamentally scandalous to them. The theologian and Judaism scholar Martin Hengel (1926–2009) remarks on Luke 9:60:
There is hardly one logion of Jesus which more sharply runs counter to law, piety and custom than does Mt 8.22 = Lk 9.60a, the more so as here we cannot justify the overriding of these in the interests of humanitarian freedom, higher morality, greater religious intensity or even “neighbourliness.” The saying is completely incompatible with the old liberal picture of Jesus and with more modern attempts to resuscitate this.
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So does Jesus speak “counter to” the fourth commandment in this harsh saying, and thus against the Torah? Does he override the Torah, at least on this one important point? I most certainly would not say that, for in other places, such as Mark 7:9-13, Jesus can just as emphatically and uncompromisingly defend the rights of parents against their impious children.32
Jesus always looks at the individual case. He sees it precisely as it is. He considers each instance for its own sake. He possesses an unimaginable feeling for what God’s cause demands in each case and where God’s will is being avoided and twisted into its opposite, even when that takes place under the cover of devotion to the Law.
For Jesus, that the man who first wanted to bury his father or be beside him in his last days should instead follow him immediately was more important than the fourth commandment. The reign of God, now arriving, surpasses everything in its urgency and shoves it into second place. The advancing reign of God leaves no more time for anything else. Therefore Jesus’ disciples have to divest themselves of all familial considerations and ties.
Jesus’ intent here is neither to offend against the Torah nor to abrogate it; he is simply concerned with the more important and urgent matter within the Torah. The fourth commandment is not eliminated, but in a particular concrete instance it is subordinated to the first commandment. We have already seen that for Jesus the coming of the reign of God is nothing but the eschatological historicization and making present of what the first commandment intends (cf. chap. 11 above).
Jesus against the Third Commandment?
The case is similar with regard to the Sabbath question, much discussed among scholars. The gospels offer us a whole series of texts in which Jesus appears to offend against the third commandment by healing on the Sabbath or allowing his disciples to break the Sabbath commandment. More precisely, these appear to be offenses against the third commandment as it was interpreted in his time by important groups within Judaism. The following texts are relevant:
the man with the withered hand (Mark 3:1-6)
the bent-over woman (Luke 13:10-17)
the man with dropsy (Luke 14:1-6)
the lame man at the pool of Beth-zatha (John 5:1-18)
the man born blind (John 9:1-41)
plucking grain on the Sabbath (Mark 2:23-28)
It would not make much sense here to go into the details of how healing on the Sabbath was regarded in Jesus’ time by the various groups within Israel—especially the Qumran community and the Pharisaic groups. It is evident that on particular occasions Jesus offended against the casuistic rules of these groups. The question is only whether his intention in doing so was to flout the third commandment, or even to abolish it.
Obviously not! The answer here must be exactly the same as in the case of the fourth commandment that presented itself in connection with Luke 9:59-60. For Jesus the first commandment is the absolute center of his thought and action, together with what that commandment wants to emphasize: the absolute uniqueness and preeminence of God over everything else, realized for Jesus in the reign of God now dawning. Therefore Jesus had to heal sick people even on the Sabbath, and therefore he could not delay the healing until the next day, because the reign of God is advancing rapidly, and that people in Israel are made whole is precisely a sign of the reign of God now becoming reality. With his Sabbath healings Jesus does not abolish the third commandment, but he gives greater weight in these cases to the first commandment.
It cannot be objected against this interpretation that in the texts mentioned Jesus never gives the approaching reign of God as a reason for his offenses against the Pharisees’ interpretation of the Torah, because if we look more closely we can see that this reasoning is actually present. Luke 13:10-17 tells of the healing of a woman whose back has been bent for eighteen years, so that she can no longer stand up straight. Jesus heals the woman on the Sabbath, and in the synagogue to boot. The leader of the synagogue becomes indignant at this and says to those present, “There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day” (Luke 13:14). The fact that a bent woman has been healed is to him a minor matter compared to the offense against the Sabbath. Healing is work, and no work may be done on the Sabbath. There are six other days in the week for therapeutic actions.
How does Jesus justify himself? He calls this form of interpretation of the biblical Sabbath commandment pure hypocrisy, since, after all, those attending the synagogue untie their household animals from their stanchions on the Sabbath and lead them to water. That is, they untie knots, they release animals—and yet he should not be allowed to free a poor woman who has been fettered and tied down by Satan for many years? Thus the point of comparison is not leading to water but untying knots.33 Jesus answers the legal casuistry that clings to words with a skillful counter-casuistry: “And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?” (Luke 13:16).