Read an Excerpt
Chapter 4†.You Ca?.t Make Me‡. (from pages 30-38)
Adolescence is a time of challenge to parental authority. That the parents have authority is obvious. How they exercise that authority is not. Under the defiance and questioning and pressure of adolescent rebellion, parents are forced to examine the base of their authority and to evaluate the ways in which they choose to exercise it.
Challenges to personal authority—commonplace in adolescence—cannot be settled simply by quoting Saint Paul: "Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right." Adolescents are quite likely to have read the letter to the Ephesians, too, and able to do some quoting of their own: "Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord" (Eph. 6:1, 4).
If one of the essential tasks of adolescence is to learn to internalize acts of obedience and submission, to learn how to be instructed and guided and led by the elders, the corresponding task of parenthood is to learn how to exercise the authority in proper ways, in wise ways, in Christian ways.
I have little patience, I must confess, with those parental bull sessions which trade opinions on how to make the children behave and lament the sad straits our society is in because of the young who have no respect for authority. They would do much better to discuss the ways in which they themselves exercise authority, just how they acquired the authority they do have, and under what conditions they can retain it. There is a clear biblical mandate that parents exercise authority and that children subject themselves to it. But there is also a biblical context in which it is to be done—a style and a grace—and parents need to pay particular attention to that.
Given this general structure, that parents have authority and children are required to obey, the question that parents with adolescents need to answer is not, "How do I get my child to obey me?" but, "How can I properly and wisely exercise my authority?"
And that is a shift, for it was the other way around during the years of childhood. Then the parental task was to teach the child obedience. But once the child reaches adolescence the parents must spend much more time and attention on the way they exercise authority, and correspondingly less on worrying whether obedience is forthcoming.
I am always a little puzzled by the preference some parents have for Proverbs 13:24 ("he who spares the rod hates his son…") over Luke 2:41-51 (the twelve-year-old Jesus at the temple) as a model for the exercise of authority. Not that they do not both give good guidance, but the proverb is a condensed, pungent admonition that the parent take seriously the task of discipline, while the story gives an actual example of how it was done in the family of Joseph and Mary when Jesus was an adolescent. What I suspect (maybe I am unkind) is that some parents want a biblical excuse to beat children who do not do what they are told and are impatient with any counsel that involves them as parents in a process of growth along with their children. The proverb can, if isolated, be used as a slogan justifying corporal punishment; the story cannot be used as a slogan for anything—it can only draw the parent into the ambiguities of parenthood and give a deeper sensitivity to the anxieties and uncertainties in which parenthood involves us.
It was no easier for Joseph and Mary to be parents of an adolescent than it is for any of the rest of us. The Passover experience in Jerusalem during Jesus' twelfth year shows the tensions that develop between authority and obedience in even the best of homes. The family had, presumably, made the annual Passover pilgrimage from Nazareth to Jerusalem many times. After the festival and on their return, a day's journey out of Jerusalem, the parents discovered that their son was not with them. Anxious and fearful they returned to the city to search for him. They found him "in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions." Then the confrontation between parent and youth: "Son, why have you treated us so? Behold, your father and I have been looking for you anxiously" (vv. 46, 48). In Mary's eyes Jesus had been both disobedient and inconsiderate. The parental authority had not been honored. Without their knowledge and against their will He had remained in the temple. If the question is to be narrowed to a question of authority and obedience the story must stop right there: Mary and Joseph are right; Jesus is wrong. Period. If all guidance were restricted to Proverbs 13:24, Joseph would have taken off his belt, administered a good whipping in front of the rabbis, and taken his son back to Nazareth. But Luke doesn't see it that way. He continues the story with Jesus' words, "‘How is it that you sought me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father's house?'" (v. 49). "Why," in other words," are you trying to control every move I make? That was all right when I was small, but I am no longer the child whom you had to watch all the time. I have a life apart from you—my relation to God is going to take me into ways you cannot anticipate. I am going to be moving beyond the realm of your expectations. There are requirements in my life that you do not place upon me. There is more to my life than just doing what you say—I am beginning to feel additional obligations. The world is more than home and worship in Nazareth—I am beginning to live in the wider world of ‘my Father's house.' I came to the temple in obedience to you—do you not see that the obedience begun in response to you must continue apart from you?"
The adolescent is more than the sum total of what the mother and the father have produced. The parent, as representative of God's guidance, must be ready to step aside when the time comes. The adolescent presents parents with a reality that they cannot manage or control: a new person, in process of becoming an adult person, is aborning. Jesus rejects His mother's reprimand and stresses His own personal needs and God's authority over Him. He implies that it involves more of a world than the parents are aware of. The divine command first heard through the mediation of parental authority can have shape and force apart from parental commands.
"And he went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them; and his mother kept all these things in her heart" (v. 51). The parents continued to exercise authority; the young man still submitted in obedience. But from this time on there was difference. Never again could obedience be interpreted as living up to the letter of parental expectations, although these could not be ignored. The reciprocities of authority and obedience were still in operation, but the context was wider.
The story is gentle, quiet, reflective. There is no counsel here for parents who want to "keep their kids in line." There is no license for youths to "do whatever they feel." There is a breaking out of parent-child molds and a model of flexibility that is aware of new reality from the point of view of both parent and youth.
There are several words in the Hebrew language for a child, each describing a different aspect or level of growth. Two of the more descriptive are taph, in popular etymology, a child clinging to his mother and naar, in popular etymology, one who shakes himself free. Jesus in the temple had just made a transition from taph to naar. And Joseph and Mary were intelligent enough to notice: they did not insist on exercising their parental authority in the ways that had worked before; they did not try to force the naar back into the mold of the taph. They adapted their parental style to the new reality of naar. They did not relinquish parental authority, but exercised it differently.
No one can write a handbook on how to negotiate the shifting requirements of authority and obedience during the adolescent years. But there are some insights that emerge from Luke's passage that provide useful wisdom. The first is that authority when challenged should not bluster. William James wrote: "I am done with Great things and Big things, with Great institutions and Big success, and I am for those tiny invisible molecular forces, that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many soft rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, but which, give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of men's pride." The statement provides a perspective for the exercise of parental authority in relation to the adolescent. Parental authority does not gain in strength as the voice is raised or the punishments increased. If as the child gets bigger the "stick" also gets bigger, the parents most certainly have a mistaken idea of their authority and how to exercise it. Mary and Joseph took the route of quiet counsel, patient trust, pondering, and praying.
A second insight is that authority must be courteous. There was no pushing, shoving, or yelling in that temple scene. Just because parents have a biblical basis for exercising authority does not mean that they are exempt from the common courtesies as they do it. Exercising authority does not mean doing whatever you wish however you wish. A line in George Eliot's Middlemarch describes some parents: "…persons whose celestial intimacies seemed not to improve their domestic manners." The fifth commandment is not divine sanction for parents to enforce arbitrary and selfish whims on their children; it is a gift to assist them in rearing children to God. Parents are warned not to take advantage of it for their own convenience: "He who troubles his household will inherit wind…" (Prov. 11:29). Very often parents use the authority God gave them as a license to get their own way, completely ignoring the fact that their authority is for the purpose of "discipline and instruction in the Lord." That is a serious lapse of responsibility on the parents' part. Parents will be attuned to the basic courtesies surrounding authority if they will look at their children as a father did in a John Updike short story, "not as our creations but our guests, people who enter the world by our invitation…"
A third insight is that authority is not coercive. Since parental authority is conferred by God, our "Lord and King," it should be used, insofar as that is possible for us, in a godlike manner. How does God exercise His authority? Plainly, not with a heavy hand. He does not coerce. As one early church father put it, "Force is no attribute of God." God is not a bully. He is not a despot. He does not push His children around. He creates us, provides for us, loves us, and disciplines us; but He does not make us do anything. There are corrections and punishments, patient instruction and clear example, the disciplines of history and circumstance, but He does not force His will upon us. That pattern is so overwhelmingly clear in Scripture that there is no excuse for any parents to assume divine authority for acting as dictators to their offspring. The same God who gives parents authority over their children also demonstrates how the authority is to be used.
It is quite true that when our children are small it is necessary, at times, to force our will upon them and make them do something they do not want to do: we forcibly snatch them out of the path of a speeding automobile; we make them take a medicine that tastes awful; we insist that they go to school when they would rather play with a new electric train. But in the long perspective of growing up these are exceptions. It is simply a mistake to extrapolate from such instances to the world of the adolescent and claim that since we are wiser, more experienced, and more knowledgeable about the world we must make them do what we want them to do. The fact is that we can't. We are no longer strong enough, present enough, or smart enough to do it. But neither should we. Authority loses its moral force and spiritual energy when it becomes authoritarian.
It is well to remember that the majority of men have never invented the device of beating children into submission…The device of beating children down—by superior force, by contrived logic, or by vicious sweetness—makes it unnecessary for the adult to become adult. He need not develop that true inner superiority which is naturally persuasive. Instead, he is authorized to remain significantly inconsistent and arbitrary, or in other words, childish, while beating into the child the desirability of growing up. The child, forced out of fear to pretend that he is better when seen than when unseen, is left to anticipate the day when he will have the brute power to make others more moral than he ever intends to be himself.
Erik Erikson
The words that typically describe God's way of exercising authority among His people are musar (in Hebrew) and paideia (in Greek). The usual translation in English Bibles is "discipline." Unfortunately, the word seems to have been reduced to something equivalent to punishment. "Do you discipline your child?" in colloquial speech usually means, "Do you spank him when he's naughty?" If the word is to be used at all it must be used with its original content: training and instruction. The disciplinarian is not one who follows people around in order to catch them in an error and then administer forty lashes of punishment "to teach them not to do it again." Closer to the core of the meaning of the word is the image of the master craftsman who takes to himself an apprentice: over a period of years he offers himself as a model, provides guidelines, gives encouragement, points out errors, demonstrates skill, establishes standards, rejects sloppy or careless work. The discipline involves a personal association that makes it possible for the younger to be shaped by the maturity of the older. The heart of discipline, and the most biblical expression of authority, is careful attention that guides growth.
Study Questions
- In what ways did you rebel against the authority of your parents? What forms did your rebellion take? How did your parents respond to your rebellion?
- In what ways do your teenagers express rebellion? What are the key issues in your home around which conflict with authority takes place?
- How do you feel when your parental authority is defied? What do you do?
- Read Luke 2:41-51. What tensions do you notice here in the relationship between parental authority and adolescent rebellion?
- What are your models for exercising authority? Figures from your family? Persons in history? Biblical personalities?
- Discuss this statement by Lionel Whiston: "A dictator in a home or in a nation chooses the way of quick returns… There can be a subtle parental pride in exacting obedience, much like bringing a dog to heel. ‘Good' children can be displayed, to the parents' advantage."
"