Do We Care For Our Parents or Are We Pharisees?

 esus Christ in today's Gospel reading criticizes the Pharisees in a way that is very applicable to our own society. The Pharisees had invested everything in their religion of ceremony, and through years of degradation, had forgotten much of the heart of God's law. As often is the case, Jesus' words transcend is cultural context and rebuke our own society. How many times have we seen an elderly parent relegated to the nursing home, not because their condition cannot be cared for, but because they are too much of a hassle? Perhaps a family feels that is economically necessary for an elderly parent unable to care for himself or herself to be separated from the family and visited perhaps once a week, perhaps once a month, perhaps less. But what seems clear is that leaving one's father and one's mother to the care of others in their old age, when one is capable of providing the necessary care oneself, is not compatible with the words of Jesus.

They say that old age is the second childhood, but it is worse than childhood in many ways. Though a child cannot care for himself and requires help to even maintain his bodily functions, its parents are willing to provide this assistance, and regard it as their unquestioned duty to their offspring to perform. However, when the elderly person is in a similar state of need, the average American family sees the need to "preserve their dignity" not by taking them into their own home to care for them as they would a child, but to send them to a "facility".

Now one could argue that in today's society we have social services that effectively take the place of a child caring for his parent, whereas Jesus was only concerned with a son preventing his parents from starving in their old age, but to defeat that notion I think all we need to do is ask ourselves whether we would rather ourselves be cared for in the home of our offspring, or by the hands of strangers who care for the task only as their way to make a living rather than as a pious offering to their heavenly Father and a reflection of the religion that they were taught by the elders they now care for. 

If we want our children to care for us, or even to visit more than once a month our cold, official, urine-smelling facility surrounded by our fellow demented inmates whose families have similar concern for their dignity, we must teach them the true words of Scripture, even when they are difficult to apply as in this case in our society in our current moral climate, and apply them ourselves in relation to our own parents, not through government intervention, which offsets responsibility upon another, but by each man looking to the care of his own family so far as he is possibly able.