Honor your father and your mother: that your days may be long upon the land which the LORD your God gives you.
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Ambrose of Milan
AD 397
The formation of the children is then the prerogative of the parents. Therefore honor your father, that he may bless you. Let the godly man honor his father out of gratitude and the ingrate do so on account of fear. Even if the father is poor and does not have plenty of resources to leave to his sons, still he has the heritage of his final blessing with which he may bestow the wealth of sanctification on his descendants. And it is a far greater thing to be blessed than it is to be rich.
So if you are afraid your son won’t take care of you once he has his hands on the money, you are in fact making filial piety a commodity for sale, not a quality to be loved. How much better a poor man’s son, the son, for instance, of an old man in the direst poverty, who expects nothing from his father because he hasn’t got anything he can leave him but who all the same supports his father with his labor and the sweat of his brow. Sometimes, of course, the children of rich people too take the fear of God seriously, and that’s why they show consideration to their parents, not because they expect something from them but because they are their parents who brought them into the world and brought them up, and God gave a commandment which says “Honor your father and your mother.” But where the reward is there for all to see, the genuineness of their sentiments is not so obvious.
It’s your parents you see when you first open your eyes, and it is their friendship that lays down the first strands of this life. If anyone fails to honor his parents, is there anyone he will spare? Sermon
Honour. Love, respect, feed, if requisite; support the infirmities of parents. See Numbers xxiv. 1; 1 Timothy v. 3, 17. They are ministers of God, in the production of children; and those who offer an affront to his minister, irritate God. (Philo)
Land of Chanaan. The promises are of a temporal nature; but they should bring to our reflection the eternal rewards which attend the virtuous. The duties of parents are not specified, as nature would show their extent, and as the obligations of parents and children are reciprocal. (Calmet)
[The Lord] declares that [this commandment] is to be interpreted not of mere words, which while offering an empty show of regard may still leave a parent’s wants unrelieved, but by the actual provision of the necessaries of life. The Lord commanded that poor parents should be supported by their children and that these should pay them back when old for those benefits which they had themselves received in their childhood.
