Suppose you have “a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey his father or mother, who does not heed them when they discipline him” (Deuteronomy 21:19). You must bring your son to the elders of the community, and there in front of them all you make your accusation: “This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a glutton and a drunkard” (21:20).

That would seem to be a pretty severe humiliation. Yet this passage envisions more than that: “Then all the men of the town shall stone him to death. So you shall purge this evil from your midst; and all Israel will hear and be afraid” (21:21). Those ‘men of the town’ would include his own family, of course: his brothers, his uncles and cousins, his own father. It is a devastating requirement. I have on occasion said that I was angry enough to kill one of my children; but I was exaggerating (mostly). Even in my worst fury, though, I myself have never faced a parenting situation so severe that the only solution was to present my child at the city gate for public execution.

Is this passage too stark, then, overstating the problem of youthful rebelliousness and proposing an impossibly-severe across-the-board remedy? Shouldn’t we recognize that this is a law we need to set aside, since the first loyalty of parents must be to their children, no matter what? After all, a “stubborn and rebellious” son who “will not obey us” could be the description of a ten-year-old who is slow to clean up his room: are we really supposed to execute such kids by public stoning? And surely we can see how this law could be misapplied – like when people used this text to disparage Jesus as “a glutton and a drunkard” (Matthew 11:19, Luke 7:34).

We should recognize the force of these hesitations, and see that such a law must not be enforced recklessly against that slow-to-tidy-up ten-year-old. Even so, we should allow this passage to remind us that sometimes teenage rebelliousness can be so bad that it will destroy families and communities. Contemporary society may have found a few more options for dealing with such trauma than they had in ancient Israel, but we still do have the problem today of families devastated by their children’s crimes (now more often drug-induced rather than alcohol-induced). Must the family and the community accept that they will keep on being devastated forever, or do they get to take action in their own defense? It will not be easy. It will take courage. But for the sake of the community, and for the sake of the rest of the family, sometimes it really is necessary to purge the evil from your midst.

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O Lord! We want so much to believe in the redemption of every situation, with a happy ending for everybody: but it doesn’t always work out that way. We pray for families struggling with rebellious children: move in the hearts of those teens, and help them make better choices: bring them back, somehow.