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 like a pretty severe humiliation for the child; but that’s not the result this passage envisions. “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 been so angry I fumed that “I could just kill” one of my children; but I was exaggerating. (I think.) 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.

But some parents have. We are used to thinking that parents’ first loyalty must be to their children, no matter what; but the text calls that “no matter what” permissiveness into question. This law clearly does not fit every case: it would not be enforced just because a ten-year-old was slow to clean up his room. And it could be misapplied, as when people used this text to disparage Jesus as “a glutton and a drunkard” (Matthew 11:19, Luke 7:34).

Yet even so, we should allow this passage to remind us that sometimes teenage rebelliousness can be so bad that it can 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 likely caused by other drugs than alcohol). 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, we recognize that sometimes there is no other solution except purging the evil from our 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 their hearts, help them make better choices: bring them back, somehow.

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