Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord.
Ephesians 5:22 [ESV]
I’ll be getting to this more over the next several days but the fact that Paul uses ‘husbands love your wives as Christ loves the church” so many times in the following verses, makes this so much less about wives as it does about husbands. This passage raises the hackles of a lot of people and honestly it did mine as well until I took a hermeneutical approach to the meaning across all of scripture.
The submission is limited to the husband and is not to all men (your own husbands). The comparison is that just as a woman submits herself to the Lord, so also in her marriage. Her submission to the Lord is used as an analogy, with the recognition that the husband and Christ are not the same but are related to each other in how the home is run. The idea is ‘just as you did it for them, you did it for me’.
And the King will answer them, Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’
Matthew 25:40 [ESV]
Christ is my wife’s ultimate authority, and it is He who is calling for this kind of ordering in the home. The exhortation to Marianne focuses on being supportive, as the term ‘respect’ is used in verse 33 as the idea here. The point Paul is making is that the wife chooses to respond in this way. There is no suggestion that the wife is being forced to submit. That also fits the exhortation of first verse, where mutual submission is a response to an exhortation to be submissive. The wife is to respect the husband’s role and support it, as the husband is sensitive to his wife. This is not an endorsement of the patriarchy that surrounded them in the biblical time culture; the call for husbands to have concern for their wives was missing in the larger culture.
It is also significant that what Paul focuses on here is not the rights a person has in the marriage but on his or her responsibility to the other person. The exhortations are ultimately focused outwards. They are not to be read or applied selfishly, but selflessly. The wife is not told to ‘obey’ her husband, as is the case with children and slaves in the next listings. This might be significant. It seems to indicate a place for give-and-take discussion in marriage when a decision is reached. She chooses to be respectful as a way to bring stability to the home.
The assumption of the passage as a whole is that the husband also is sensitive, though it does not qualify the wife’s response as being dependent on the husband’s sensitivity. There is a balance in this passage that provides for the stability being desired. The love and care required of the husband, who in the Graeco-Roman culture would have been seen to have absolute power, shows the effort to convey a balance in the relationship. Marriage works best when sensitivity works in both directions, as the husband leads with a caring, nurturing love and the wife responds with submission. In other words, the submission–love combination is not to be seen in terms of power or rank, as it often is portrayed, but as a form of cooperation in reaching for a shared goal. Even children are to see their parents as a team sharing honor.
Application:
What all of this means practically is that couples have an array of options as to how they design their unique relationship, given how the husband is to be sensitive towards his wife and the wife supportive of her husband – principles that allow for a couple to work out its dynamics in a mutually agreed way in which love and submission work together. For Marianne and I this works in a way that is beautiful. The main point is that the times where we have been in a position where I have made a decision that Marianne submits can be counted on one hand in the 25 years we have been married. We share all decisions and there has never ever been a time where God has called only one of us to a position in ministry or leading of a direction in our Christian lives…these times where I have taken a decision is strictly limited to home dynamics were there was no clear winning direction. Marianne has, in those times, submitted to a direction I have chosen under humble and sober ownership of the household of our family bathed with prayer the weight that I will answer to the Lord for that decision.
Today’s Psalm:
These things I remember,
as I pour out my soul:
how I would go with the throng
and lead them in procession to the house of God
with glad shouts and songs of praise,
a multitude keeping festival.
Psalms 42:4 [ESV]