I love preaching on this passage. That might sound strange, given how much ill feeling it generates in some parts of the church, but that’s actually why I love preaching on it. There are passages of Scripture that have gotten jammed up over the years in interpretations that don’t actually make sense, and it’s a joy and delight to be able to come along and say, “You keep using that passage. I do not think it means what you think it means.” (All due apologies to The Princess Bride.) There are interpretations of Scripture which ought to be inconceivable that are widely assumed to be obviously true, and they need to be set right.
That’s what we’re dealing with here. It’s a widely-misused passage which illustrates two common pathologies of biblical interpretation. One is the mindset which reads the Bible as an instruction manual from which we are to extract “biblical principles” to follow in our lives. With that approach, the instant the brain sees the word “wives,” the mental guillotine drops and everything that follows is cut completely out of its context. It’s as if Paul said, “OK, I’m done talking about all this grace and unity stuff; now I’m going to sit down and write you a rulebook on ‘how marriage is supposed to work.’” That’s how it’s frequently read, as if it were a marriage manual that got mixed up with the letter and published by mistake.
If we’re going to take this passage seriously as Scripture, we can’t do that. We need to understand it in context—both the context of the letter, in which it serves a purpose in Paul’s overall argument, and its historical and cultural context. Ephesians wasn’t written five years ago by a youth pastor in Iowa, after all. We need to ask ourselves how the Ephesians would have heard this passage, which was written to address their questions, concerns, and culture, not ours. When we ignore the context of a passage, we almost always produce interpretations which serve the agenda of the interpreter rather than challenging it. In this case, that has historically meant two profound errors: first, the idea of absolute unilateral submission of wives to husbands—the husband is supposed to be the lord of the house—and second, a focus on wives rather than husbands despite the fact that Paul addresses eight verses to husbands and only three to wives.
Unfortunately, as Newton’s Second Law of Theological Dynamics tells us, for every error there is an equal and opposite reactionary error. In this case, many people reject that interpretation of Ephesians 5 without questioning any of the assumptions which produced it. Their goal is to replace an interpretation they find repugnant with one which serves their purposes, and they assume their only option is to mutilate the text by excising the word “submit.” Thus we fight over Scriptural authority while the meaning of the Scripture is lost.
The instruction-manual mindset is reinforced in popular biblical interpretation by the second problem: the existence of biblical headings. As Sara can tell you, this is a point I tend to hammer on. Modern people stick them in the biblical text and other modern people take them as divinely inspired when time and again, they point you in the wrong direction entirely. Thus we have a big heading reading “Wives and Husbands” between verses 21 and 22, treating them as two different paragraphs divided by a complete change of topic. In the Greek, that paragraph break isn’t there! In fact, verses 18-23 are all one long sentence.
A lot of commentators don’t see that, I admit, but I can’t see how they miss it. There are only two verbs, both in verse 18, followed by four participles which are dependent on the verb “be filled.” Verse 22 has no verb of any kind whatsoever. How you justify starting a new sentence there, I have yet to figure out.
At this point, a few of you are probably saying, “OK, so you’re excited about participles, but why should I care?” Let’s take this from the top, and I think you’ll see why. Like I said last week, verses 15-16 are Janus verses which set up a sharp dichotomy: being foolish versus understanding the Lord’s will. We cannot be wise unless we understand God’s will, and we need to take this seriously because the days are evil and time is short.
Paul develops this with another dichotomy, but one which seems oddly chosen: “Don’t get drunk, but be continually filled by the Spirit.” Drunkenness doesn’t connect to anything he’s said up to this point; where did that come from? You may remember a couple weeks ago I said the ESV should have used “debauchery” instead of “sensuality” in 4:19; here we have the flip side, where instead of “debauchery” in verse 18 they should have used “dissipation.” The point here isn’t that getting drunk equals orgies and the like, it’s that drunkenness dissipates our energy, our talents, our resources, and ultimately our spirits. Drunkenness unfocuses our lives; it empties us and hollows us out, leaving our strengths and gifts to evaporate unused. That is foolishness. Where drunkenness empties us, the Spirit of God seeks to fill us with all the fullness of Christ, which enables us to understand God’s will and thus to be wise. The contrast is between dissipation and concentration, between distraction and focus.
This raises a question: what does it look like to be filled by the Spirit? Paul answers that question in four dimensions, giving us four effects of the Spirit’s work in our lives. One is worship—singing and playing to the Lord from the core of our beings. If the Spirit is filling us, worship will flow out of us spontaneously, because we love to praise God and it’s the most natural thing in the world. Interestingly, though, that’s not the first effect to which Paul points. It took me a long time to realize that. He starts off talking about Spirit-inspired psalms and hymns and songs, and that verse gets used a lot in discussions of the theology of worship, but he isn’t talking about psalms, hymns, and songs addressed to God. Paul says if the Spirit is filling us, this is how we will talk to each other. Our conversation should be a form of worship as we encourage each other and build one another up, reminding each other what God has done for us in Christ.
The third effect Paul mentions is gratitude, which makes sense. Praise and thanksgiving go together naturally and easily. To be sure, giving thanks always and for everything is neither natural nor easy, but that’s the effect of the Spirit in our lives. We can always see the hand of God when he makes things go our way, and it’s easy to thank him when he gives us what we ask for. The more we’re filled by the Spirit, the more we’re able to see the goodness of God even when we’re suffering, and the more we know his faithfulness even as he leads us through darkness and trials. The Spirit frees us to be grateful to God for being God regardless.
Fourth, Paul says the work of the Spirit in our hearts moves us to submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. We need to be clear on what that means. In the world, submission is about hierarchy: some people submit to other people, who submit to others in turn, on up to the top. Submission means doing what you’re told by those who have the right and the power to make you do it. That is not what Paul has in mind. He’s talking about mutual submission. Tat isn’t a product of hierarchy, it scrambles the hierarchy. It can’t just be about following orders, because that would mean everyone had to obey everyone else, which would be chaos.
If submission is mutual, it has to be about what we offer, not what we demand. It doesn’t mean we have to do whatever anyone else says, but it does mean giving up the insistence that others have to do whatever we say. As Paul says in Philippians 2—holding up Jesus as our model—we need to be willing to let others be more important than ourselves, and we need to be willing to let them have their way if it’s otherwise appropriate to do so.
So, Paul says, “Be filled continually by the Spirit.” which is another imperative that isn’t a command for us to go out and do something. It’s more a matter of letting the Spirit do his work and not getting in his way (by, for instance, getting drunk). Then he tells us being filled by the Spirit will result in us submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ. Having said that, he immediately turns to his first concrete example of mutual submission, which is marriage. I want to be clear on this: marriage isn’t a special case of particular submission, it’s a particular case of mutual submission. Now, many people disagree with me here, and at first glance, their argument seems indisputable: Paul doesn’t tell husbands to submit to their wives, only to love their wives, so therefore only wives are supposed to submit. Game, set, match, right?
Not so fast. Notice one key point: Paul never tells wives to love their husbands. No one doubts wives should love their husbands, because we understand love is supposed to be mutual, but we aren’t looking for excuses to make exceptions to that command. Thing is, this passage is structured in parallel; if the command to love isn’t exclusive to husbands, submission can’t be exclusive to wives, either. That’s especially true given the context: the idea that love should be mutual isn’t actually stated here, while the command to submit to one another clearly is.
We need to remember Paul’s audience had never heard of Gloria Steinem or Susan B. Anthony. Roman law gave husbands absolute power over their wives (and also their children). Roman women could at least initiate divorce—Jewish women couldn’t even do that—but otherwise they had to submit to whatever their husbands might do or demand. Paul isn’t telling wives they have to submit; the law already tells them that. Paul is inviting them to submit differently, to submit to their husbands in their own free will as an act of honor not to their husbands but to Christ. Logically, that means not submitting to anything which would dishonor Christ. Submission does not necessarily mean obedience. Our obedience is owed to Jesus.
The real challenge in this passage is to husbands: “Love your wives as Christ loved the church.” Again, Philippians 2 shows us what that means: Jesus gave up absolutely everything and humbled himself utterly, becoming a servant, suffering, and ultimately accepting brutal and unjust execution for the church. If there was a limit to the price he was willing to pay for us, human ingenuity couldn’t find it. His example rules out domination, control, exploitation, abuse, and self-centeredness; because he loves us, Jesus let go of everything he had the right to demand. Husbands, that’s the expectation Paul sets before us. That’s the standard by which we’re supposed to measure ourselves. Good luck.
It’s no surprise that when Paul starts talking about submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ, he immediately applies it to husbands and wives, because marriage was the point where the idea of mutual submission challenged his culture the most—but that’s not his only reason for making that turn. Throughout the letter, he’s been talking about the mystery of the church, and that’s very much in view in this passage as well. Here, his focus is on the union of Christ with his church. We can’t comprehend his love for us, as individuals or as a body, just by reading about it. We need to see it with skin on, we need to see it modeled for us, if we’re going to have any hope of wrapping any part of our minds around it. The only place we can see two becoming one in the way Jesus is uniting us to himself is in the mystery of a spiritually healthy Christian marriage. It’s an imperfect model—even the best marriage is vastly imperfect—but it helps us see something about Jesus and the church we would never see at all otherwise.
That means we need to handle this passage especially carefully. To whatever extent we misinterpret it, we aren’t just giving people a wrong understanding of marriage, we’re giving them a false picture of Christ and the church. With that in mind, I want to give you two keys for understanding what Ephesians has to say to husbands and wives. The first is a principle I mentioned a few weeks ago: put simply, read your own mail. Paul’s comments about women are addressed to women, and his words about men are addressed to men. Much of the misuse of this passage has arisen because we like reading it the other way around. We want it to be about what we deserve to get from our spouse. Thus, for instance, generations of men have read verse 22 as if it says, “Husbands, your wives are supposed to submit to you as to the Lord.” Newsflash: it doesn’t.
We focus on what our spouse is supposed to do for us, but that’s not what this passage is about. We need to read our own mail and realize that it’s about what God wants from us. The point of these verses isn’t so I can tell my wife what to do—good luck with that anyway—or so you can tell your husband what to do. Paul doesn’t say, “Boss each other around in reverence for Christ.” He gives each of us our own marching orders. It’s for each of us to take care of our own responsibilities; if we’re married, it’s for each of us to love and serve our spouse as God calls us to do, and let God and our spouse work on our spouse.
Second, this passage is about Jesus Christ from first to last. We are to be submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ, including wives to their husbands as to Christ. We don’t submit to others because they demand it but to please the Lord—which means, along the way, we only submit as far as it pleases the Lord. This is not a summons to be a doormat. Sometimes submitting out of reverence for Christ means saying “no.” Again, submission is not the same thing as obedience. We owe unconditional obedience only to the Lord. Husbands are to love their wives as Christ loved the church. It’s not about whether we get anything back. God calls us to be faithful as he is faithful regardless.
In this world, relationships are about power dynamics, so we naturally read passages like Ephesians 5 in that light as if they were written to tell us who has power over whom, in what ways, to what degree, and why. That gets the Bible exactly backwards. Jesus calls us to set thoughts of power completely aside and let his Spirit teach us to see our relationships as opportunities to love others as he loves us and serve them in his name.
Photo: Wedding Day, © 2014 micadew. License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic. Image has been cropped to fit.