I closed last Sunday’s sermon with these words: “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.” That’s profoundly important, because in power relationships the thing which truly matters is the power imbalance in that relationship—because almost every power relationship has one. It may be legal, as in the relationship between employer and employee, or creditor and debtor; it may be structural or positional, like the relationships between employees up and down the hierarchy—team member to team lead to assistant manager to manager and so on; it may be intrinsic, as with a dominating person and a “friend” who’s a wholly-owned subsidiary—think Gaston and LeFou in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, if you’re familiar with either version. Then there are relationships which combine categories, like the parent/child relationship, which is both legal and structural—and when a highly dominant person is a parent, you get all three.
With all these, with all worldly relationships, the power imbalance is the important thing. What matters to the world is who gets to tell whom what to do and why, because the world sees relationships from the demand end. Unfortunately, in the church we reflexively approach the “household code” passages from this worldly mindset. Consider the questions we ask. “What do I have to do or not do?” “What can I get away with doing or not doing?” “What do I have the right to demand that you do, or not do, or stop doing?” We take these passages as law and argue them like lawyers. We generate rules, draw lines, and look for loopholes. We get mad when other people don’t meet our expectations; when we don’t meet theirs, we retreat behind a cloud of ink—legal, not squid, but same difference.
Again, truly Christian relationships are relationships of mutual submission. They aren’t about what other people have to do for me, or what they’re going to demand from me. They aren’t about the demand end, because they aren’t about demand at all. Our relationships are arenas in which Christ calls us to opportunities to give our lives for others in caring and service, and sometimes more. The world is all about power, and power plays make the world go ’round. For the Lord, the point is a different kind of power, and power play, altogether. It’s not power of some people over other people—whichever end of that we might be on—it’s the transforming power of God in us by the presence and work of his Holy Spirit.
As Paul dives into this collision, this culture war between the kingdoms of this earth and the kingdom of God, he looks first and longest at wives and husbands but doesn’t stop there. He turns next to children and parents, looking at a relationship in which there is an honest power element: unlike wives, children are commanded to obey. The point New Testament scholar Peter O’Brien makes must be borne in mind, however: “Children are here addressed as responsible members of the congregations.” Their duty to obey their parents is also a subcategory of the command to mutual submission, and so it must also be understood as an aspect of their submission to Christ. That’s why Paul tells children, “Obey your parents in the Lord.” This is part of their Christian discipleship; their own relationships to Jesus are taken every bit as seriously and understood as every bit as important as their parents’ relationships to Jesus.
As with wives submitting to husbands, Paul isn’t changing the behavior required of children, he’s changing the basis for that behavior. In his 1882 speech “Advice to Youth,” Mark Twain said,
Always obey your parents, when they are present. This is the best policy in the long run, because if you don’t, they will make you. Most parents think they know better than you do, and you can generally make more by humoring that superstition than you can by acting on your own better judgment.
Twain’s obviously being satirical here, but like any good satire, his words rest on bedrock reality. In the world’s eyes, the question why obey your parents? ultimately comes down exactly to this: “Because if you don’t, they will make you.” Paul says, no. Obey your parents because doing so is pleasing to Jesus.
Logically, again, that means not obeying any commands which would displease Jesus. On the one hand, given the human capacity for rationalization, that should only be applied when the matter is inarguable—a command to steal someone else’s property, for instance. On the other, this applies powerfully to parents, because it rules out domination, control, exploitation, abuse, and self-centeredness. If children can’t disobey any time they want to and say God gave them permission, parents can’t command anything they want and say God gave them the right.
Paul supports his point with an appeal to the Ten Commandments, to the commandment to honor your father and mother, which means both more and less than obedience. On one hand, we can continue to honor them even when they are no longer here to obey; on the other, we don’t honor them if we help them do something dishonorable. In the main, however, we honor them by doing what they would have us do. Similarly, in the main, the promise of this command holds true: if you honor your parents, your life will be long and go well. It’s not always true, of course, in this lost and broken world so loved by God. It’s a general promise, because in most cases it will help you avoid the follies by which so many people destroy their lives. It’s no guarantee because there are other categories of things which can shorten and blight our lives—though even then, it may be your life will be longer and go better if you follow God’s command.
Note that Paul’s instructions the other direction are not to parents but to fathers. I believe that’s because his focus in this section of Ephesians is on power, and specifically deconstructing power relationships in favor of mutual submission—and the power all lay with fathers. Last week I referenced the aspect of Roman law called the patria potestas; this week I want to unpack that a little. New Testament scholar Andrew Lincoln in his Ephesians commentary quotes the Roman author Dionysius of Halicarnassus as follows:
The law-giver of the Romans gave virtually full power to the father over his son, whether he thought proper to imprison him, to scourge him, to put him in chains, and keep him at work in the fields, or to put him to death; and this even though the son were already engaged in public affairs, though he were numbered among the highest magistrates, and though he were celebrated for his zeal for the commonwealth.
As Lincoln notes, the father’s level of responsibility was equal to his power, “since he was legally liable for the actions of members of his household.”
Into this, Paul offers a powerful challenge to fathers restraining and limiting their exercise of the power the law gave them over their children. Yes, children need to obey, because they are more limited than adults. The limitations of their experience and frame of reference were as obvious then as now. Our modern understanding of brain development wasn’t obvious, but I doubt it would have surprised Paul much. Contra Twain’s sardonic comment, children are not as equipped to navigate through life as adults, as a general statement. That said, they are our brothers and sisters in Christ who stand before him as our equals in every way that ultimately matters. I’m not worth a wooden nickel more than Drake Britton. I’ve experienced more, I’ve learned more, I’ve survived more, and I hope whenever we get to me asking him not to run in church, he at least slows down a little—but the fact he’s not yet ready to get a job and buy a house is no reason to take him one whit less seriously as a part of this congregation.
It’s with that reality firmly fixed in mind that Paul commands fathers not to provoke our children to anger—a command which in our age applies just as much to mothers. This is the same word family we see in 4:26, which I think makes clear we’re talking about justifiable anger on the part of our children; here as there, Paul’s concern is that even anger at true injustice still gives the Enemy an opportunity to lead people into sin. To quote Lincoln again, “This involves avoiding attitudes, words, and actions which would drive a child to angry exasperation or resentment and thus rules out excessively severe discipline, unreasonably harsh demands, abuse of authority, arbitrariness, unfairness, constant nagging and condemnation, subjecting a child to humiliation, and all forms of gross insensitivity to a child’s needs and sensibilities.”
Our concern with our children should never be for our own sake, only for theirs. Our calling as parents is to raise them as disciples of Jesus. “Bring them up” in verse 4 translates the same word as “nourishes” in 5:29. Yes, we need to correct their misunderstandings and sinful behaviors, just as we need others to do the same for us, but the point isn’t to make them look some kind of way so that those around us have a high opinion of us. The point is to teach them about Jesus and to live before them as followers of Jesus so they will see him as clearly as any of us ever do, and thus will be moved to know him, love him, and follow him. If Paul’s explicit standard for husbands is “Love your wives as Christ loved the church,” his implicit standard for parents is no less daunting: to care for our children as God our Father cares for his.
The third case Paul addresses is slaves and masters. This is obviously not as directly applicable as the first two, since we don’t have legal slavery anymore—but before we get too happy about that, we would do well to remember the last people in this country who did would point at the economic structure of the North and call it wage slavery. What they were defending was hideously wrong, and their whataboutism didn’t change that a whit . . . but that didn’t mean they were wrong about their target. As I noted a few minutes ago, the employer/employee relationship is a legally-backed, legally-enforced power relationship. At minimum, one works for the other and the other has a legal right to make and enforce demands; and that’s not getting into the aspect of intrinsic power added when an employee can’t afford to quit and the employer knows it. Even with good employers who would never dream of intentionally abusing that power, that additional imbalance is still there and both sides know it.
Now, regarding Paul’s comments to slaves, it’s again true that they were legally required to obey—and that was a harsher reality for them because they were legally property, which meant two things. One is obvious: masters didn’t even have to treat them as people. The other might be less so: unless you freed one and then adopted him, a slave was never going to be your heir, as a son might, and could never be used to make an advantageous marriage, as a daughter might, and so it didn’t matter a jot to you whether your slaves liked you or not. As such, you could terrify them into obedience with vile threats, you could carry out those threats, you could use your slaves sexually in any way you wished—which was definitely a thing—and what they thought of any of it was irrelevant.
This is the reality into which Paul says, “obey differently.” Rather than sullen, grudging obedience to your earthly master, obey your earthly master with reverence and awe toward God as your service offered to Christ. Obey sincerely, making every effort to do your work well, rather than performatively—that’s the meaning of “eye-service.” This obviously would not apply to sinful uses of slaves, and so Paul structures his imperative a little differently: the main point is to obey with reverence and awe toward God. That is your service offered to Christ even if the thing being done to you is not pleasing to him. The relief here is not that you can stop that from happening but that the guilt in such cases isn’t yours.
Now, people complain Paul doesn’t command abolition and urge a slave rebellion; this is true. Speaking as a student of history, I think it’s safe to say it would have been far worse for the world if he had. What he does instead is undermine it so wherever the church spread, slavery would begin to collapse. The Roman attitude toward slaves was proverbial: “All slaves are enemies.” Masters could threaten to beat their slaves, to sexually abuse them, to sexually abuse their loved ones, to separate them forever from their loved ones by selling them away, in order to compel their obedience. Masters could do all those things, if they wanted to. Paul tells them to treat their slaves as brothers and sisters in Christ—which includes mutual submission. More, he says they are fellow slaves of Christ who will be held accountable by their common Master for how they treat their earthly slaves. This was absolutely shocking in that context. Their world said, “This person is your property—use your property however you want.” Paul says, “This person is your equal in Christ, and Jesus will judge between the two of you just as you would judge between two of your slaves.” There is no favoritism, and no special deals are available. Whatever the world may think, your slaves belong to Christ, not you. Act accordingly.
The bottom line here is what I said at the first: God calls us to a different sort of power play than the world. The world urges us to assert ourselves, to assert our power, to gain power and use it. God calls us to turn to him, lay our power down at the foot of the cross, and open ourselves to his power. In 1:19-20, we see Paul starting to pray that the Ephesians would experience this—this is actually the point where he wanders out of the prayer and starts talking about the work of God in Christ. After he transitions back into his prayer for them in 3:14-15, this is where he picks back up, praying “that you would be strengthened by his power through his Holy Spirit from the inside out, on the lavish scale of his inexhaustible glory.” In our passages last week and especially this week, he wants to show us what that looks like in practice. Underlying all this is an imperative which goes all the way back to the beginning of God’s people: abandon the phantasm of control and place your life in his hands. Do what he gives you to do, and leave the rest to him. Walk by faith; live by trust; act by the Spirit.