Several people have asked me why I hadn't posted anything new on this blog of late. Truth is, I've been busier than usual. Last weekend was my daughter Adrienne's wedding. She married a wonderful young man named Earl, who I'm proud to call my son-in-law now. Here's a look at the bride and her groom:
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| Earl & Adrienne |
When Adrienne and Earl chose a passage of scripture to be read at their wedding ceremony, they passed over Paul's famous instructions for wives and husbands set out in Chapter 5 of Ephesians:
"Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church. ... Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her[.] ... This is a profound mystery[.]" Ephesians 5:21-23, 25, 32 (NIV).
I'm not surprised that Adrienne and Earl didn't select this passage for their wedding ceremony. My daughter definitely views marriage as a partnership of equals, not as a chain of command - with the husband at the top no less. Let's be honest: plenty of bad "Christian" marriage advice has flowed from Paul's admonition that wives should "submit" to their husbands. But I wonder if Adri and EJ might have reconsidered these verses if they had heard what Grandpa Bill had to say about them in a sermon he preached about marriage. My dad wrote:
"This passage is like a seed that holds the promise of what marriage later became in the Christian tradition. Of course, in Paul's day, wives were subject to their husbands in both the Jewish and Greek communities. If you were to suggest the equality of the sexes to anyone in the first century, even in the church, you would have been laughed out of the room. Women were property, not persons.
With this in mind, a passage that said, 'Wives, be subject to your husbands,' came as a breath of fresh air to its readers because of what it also said, because of all the qualifiers it added. It said that husbands should love their wives to the point of self-sacrifice. It said that marriage is a true union of husband and wife, so that the way a man treats his wife is ultimately the way he treats himself.
All of this was a 'profound mystery' says Ephesians. Now, marriage was not a profound mystery to first century men living in a man's world. It was a matter of comfort and convenience; it was a matter of economic necessity; it was a matter of ensuring one's own posterity; but it was not a profound mystery!
Paul, and other first century Christians, began to liberate marriage from this bondage. They didn't yet realize all of the ramifications of this, but they did know that men and women had to sit together at the Lord's Table, and that Paul had said some startling things like 'in Christ there is nether male nor female.' This didn't automatically result in a full-blown doctrine of Christian marriage. Nevertheless, considering the cultural and historical context, these verses were revolutionary! The seed was sown for the unfolding of the profound mystery of Christian marriage.
Verse 21 is that seed in its essence. The writer could have stopped here and said it all. This is the Word of God on Christian marriage: 'Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.' This is the timeless foundation on which believers build their marriage unions. Did the old writer know what he was saying? In an age of male dominance and female subservience, did he know he was espousing 'mutual subjection,' wife to husband and husband to wife? Was this a slip of the pen, or was it the Spirit giving us the Word?
Time has told, and continuing revelation has given us the answer: what holds a Christian marriage together and makes it work is not romance, not good sex, not a legal marriage contract, not psychological compatibility - but mutual subjection. Mutual subjection is at the heart of the profound mystery of the marriage union. It is the binding agent." In the words of Ephesians, it is how "the two will become one flesh." Ephesians 5:31 (NIV).
From: "Christian Marriage - A Profound Mystery"
Scripture: Ephesians 5:21-33
Preached: August 21, 1988
Paoli United Methodist Church
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