Eph 5:22–33 — A Profound Mystery, Part 2

Last week we began our study of Eph. 5:22-33. We noted that this wonderful text has two layers of meaning. The first layer is the practical guidance and instruction concerning the marriage relationship. The second layer is the deeper significance of marriage as a picture of the union that exists between Christ and his church. Last week we looked at the second layer. This morning I want to explore the first layer - how the relationship between Christ and his church teaches us how to relate to our spouses in marriage.

The most important thing to notice about the text is that Paul gives two commands, one for wives, and one for husbands. To the wives, he says, be subject to your husbands. To the husbands, he says, love your wives.

Now right away this all is quite foreign to our modern sensibilities. These commands go against the grain of our democratic and egalitarian culture. The call for wifely submission immediately sets off bells. It seems to justify the mistreatment of women, as if a wife has no other purpose in life but to cater to her man’s every need.

And then there’s the call for husbandly love. It sounds a bit condescending. It almost seems to imply that women can’t take care of themselves, that they need a husband who will do everything for them.

Feeling uncomfortable with the text, some Christians argue that such commands merely reflect the cultural conditioning of the Biblical authors. The argument goes like this. Paul was raised as Jewish rabbi, and so it isn’t surprising if at times his patriarchal biases and prejudices against women show through. At certain points, then, Paul’s message is not truly inspired. We must separate the kernel of authentic teaching from that which is merely the husk of cultural influence.

The irony is that it is the Christian feminists who have succumbed to the pressure of their cultural environment. Not only was Paul not prejudiced against women, as some suppose, but when Paul calls for female submission to male headship he appeals to fundamental theological assumptions. You may not like Paul’s teaching concerning husbands and wives. But one thing should be clear: Paul’s teaching on this subject isn’t something that he failed to think through, as if he momentarily lapsed into an uncritical acceptance of the patriarchal prejudices of his day. Paul’s teaching flows from his deep theological reflection on gender roles, which Paul sees as rooted in creation and brought to their fullest flower in redemption.

As an illustration of Paul’s appeal to creation, consider …

1 Timothy 2:12-14.

The word “for” introduces the ground or basis of Paul’s prohibition against women exercising a teaching authority in the church. And that ground or basis is the divinely intended roles of man and woman established at creation. When God created man, he created them male and female, after his own image. Men and women are therefore equal in the sight of God. Women are not inferior to men, since both are equally made in God’s image. But on top of this fundamental equality, God also overlaid an authority structure in which the husband is the head of the family and the wife is to be “a helper suitable for him.” Submission to authority does not make the person who is submitting inferior to the one who is exercising the authority. If it did, the fact that Jesus came not to do his own will but the will of the one who sent him, would have negated his divine equality with the Father. When men and women assume their proper roles in the home and in the church, their essential equality in the sight of God is not erased.

The perfect harmony of equality and authority is captured in Genesis 2, when Moses says that the woman was a helper suitable for the man. On the one hand she is man’s helper, and is thus made for him and subject to the man’s headship. On the other hand, she is a helper suitable for the man, or in Hebrew, corresponding to the man. She is like him in every way, on the same par with him - not higher than him like the angels, not below him like the animals. She is flesh of his flesh and bones of his bones, perfectly equal with him in every way. And both the man and the woman are accountable to their Creator whose image they equally bear.

In our text this morning, Paul builds upon this appeal to the creation order. He shows that wives must submit to their husbands, and husbands must love their wives, not only because this is the creation pattern, but because this creation pattern has been intensified and fulfilled in redemption. The divine plan of salvation does not overthrow the creation order, but brings the creation to its original goal in Christ, in spite of man’s sin. And so Paul argues that wives ought to submit to their husbands, just as the church submits to Christ in everything, and husbands ought to love their wives, just as Christ loved the church.

One of the difficulties that confronts us in this text is the way in which Paul appeals to the example of Jesus Christ as the standard defining how husbands and wives ought to relate to one another. The difficulty is that the standard seems too high. If you are a wife, you look at the text, and then you look at your husband, and you say, “It would be a whole lot easier to submit to my husband if he were more like Christ!” And so the text can leave you feeling discouraged.

The same thing happens to husbands. According to the text, I as a husband must love my wife in the very same way that Christ loved his church. It is not enough for me to love my wife a little bit like Christ loved the church. I must utterly lay down my own life as a total sacrifice for my wife. I must negate my own interests, subordinating them completely to her. My life is to be lost in order that hers might be gained, my happiness laid upon the altar for the sake of hers.

Now all of this seems impossible - and it is impossible! And so the question is, how can we profit from the exhortation of this text? How can we take the Christological layer and set it before us as the standard and goal, without giving up?

There is something wonderful in this text that I would like to bring out in order to answer this question. Notice that the exhortation to husbands is divided into two subsections - (1) vv. 25-27 and (2) vv. 28-32. The first subsection says, “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church.” The second subsection seems to suddenly shifts gears, for here Paul says, in verse 28, “So husbands ought also to love their own wives as their own bodies. He who loves his own wife loves himself, for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it.” Don’t tone down what Paul is saying here. He is literally appealing to self-interest as a motive for loving our wives! It is very clear. Without apology, Paul plainly says, “he who loves his own wife loves himself.”

If you read the text in the original Greek, Paul’s unabashed appeal to self-interest stands out even more clearly because of the repeated use of the Greek word heautos, which can be translated “his own” or “their own.” Let me read the passage again, highlighting each of the seven occurrences:

So husbands ought also to love their own wives as their own bodies [1, 2]. He who loves his own wife loves his own self [3, 4] for no one ever hated his own flesh [5] … (Skipping down to verse 33). Nevertheless, let every one of you in particular so love his own wife even as his own self [6, 7] …

This sevenfold repetition of the word heautos is dramatic and inescapable. What? Paul, you just told us husbands not to love ourselves, not to seek our own interests, but to sacrifice ourselves for our wives. Therefore, what is this your point in all of this talk about loving our wives “as our own bodies”?

Now the thing we need to grasp is that Paul has not shifted gears from his lofty paradigm of Christ’s self-sacrificial love in vv. 25-27. It’s not as if, having appealed to our higher nature, he now realizes that this may be asking too much, and so he tries a second, more down-to-earth and realistic approach.

No! Not for a microsecond does Paul abandon the Christological paradigm! The second subsection is in perfect harmony with the first. This is made clear at the end of verse 29: “He who loves his wife loves himself; for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ also does the church, because we are members of his body.” The selfless love of Christ for his church, Christ’s sacrificial self-denying love that led him to come from heaven to earth, to become man, to take the form of a bondservant, and to die on the cross for our sins - that love was motivated by Christ’s self-interest. What Christ did, he did for us, and what he did for us, he did for himself as well, “for we are members of his body.” Christ was no altruist. He did not buy into the anemic concept of “disinterested benevolence.” Did our Savior suffer to deliver us from sin and hell, and having delivered us, go on his merry way back to the realms of glory, from henceforth preoccupied with his own affairs and unconcerned about what would become of us thereafter? No, he set his love upon us, he laid down his life for us, he did all this for us, in order to secure a Bride for himself. He delivered us that we might belong to him forever, that we might be his eternal delight and possession. As the Lord said to Israel through the prophet Isaiah: “You will be called Hephzibah … for the Lord delights in you … As a bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so your God will rejoice over you” (Isaiah 62:4-5).

Christ sets the pattern. This is what you husbands must do. Notice that Paul does not command husbands to exercise their headship, although this is what we expect after his instruction that wives must be subject to their husband. Instead, Paul commands the husbands to love their wives. And don’t immediately skip over the word love and start talking about costly sacrifice. Paul really wants us to love our wives, to enjoy them. Yes, he wants you to like your wife, to desire your wife. That’s exactly how Paul describes the love of Christ for his bride: he desires her and takes pleasure in her beauty. You see, you cannot exercise headship by going out and trying to be a head. You can only exercise headship through love. It’s as if Paul is saying, forget for a moment about being a head and all that. Just concentrate on loving your wife, caring for her and cherishing her, and pursuing her. If you do that, then the whole issue of headship and submission will fall into place.

In the conservative church we are rightly sensitive to the unbiblical trends in the culture around us. But this sensitivity has its drawbacks. I fear that it often causes us to overreact and emphasize the things that the culture is calling into question. And so we men are often told that we must not be wimps and pansies, and the wives are told that they should stop trying to wear the pants in the family. We are told that what the church needs is more strong men to lead their families, more submissive wives. And so we look back to the idyllic 1950’s before the feminist movement, and with this Norman Rockwell picture in our minds, we think that if we simply bring back the traditional American suburban family, then we will have the ideal Christian marriage.

But there is a subtle danger to this approach. The danger is not the obvious concern that Christian men may become more domineering over their wives, or that Christian wives may think that letting their brains rot is a form of godliness. The real problem is more subtle: attempting to put into practice the biblical roles of headship and submission becomes an end in itself. Husbands think, if I just make sure that I exercise firm leadership, and make sure that I’m the one wearing the pants in the family and not my wife, then everything will be hunky dory. Wives think, if I just do a better job of submitting, my husband and I will have good marriage. Paul’s profound insights are thus reduced to simply doing the opposite of what the culture is doing, rather than pursuing the high calling that is set forth before us in this wonderful tapestry of the love of Christ for his church, and of the submission of the church to Christ.

I repeat: neither headship nor submission is an end in itself. Christ’s headship is merely a means to an end. Christ exercises his authority over his church with the goal of taking away her spots and wrinkles, “that he might present the church to himself (there’s that Greek word heautos again), radiant with glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she would be holy and blameless” (Eph. 5:27).

Neither is the church’s submission to Christ is an end in itself. It is something she does for her own sanctification. The church looks to Christ the Head for all things. She receives his love, his gifts, his presence. She responds to his love in gratitude and obedience. And as a result, she grows into his likeness.

So the seemingly unattainable ideal of these commands - to love as Christ loved the church, to be subject as the church is subject to Christ - is seen to be not so unattainable if we simply introduce a bit of enlightened self-interest into the program. Here is a new way of thinking about the high calling of this text that enables you, imperfectly to be sure, to begin applying the standard of Christ’s loving headship over his church. You husbands, the last thing I want you to do is to go out of here this morning and think, “I need to work at exercising my headship.” Instead, think, “How can I take greater pleasure and delight in my wife?” A husband who is loves his wife in this way, does not need to command her to submit to him, for she will eagerly follow his leadership.

The same thing applies to you wives. Don’t think, “Okay, I’ve got to take a deep breath, and really start submitting to my husband, even when I think he’s totally out to lunch.” Instead, say to yourself, “I am submitting to my husband as to Christ. As I obey my husband and follow his leadership, I am submitting to Christ, just as the church does. Such submission is for my own good, that I might be progressively sanctified in the process. And the outcome is that I will be presented to Christ without spot or wrinkle and thus bring great joy and delight to my Lord.”

At first, Paul’s appeal to self-interest seems wrong. But if you reflect a moment, you will realize that this command, to love your wife as yourself, is merely a rewording of the command to love your neighbor as yourself. Paul, following the lead of his Master, takes that one verse tucked away in a long list of various regulations in Leviticus chapter 19, rescues it from its near oblivion, and holds it forth like a diamond in the blazing light of the mystery once hidden in God but now revealed, the mystery of the union of Christ and his church. In its original context the command to love your neighbor as yourself could very well have been interpreted in a down-to-earth selfish sense. You should treat people that way you want to be treated. But now in light of the fulfillment of God’s eternal purpose in Jesus Christ and his church, that added phrase, “as yourself,” takes on a whole new dimension of meaning. In those two words, “as yourself,” are hidden the whole mystery of Christ’s one-flesh union with his body, the eternal union and communion that we as members of Christ will enjoy forever in eternity.

Thank God that Christ’s love for us is not an altruistic, disinterested benevolence. For then we would not be compelled to love him in return. We might express our thanks, and go on our merry way, but there would be no need to pay any further attention to Christ. Christ’s love for his Bride is a passionate love that seeks an everlasting and unending union with her. And the church’s submission is no mere duty but a passionate submission. She longs for nothing more than to feel his love for her, and as she is loved by him, thus to submit to him, and satisfy the deepest longing of his heart. We are happiest when we know that we are pleasing to him.