Subject or Object?
Ephesians 5:15-33
Robert
J. Elder, Pastor
20th
Sunday of Ordinary Time: August 19, 2012
One summer, I was riding through the Scottish
countryside with my cousin, Malcolm and his wife, Muriel. They have a highly
kinetic relationship, so a good deal of good-natured bantering was going back
and forth between them. Finally, Muriel had spoken maybe a little more sharply
than she might have intended, and there was a moment or two of uncomfortable silence.
Then Malcolm spoke up, “Muriel, I know you love me; you told me so five years
ago.” Without missing a beat, Muriel replied with mock seriousness, “That was then; this is now…” Referring to marriage in a sermon in our day, even in an oblique
way, is among a preacher’s greatest fears...and with good reason!
Several years ago, on Orientation Sunday in Duke University Chapel, the
text assigned to the preacher ... was ... Ephesians 5:21. The preacher’s heart
sank. “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives, be subject
to your husbands...”
“I can’t preach that,” the
preacher thought. “Only the likes of Jerry Falwell would preach such a text!
Especially is it an inappropriate text for a progressive, forward-thinking,
university church. Forget Ephesians 5. The word for our day is liberation, not submission. But the preacher decided to let the Bible have its say.
He began his Orientation sermon this way:
“[We] despise this text. No one but Jerry
Falwell (may he rest in peace) or some other reactionary would like this text.
What an ugly word! Submission. And yet we know that, taken in the context of
the day, this is a radical word. Women had no standing in that day. The writer
of Ephesians 5 expends more words giving advice to husbands, telling them about
their duties to wives, than words to wives telling them what they are to do for
their husbands...this is not a text about women’s submission in marriage, it is
a text which urges mutual submission
in a strange new social arrangement called the church.”
“And that is why we despise this text. Our
word is liberation.”[1]
While scripture’s word is submission.
There is so much modern misunderstanding about this passage of scripture
that our lectionary suggests preachers skip verses 21-33 altogether. Even less
likely is a modern day sermon on the first 9 verses of chapter 6, with their
emphasis on obedience in children and slaves. The use – and abuse – to which
these verses have been put in many places and circumstances over the centuries,
makes any preacher less than enthusiastic about preaching on them.
So, we have a whole section of scripture, much of which sounds immediately
distasteful to modern ears, with words about subjection and submissiveness,
directed at wives, children and slaves. Aren’t these verses a perfect example
of the need to use the Thomas Jefferson method of scripture analysis, cutting
out the passages which offend us in order to leave us with a Bible that is not
only more agreeable, but which more closely reflects modern sensibilities?
Well, no, I don’t think so, though you are welcome to disagree with me, and
if you do it certainly wouldn’t be the first time in my ministry! What is
needed is the recognition of a few crucial principles in reading these verses.
I
Only a community of faith which receives these words
can hope to understand them correctly.
These words were not directed at the culture in general, but to believers
whom together Paul calls the “body of Christ.” So, a real understanding
requires, first of all, a life within the community of faith. These are not
general human principles which would make sense to any thinking person whether
they were believers or not. They sound crazy to non-believers, and,
truth-be-told, to quite a few believers as well, and probably for good reason.
It makes no sense to urge non-believers to allow themselves to be subject
to others, because in the world outside the family of faith, where power is the
motivating force in most relationships, to suggest that people assume a
powerless and subjective position would be tantamount to suggesting that they
become permanent victims. There is no guarantee of mutuality there. Being
subject in a world that treats people like objects doesn’t sound like good news
but more like a prescription for servitude. No one in the world can assume that
submissiveness on their own part will be met with mutual submissiveness from
others. Quite the contrary. The world is entirely likely to victimize anyone
who makes themselves so vulnerable.
We must grant that pursuing all relationships with a sense that they are about
power is a way that leads to death, not life. But only a community of faith
organized around a different standard can understand submissiveness in a way
that leads to life and wholeness.
II
These verses may legitimately be understood
only with deep
humility, convictionally and confessionally.
They are intended to be understood so that a spouse, for instance, may ask
himself or herself from time to time, “Am I working toward loving my spouse as
Christ loved the church, sacrificially, unselfishly?” They may legitimately be
used reflectively, subjectively. They may not be used legitimately as a blunt
object to threaten the opposite person, but rather as a personal moral guide.
So when, in Paul’s letter, husbands, for instance, are advised concerning
their behavior, they are not permitted to ignore the verses directed at them
while berating their mates concerning the verses Paul wrote regarding wives.
Similarly, wives ought not read the verses directed at husbands as part of a
riot act, while overlooking the admonitions Paul wrote to them.
There are those interpreters who attempt to show that these verses reveal a
divinely ordained order for family relationships, with God at the top of the
organizational chart, then husbands directly under God, with wives appearing
under the rule of their husbands. I have seen this type of structure referred
to with various headings like “God’s Chain of Command,” as though loving relationships
among faithful people had mostly to do with organizing a power structure in
which some give commands and others obey them. The odd thing is, the chain of
command idea already existed in Paul’s time, though not as a guide for
Christian living, but as a pagan listing of household responsibilities. In
Ephesians, Paul called upon everyone’s familiarity with that idea in order to
help believers break free from it, to move human relationships beyond the banal
questions of who will be giving the orders and who is destined to take them.
The discipline encouraged in this passage is meant to be internal, chosen,
not external and enforced; it is to be subjective, not objective. No one may
legitimately use these verses to force subjection on an unwilling spouse, and
neither may one use them to require sacrificial love from their “better half.”
I recently read about a Christian speaker who was approached by a married couple
with the husband asking, “I want to know who
should be in charge of a Christian
marriage?” The speaker looked at them and said, “But that’s not a Christian
question! The Christian question is:
‘How can I best serve my spouse…?’”[2]
These are principles which must be freely chosen to have any meaning at
all. And the operative principle in all of them is announced in verse 21.
III
“Be subject to one another out
of reverence for Christ.”
It is true that every home needs a leader, but the contest for that
position should not be between one spouse and the other. The leader of every
believer’s home should be Jesus Christ: “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ,” Paul
declared. It is Christ who is the one deserving reverence in Christian homes.
All the things Paul encourages in his letter: that husbands love their
wives as fully as Christ loves the church, which is to say, as fully as one who
was willing to face death on a cross for the sake of his love; that wives
should subject themselves to their husbands, which anyone who has been around
our culture lately knows has about as much human chance of getting a hearing
these days as a shellfish in a oyster bar; all these things should be things we
hear with amazement, not with nodding heads. They are incredible, from a human
point of view. But before we can hold up our hands and say, “No way!”, before
we even hear words about submissiveness and sacrificial love, Paul
predetermines our view of his instructions with the first instruction, the one
that supersedes them all: “Be subject to
one another out of reverence for Christ.”
He explains further, “This is a great mystery, and I am applying it to
Christ and the church.” This isn’t an exhortation about how we can be if we
just work at it, but about how Christ
is. Christ was submissive even to the
point of death, Christ loves his
church – loves us – more than he loved his own life. It is only because we know
that’s how Christ is that we can
begin to see the mystery that Paul mentions as it applies to our own
commitments – how we can be. We begin to see that the commitments we
make to one another – not just as husbands and wives, but as lovers, as friends,
as families in the fellowship of the church – these commitments are going to be
hopelessly control driven unless we submit them to the one who was totally
submissive in giving himself away for us all.
Christ will not fail to honor those who reverence his submission for our
sakes. “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.” For Christ has
made himself subject for our sakes. May God bless us richly in him, and may
each of us strive in every way to be a blessing for each other.
