Monday Thoughts: Ephesians and Marriage

I was involved in a somewhat private wedding recently in which Ephesians 5:21-33 was chosen as one of the Scripture texts to read. I was looking at this text somewhat more closely than usual. It is one thing to discuss this text in class, in theory. We can debate what it meant for a wife to submit to her husband, what it might mean for a husband to be the head of a wife.

We can discuss the difference between how these words "read" in the first century versus how they read today. What is the difference between "that time" and "this time"? We can follow IBS methods and survey Ephesians, do a detailed observation on some of these verses, do our word studies and interpretive studies using the best of commentaries (Asbury speak). We can measure the width of the "river" between their town and our town and cross the "principlizing bridge" (Duvall and Hays textbook Dora the Explorer speak).

But a wedding is real. It's real life. More importantly, it's the lives of two real people. I've been to a wedding where the wife was soundly subjugated to her husband on the pretense of a superficial reading of this text. He was the hero, the superman. She was the poor little mindless thing that should obey the superior intellect, no doubt in between knitting.

My heart sunk, distressed that a teaching that liberated marriages 2000 years ago would be used to enslave them today, angered at the perversion of God's word by way of a shallow reading of the Bible's words.

It was not the time for debate. I prayerfully rendered a dynamic translation that I thought would come closer to what God might want couples to hear from these words today.

"As you surrender to one another in the fear of Christ, let the wives do so to their husbands as to the Lord. For the husband provides for the wife as Christ provides for the church—he is the Savior of the body...

"Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and handed himself over for it so that ... it might be holy and blameless. So also ought husbands to show love to their wives as their own bodies. The husband who loves his wife loves himself.

"Christ nourishes and cherishes the church because we are members of his body. For this reason a man will leave father and mother and be joined to his wife. And the two will be one flesh.

"So let each love his own wife as himself, and let the wife respect her husband."

One of the main decisions I made was with the statement, "the husband is the head of the wife." Of course it did have to do in part with authority in the ancient context. However, the head also had to do with "feeding" the body and nourishment, as Colossians 2:19 indicates. Notice that this passage speaks of Christ "nourishing" and "cherishing" the church.

So I asked myself questions like this: Does "head" give the most accurate connotations of this passage today, especially given how politicized the issue is. No, I decided, it immediately gives the impression that this passage is about the domination of the husband, and that is not the main connotation of what Paul was saying. It was the secondary feature of the original meaning.

Second, is this the most accurate application of this Scripture to today? Not a time for debate but a time to take responsibility as the designated mediator of God's word.

"The husband provides" I thought was a more accurate translation, especially since the role of Christ as "rescuer"/"savior" of the body is evoked.

Of course in the age of the Spirit, sometimes God provides through the wife as well. :-)