Husbands And Wives

There was once a missionary who went to a very remote isolated tribe, way up near the arctic circle. He was the first Christian missionary to ever come to their area. In fact they had had almost no contact with the rest of the world at all. He moved in with them, worked very hard to learn their language and their customs. And he worked very hard to teach them about Christ, through his words and his actions both.

As they learned about Jesus the whole village decided that they wanted to be baptized as Christians. And, since none of them had had Christian weddings, they wanted to do that, too. They set apart a special day, with a mass baptism service in the morning, a mass Christian wedding ceremony in the afternoon, followed by a great feast and celebration. The missionary baptized the whole community in the morning, then led a mass wedding in the afternoon. Then they ate and they danced and they celebrated. And when their stomachs were bursting at the end of the day, the missionary leaned over and asked the chief what he thought about baptisms and Christian weddings now that they had experienced them both. The chief said that the baptism was great, but the people especially like the weddings. The missionary asked him, "And why is that?" And the chief said, "Well, today we all got new wives."

And the missionary suddenly badly wished he had spent more time teaching them about what a Christian marriage meant.

We live in a world that needs to hear again what a Christian marriage looks like. We need to teach about marriage. With all the divorces and painful marriages, with all the pressures and stresses that our world places on marriages, we need to be really clear on just what it is we are trying to do. Our culture has all sorts of techniques for fulfilling ourselves, asserting ourselves, feeling good about ourselves. But we're not very good at husbands and wives learning to get along with each other.

This morning, as we continue to work our way through Paul's letter to the Ephesians, we come to his longest instructions to husbands and wives. Its a passage that is difficult for us to understand today. It is a passage that can be easily misinterpreted in a very destructive way. But I believe that it also contains some important wisdom for us. It's printed out in the bulletin for you to see. I invite you to hold it open in front of you as I read it and as I talk about it.

Now hear the words of the Apostle Paul from Ephesians, chapter 5.

"Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.

Wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church, the body of which he is the Savior. Just as the church is subject to Christ, so also wives ought to be, in everything, to their husbands.

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, in order to make her holy by cleansing her with the washing of water by the word, so as to present the church to himself in splendor, without a spot or wrinkle or anything of the kind yes, so that she may be holy and without blemish. In the same way, husbands should love their wives as they do their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hates his own body, but he nourishes and tenderly cares for it, just as Christ does for the church, because we are members of his body. "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh." This is a great mystery, and I am applying it to Christ and the church. Each of you, however, should love his wife as himself, and a wife should respect her husband."

There are three basic ways that this passage can be interpreted.

One way, a traditional way, is to emphasize Paul's instructions to the wives, to insist that the woman's role is to submit to her husband, do what her husband tells her to do, think what her husband tells her to think, to be something like a servant for her husband. A first reading of the first verses really sounds like Paul has a very hierarchical relation ship in mind, with the husband always the boss.

I don't remember ever meeting anyone who was a serious student of the Bible who believed that was what Paul was saying, but it has been all too common that some men insist on making all the decisions in the house and molding their wives into subservient doormats. And they might try to use this scripture as part of their manipulation, telling their wives that God commands them to submit to whatever injustices their husband inflicts on them. But that comes more out of their own need for control and inability to love than it does from the Apostle Paul. And this is not a Christian position.