Wife Week! (Ephesians 5:15-33) Series

Today, we have the privilege of starting to tackle one of the more heated and debated passages and topics in the Bible. It's about how husbands and wives should relate to each other.

With respect to this topic, and this passage, there are three main questions that are debated among scholars. I'll just open with these three questions. I'm not going to answer them right away. I just want to put them at the forefront, for now:

(1) What does it mean, that a husband is "head" of his wife?

(2) What does it mean to submit, or "put yourself under" someone else?

(3) Are husbands called to submit to their wives, or is submission only something a wife does?

What husbands and wives both tend to find, I think, is that they really like parts of what Paul has to say about how marriage should work. And other parts, they find incredibly challenging. So I expect that's how today's sermon, and next week's, will likely work for all of us. At any given point, half the room will want to erupt with hallelujahs, and half will find themselves wrestling deeply with the cost of being a faithful spouse. This week, we'll talk a little about husbands, but the focus will be on wives. Next week, the focus will be on husbands. And if you take a quick peek at the translation handout, you'll see why that's the case. Paul starts, in Ephesians 5:22-24, by talking about wives. Then, after spending three verses talking about them, Paul then turns to the husbands, and spends 8 verses talking to them.

Now, the other really complicating thing in all of this, is that our English Bibles (without exception) do us no favors in how they lay out these verses. English Bibles tend to be set up so that every verse can be read by itself, and make sense by itself. That makes it easier to memorize verses, and it makes it easier for "Our Daily Bread" type devotionals. So what translators usually do, to help make that possible, is break up complex sentences into something that's more bite-sized and manageable. Even really formal translations like the KJV kind of make a mess of the passage here, by the way they break up Paul's argument. They do this in two ways. First, they separate out what Paul says about the Holy Spirit in verse 18, from what he says about marriage. Second, they separate out Paul's command that we submit to each other, from the command to wives to submit to their husbands. If you take my translation home, and read verses 18-22, and then compare it to basically any other translation, you'll see it comes out wildly different. And I know I'm just one random dude on this, and who am I to tell you that your Bibles don't do a great job translating here? But almost every commentator makes a big deal about this as well, and I can steer you toward a really helpful teaching by Tim Mackie, who unpacks this nicely as well (and Clinton Arnold really shines here, for those who have his commentary).

So basically, Paul's argument goes like this, starting at the beginning of chapter 5:

We live in wicked days, and we only have so much time on earth. So use your time well. Use it wisely. Live as a people filled with the Holy Spirit, who empowers you to live faithfully toward God and people.

Ephesians 5:18:

(18) and don't be drunk with wine, in which there is wastefulness,

but be filled with the Spirit,

(19) speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and Spiritual songs,

singing and praising in your hearts to the Lord,

(20) giving thanks always for all things in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to our God and Father,

(21) putting yourself under one another out of fear/reverence of Christ,

(22) wives to their own husbands as to the Lord,

In verse 21, Paul says that if we are filled with the Holy Spirit, the result of that will be that "we submit to one another, wives to their own husbands as to the Lord."

In the first century Roman empire, there were crystal clear power structures. You have the government, with a Caesar at the top, and layers of bureaucracy underneath. Within family relationships, there were also clear power structures. Masters were over slaves. Parents were over children. Husbands were over wives. Everyone in society was expected to know their role, and work within that.

At the same time, those relationships were more complicated than we have today, because the Roman household wasn't just a nuclear family. So take the typical Roman free woman, for example. She would be expected to submit to her husband, if she had one. But she could also be a master, who had authority over male and female slaves. And she, along with her husband, had authority over their children. A male slave would be under the authority of his masters. But there were sometimes levels of slave, and one slave might be master over another. So it's not like all men were over all women, or that all women submit to all men. Roman households were a complicated thing (*Cynthia Westfall).