12 Pentecost 06 B Proper 16

“Wives be subject to your husbands,” so says St. Paul in our second lesson for today from Ephesians 5.

There is no Bible verse that brings out the anger and horror of some women like this verse. It spawns jokes like the man who said, “Last night my wife and I had a terrible argument. Afterwards, she came crawling to me on her hands and knees. ‘Get out from under that bed, you coward,’ she screamed.”

There is no verse that has been used more to try to control women. There is no verse that has been more misunderstood than this one. A woman, who had been abused by her husband for years, took her husband to a new pastor, in the hope that the pastor could help her. They went into counseling, and the pastor told her to submit to her husband, even to his beatings.

There’s a lot wrong with that picture, and there’s a lot wrong with the family in today’s culture. Statistics of wife abuse: one out of every three women who seeks emergency medical treatment at a doctor's office or hospital is the victim of domestic violence.

Among Christians, for every 60 married women, 10 are verbally abused, and 2 or 3 are physically abused. Reverend Joy Bussert, director of the Battered Women Project for the Minnesota Council of Churches: "Batterers are often pillars of our churches, men who teach Sunday school and serve on the church council."

We must admit that some men have used this Bible verse to abuse and terrorize women. This should not be. It is also true that there are abused husbands in the Christian community.

And yet, what are we to do with this verse? Are we to be like the guy who was seen ripping pages out of his Bible? When asked why he said, “I’m just getting rid of the parts I don’t like.”

If we just toss it out as the male-dominated, patriarchal, sexist ramblings of a woman hater, then we will fail to gain a measure of insight into our relationship with our Lord and with each other.

Before we examine this verse, we must look at the historical context in which Paul was writing. When Christ came he gave a whole new meaning the marriage relationship. St. Paul said, “In Christ there is neither male nor female.” He recognizes that in Christ we are positionally equal before God, and as Christians the marriage relationship has been transformed. The wife now has the same claims on her husband as the husband has on her. The husband and wife are equally interdependent on one another.

But Paul seems to be aware of another responsibility besides that of explaining to Christians the radical change which Christ brings to human relationships, including marriage.

As a wise pastor, he had to try to see to it that the new freedom and status of the Christian woman within her own home and marriage relationship was not to be practiced so as to create dangerous misunderstandings and resentments among Pagan and Jewish neighbors, especially if this would prevent them from hearing the Gospel and responding to it.

In the ancient world, total obedience to the husband was expected of the wife. The Jewish man’s morning prayer included a prayer “thank God that he has not made me a gentile, a slave or a woman.” Many Jews viewed the law as saying that a woman was not a person, but a thing. She had no legal rights whatsoever; she was absolutely her husband’s possession to do with as he willed. Greek society was not any better, and in fact, in Rome, it was worse.

In theory the Jews had the highest ideal of marriage. The Rabbis had their sayings, “Every Jew must surrender his life rather than commit idolatry, murder or adultery.” “The very altar sheds tears when a man divorces the wife of his youth.” But the fact was that by Paul’s day, divorce had become tragically easy.

The law of divorce is summarized in Deut. 24:1. “When a man takes a wife and marries her, if then she finds no favor in his eyes because he has found some indecency in her, he writes her a bill of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her out of his house.” Obviously everything turns on the interpretation of “some indecency.” The stricter Rabbis, headed by the famous Sammai, held that the phrase meant adultery and adultery alone, and declared that even if a wife was as mischievous as Jezebel a husband might not divorce her except for adultery. The more liberal Rabbis, headed by the equally famous Hillel, interpreted the phrase in the widest possible way. They said that it meant a man might divorce his wife if she spoiled his dinner by putting too much salt in it, if she walked around in public with her head uncovered, if she talked with men in the streets, etc. A certain Rabbi Akiba interpreted the phrase to mean that a husband might divorce his wife if he found a woman whom he considered more attractive. It is easy to see which school of thought would predominate.

Two facts in Jewish law made the matter worse. First, the wife had no rights of divorce at all unless her husband became a leper, or an apostate, or engaged in a disgusting trade. Second, the process of divorce was disastrously easy for men.

Because of this the very institution of marriage was being threatened because young girls were refusing to marry because their position was so uncertain.

The situation was worse in the Greek world. Prostitution was an essential part of Greek life. Demosthenes had laid it down as the accepted rule of life: “We have courtesans for the sake of pleasure; we have concubines for the sake of daily cohabitation; we have wives for the purpose of having children legitimately and of having a faithful guardian for all our household affairs.” Divorce was so easy that the woman had no security at all.

In Rome, the matter was worse. It is against this background that Paul writes. When he wrote he was not stating the view that every man held. He was calling men and women to a new purity and a new fellowship in the married life. It is impossible to exaggerate the cleansing effect that Christianity had on the home life in the ancient world, and the benefits it brought to women.

Paul’s overarching goal was to win his fellow Jews and the Gentiles to whom he was called to minister, to Christ. If we read this verse in this light we see that Paul was ready to endure any deprivation rather than put an obstacle in the way of the Gospel of Christ. For this reason, if for no other, he asked wives not to provoke antagonism to the Gospel by insubordination to their husbands. In a similar way, Paul asked the Corinthian women to keep their heads veiled so they would not be accused of being women of loose moral character by their Jewish and Pagan neighbors, and thus those same neighbors would not be open to listening to the Gospel. The women were not to do these things necessarily because they had to in Christ, but rather so that they could reach out to their non-Christian friends, neighbors, and relatives.

One of the problems people have reading Scripture is that they read it out of context. We can be guilty of doing that here if we neglect to read the verse right before “Wives be subject to your husbands.”

As we read the verse right before that, we read these words, “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.” Now what does it mean to be subject to someone?

In order for us to gain a proper understanding of what it means to be subject (or in submission) to someone we must look at other passages of Scripture. In Philippians 2 Paul speaks of Jesus, “who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking on the very nature of a servant.” In Matthew 20 we are told, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must become your servant.”

So we see that the way of Christian submission, the way one is subject to another is the way of servanthood. It is the opposite of the spirit of self-assertion, of jealous insistence on one’s rights. It is willingly placing another above ourselves.

First, we are to submit or subject ourselves to one another because we reverence Christ. To reiterate, he says, Wives, be subject to your husbands. Too many men misread this passage to say that a man has a right to subject his wife. It doesn’t say that. The whole passage implies that if a man loves his wife in a godly, selfless, servant-like way, she will want to submit to his spiritual authority and leadership. It is a willing submission.

Retired Pro Football player Mike Singletary writes in the Men’s devotional Bible, “I know that the very word authority jars the feminist and she asks, ‘why should any man be in authority over me?’ If a man exercised his authority in the way it is outlined in the Bible, a woman would not resent it. She would find herself served. She would find her needs met. She would have her say, be able to exercise her gifts, not to be pushed back and ignored and treated like a second-class citizen. God’s design for marriage is for husbands to love their wives as Christ loved the Church and for wives to respect their husbands. Christ love the Church enough to die for it, and that kind of love is worthy of respect.”

When this passage says that the husband is the head of the wife, the Greek language means the husband is the source of the wife just as Christ is the source of the Church. This harkens back to the order of creation in which Eve was taken from Adam. This does not imply an authoritarian dictator, but rather a husband who is submitted to the Lord and is exercising his role as the spiritual leader of the household.

Husbands are to love their wives, St. Paul says. Martin Buxbaum tells of two women overheard discussing marriage at a party. One of the women said, “My husband and I have managed to be happy together for 20 years. I guess this is because we’re both in love with the same man.” Husbands are to love their wives more than they love themselves.

There is a story of a school boy who did a paper on Benjamin Franklin. He did his research and then he squirmed into his chair, chewed his pencil, took out a piece of paper and wrote at the top of it: “Benjamin Franklin,” and produced the following masterpiece: “Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston, but he soon got tired of that and moved to Philadelphia. When he got back to Philadelphia he was so hungry, so he bought a loaf of bread. He put the bread under his arm. He walked up the street, he passed a woman. The woman smiled at him. He married the woman and discovered electricity.” Husbands, how is the electricity in your marriage? Maybe it is time to get recharged. We will be offering a marriage course sometime in the future, put out by the Alpha people. Make it a priority in your marriage.

In order for us to function as God has designed us we must remember to love each other as Christ loves us. That love can be summarized in four ways:

Love must be sacrificial. This is a love that is willing to make any sacrifice for the good of the other. It does not seek its own way. It is patient. It is kind. It is never jealous or envious, boastful or proud.

Second, this servant type of love is purifying. This type of love does not drag one another down. It does not make them harsh or forces them to be deceitful or weakens their moral fiber. This type of love motivates them to want to be more Christlike. It is not harping on them or criticizing them or blaming them for everything. This type of love is not easily angered, keeps no record of wrongs, does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.

Third, submissive love or love in which one is subject to another, is a caring love. The man must love his wife as he loves his own body. Real love does not extract service, nor to ensure that its own physical comfort is attended to, it cherishes the one it loves. There is something very wrong when a man regards his wife, consciously or unconsciously, as simply the one who cooks his meals, washes his clothes, cleans his house and trains his children. Love always protects, always trusts, always hopes.

The final type of love about which we are speaking is an unbreakable love. For the sake of this love a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife. They become one flesh. This type of love always perseveres. It hangs in there for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health.

Marriage does not guarantee happiness. Happiness in marriage can only be obtained to the degree that these four types of love are practiced by both parties.

All of these types of submissive love are dependant upon one thing. That is the husband or the wife’s relationship with Jesus. This also speaks to the single person. Rather than seeking happiness in marriage, seek happiness in Jesus. As you do that it may be that Jesus wants you to share that happiness in the context of marriage, but you can be tremendously happy as a single person as long as you are in relationship with Jesus. In fact, you can forge a much deeper relationship with Jesus than can the married. You can practice the type of love I have been talking about in your relationships with other. You will benefit from it.

Rather than getting hung up on this idea of submission, if we practiced loving each other as Christ loves us, and as we seek the greater good of the other, then being subject to one another will take care of itself.

“Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.”