The Twelfth Sunday after Pentecos
August 27, 2006
Proper 16B

Wives be subject to your husbands…

This reading from the Letter to the Ephesians is one of those “hard” pieces of scripture. It’s a reading that always evokes a reaction. Of course, the reaction varies according to the audience: In some settings it might be nods of agreement and looks of approval, while in others it may be met with nervous giggles or outright laughter, looks of chagrin or even looks of defiance or disgust, but there is always a reaction. It’s also a piece of scripture that has, I fear, been used (or better, misused) not to uplift its hearers, but rather to allow or even encourage a sense of superiority and even arrogance on the part of one group while forcing subservience on the part of another.

No, this reading from Ephesians is not one of my favorite parts of the bible, and it’s one I’d just as soon skip, given the option. (In fact there was some speculation at a staff lunch this week about whether I would skip it!) But we can’t really do that, we can’t just leave out the parts of scripture that make us uncomfortable, not and protect the integrity of the bible, and our integrity as readers, so perhaps it is time to tackle this reading head on, to figure out both why this passage affects us the way it does, and then what meaning we can take away from it.

So, first things first: Why does this passage make us squirm? One factor, I think, is that in our democratic 21st century sensibilities, we aren’t comfortable with the notion of being “subject to”—submission to any kind of authority makes us squeamish—submission seems to take the notion of obedience or compliance one step farther. Unlike our British compatriots in the church, we aren’t subjects of a monarch, and we tend to think of our relationships in more mutual terms. So what does it mean to us to be “subject to one another out of reverence to Christ”? The best substitute I can come up with is to “be in relationship with” one another. I will admit that this is not a perfect alternative, but the notion of being in relationship connotes for us in the modern world I think, the kind of mutual love and respect that the author of this letter is calling for.

For many, if not most of us, however, our discomfort goes deeper than just the notion of submission, and it is evoked most by the phrase I began with. Wives, be subject to your husbands. That’s the phrase you always hear emphasized from this section of the letter to the Ephesians. That’s the phrase that some editions of the bible choose as a chapter heading. And for many of us, that’s the phrase that raises our hackles because it brings to mind relationships that are not reciprocal but are hierarchical, it brings to mind relationships marked not by equality and mutual respect but rather by the superiority of one member over the other.

Wives be subject to your husbands.

Here’s something interesting about that phrase. When you go back to the Greek, the language of the earliest text, what you find is that there is no verb in this phrase. An accurate translation of this verse is this: “Wives to your husbands as to the Lord.” Recall that in the original Greek text no punctuation was used; punctuation has been added by later editors of the text. So it’s likely that this phrase is an extension of the phrase that precedes it, “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.” So we might read the whole thing this way: “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ, wives to your husbands as to the Lord. It’s a small change, but at least it takes some of the emphasis off the “wives be subject” part.

What does it mean, then, to be subject to, to be in relationship with one another “out of reverence for Christ, wives to your husbands as to the Lord”? If we go on to read the injunction for men, we can get a fuller picture.

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.

Now we have a view of what MUTUAL submission, mutual relationship might look like: wives are to love their husbands as they love Christ, and husbands are to love their wives as Christ loves the Church. The letter to the Ephesians gives us some idea about what this kind of love might mean, but if we turn to Philippians 2 we get an even fuller description: Christ emptied himself taking the form of a slave to all, humbled himself and became obedient even to the point of death on the cross. Christ’s love for the church, for those who comprise the church, has nothing to do with domination, nothing to do with superiority but everything to do with humility, with taking on the manner of a slave in order to care for others. If anything, this injunction for the men is stronger than the one for the women; if anything, men are asked to exercise more humility in relationship than women, although we rarely read it that way.

Many years ago a priest friend told me that he thought the injunction for the men to love their wives was the really radical part of this message because while women had always been expected to serve their husbands, the reverse was not true: Marriages were business propositions, and wives were property. The call to love one’s wife as Christ loved the church was therefore revolutionary just by virtue of the fact the husbands weren’t expected to love their wives at all. I think this is true, but I think that we can take it even farther than that. In the OT, in Torah, there are many injunctions that apply to men but not to women, and Paul himself spends far more time chiding recalcitrant men than he does reproaching women. As one commentator put it rather flipply, it’s not that God loves men less; it’s that men require more supervision.(1) Women knew (and know) all too well about submission, about compliance, about humility because these are the values that cultures then and now have espoused for women. Men, on the other hand, were and are encultured to be dominant, to be in charge; they have much more cultural baggage to overcome in order to emulate Christ’s love, Christ’s humility. Is it any wonder that the women among Jesus’ followers accepted his message more readily, accepted his call more easily? Women had far less to give up than did men in accepting Jesus’ call, because they had no claim on patriarchal authority in the first place.

And in fact, the claim on patriarchal authority was not equal for all men. Patriarchy isn’t about the rule of all men over all women; rather it’s about the domination of a few men over everyone else (2), over those who are perceived to be weaker, men and women alike. And just as women heard Jesus’ call more easily, so too did the men who were excluded from the patriarchy—the weak, the sick, the blind, the misfits. They too heard Jesus’ message more clearly, they too saw the Good News in Jesus’ call to care for the poor, to let go of earthly treasures in order to embrace the heavenly ones, because they had less to loose.

No matter how this passage from Ephesians has been heard, no matter how it has been interpreted and used, it is not really about domination and submission. It’s not about giving one segment of society permission to subjugate another. No, this passage from Ephesians is about those with more status, with more authority being called to let go of that in the name of love. It’s about loving one another as Christ loved us. It is about being in mutual relationship—mutual submission, mutual obedience, mutual respect. May we embrace that message and go forth into the world, loving one another as Christ loves us.

Thanks be to God!

1 Sarah Dylan Breuer www.sarahlaughed.net/lectionary 8/26/2006
2 Scott Bartchy, cited by Dylan Breuer, ibid.