Ephesians 5:15-27

You have no idea how tempting it is, when you have decided to preach on the book of Ephesians, and you get to chapter 5, to choose the first half the chapter instead of the second. You can’t preach on everything, after all, and the first half contains what is probably the key verse: “live as children of light, for the fruit of light is found in all that is good and right and true”. You couldn’t blame me for speaking about that.

But last week we explored how we respond to those within the faith who we disagree with; those who we can see are genuinely seeking to follow Jesus, but come to conclusions we think are simply wrong, how we might receive their disagreement as a gift from God to us, to the body of Christ.

And he we have it. Paul, who was clearly seeking to follow Jesus, and the conclusions that that led him to.

About wives and husbands.

Paul has been writing about how the people of Jesus should live in the world. How could the Church show the powers of the world, the wisdom of God in its rich variety; how they could demonstrate the proclamation that there is another way.

The second half of chapter four and the first half of chapter five has laid out the differences – one way characterised by licentiousness, greed, gossip, argumentativeness, bitterness, corruption, theft – and the other, of compassion, mutual support, spirituality, kindness, forgiveness, praise, unity.

And now he brings his theoretical discussion home. Literally, home. Into the life of the Christian household. Husband and wife, and then in chapter six, parents and children, slaves and masters.

And what does he do? What does he tell people? Well, in truth I think his message is summed up in verse 21: “be subject to one another out of reverence to Christ”.

And then he takes these three relationships: husband-wife, parent-child, master-slave, and in each case he basically follows the same pattern.

First, he turns to the partner in the relationship who has less, or even no, power, according to the culture of the day: the wife, the child, the slave, and of them he demands…. absolutely nothing more than they are already required by law, and the even more powerful force of custom, to give.

When Paul writes “wives be subject to your husbands” he is not laying any burden on them that they were not already carrying. They were already required to be subject, in everything, to their husbands.

Likewise, he tells children, who were already bound to honour their parents, to do what they already had to.

And of slaves, who the law required to obey their masters, again, he asks just that, and nothing more.

Paul is not establishing an inequality in these relationships. He is recognising, and working within, the asymmetric power relationships that already existed. And in that context he offers to the believer a way of living in that relationship which is consistent with their faith. He gives a way for the powerless partner to fulfil what is culturally demanded of them, and do so as an act of obedience to God. “…as to the Lord… in the Lord …as you obey Christ”.

Now remember that in many, many cases, the first member of a household to come to faith in Jesus was one of the least powerful – the faith grew most quickly amongst slaves and women in particular, attracted by the telling of Jesus’ treatment of the outsider, the disempowered. And it’s not hard to imagine the difficulties faced by the faithful woman whose husband did not believe, or the faithful slave with a pagan master. What were they to do, when the demands of those placed over them conflicted with their faith?

What Paul does here is to set people free from a terrible dilemma. Your husband demands you accompany him to the pagan temple? You don’t have to choose between that authority and obedience to Christ, with the terrible personal consequences that might follow from disobedience: you can go, and you can even do as an act of faith in Jesus. Perhaps your witness will even win them over.

In a culture in which the inequality of power in the family is deeply entrenched, Paul offers wives a way to live faithfully both as wives and as Christians. He is not laying a burden upon them. He is taking away a burden they may have felt faith in Jesus placed upon them; giving them permission to do what they must.

And then, in each case Paul turns to the powerful partner. And here he radically departs from the social norms and laws of the day. For while there was nothing new in telling wives to obey, commanding husbands not just to love their wives, but to love them as they love themselves, to give themselves up for their wives as Christ did for the Church – that was something never demanded of the partner used to having things all their own way.

And this is why I say that the heart of Paul’s argument lay in verse 21: be subject to one another. The underlying principle that Paul is working from is one of mutuality. For the wife, mutual submission means no more than was already demanded of her; but for the husband, it asked the laying down of his life.

Paul’s instructions to the Christian household are simply his outworking, in a particular culture, in a particular time and place, of this law: be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ. For, as he ends this section, in chapter 6 verse 9, you have the same master in heaven, and with God there is no partiality.

Now I’m not claiming here that Paul would have fitted right in with twenty-first century feminism and egalitarianism. I’m sure that he considered the submission of wife to husband to be absolutely the right and natural order of things. He was, after all, a first century Jew. And the most significant example to the contrary, of the elevation of women, was in the cult of Artemis, a pagan worship which he had come into very pointed conflict with.

And (sadly), social justice and equality wasn’t at the heart of Paul’s understanding of the faith, either – far less so than, for instance, is evident in the life and teaching of Jesus! – he was passionate, above all, for the good news of Jesus to be spread, and for the Church of Jesus to remain united. he is not inclined to overturn the social order, for to do so would be an impediment to both of those great passions.

A different writer might have chosen to emphasise that the gospel overturns these cultural patterns of inequality; indeed Paul himself elsewhere wrote that in Christ there is neither male nor female, who insisted that God shows no partiality, and begged a slave owner to set his returned runaway free.

We live in an age that insists that all individuals have equal rights and dignity. We, I suspect, have seen this more clearly than Paul: that entrenched inequality is inconsistent with the reality that each is created in the image of God. Of course, we still recognise that there are relationships which are asymmetrical – there is an inequality of power between parent and child, teacher and student, citizen and government, employer and employee – but we see such inequalities as things to be reduced where possible, and where necessary, balanced with safeguards.

And we have also, I suspect, seen more clearly that Paul the way that cultural relationship norms can be weaponised to cause great harm; only really now is the extent to which that is true in abusive relationships being brought to light.

Paul, living in a different context, saw differently to us. And so he came to conclusions on family relationships that we would rightly reject.

But we can still receive his insights, even his differences, as a gift. For Paul saw other things more clearly than us: that the call of love challenges our individualism, and challenges us to be subject to one another.

Our clarity of vision in rejecting inequality is closely tied to our emphasis on the autonomous individual, our elevation of self-sufficiency. And that makes it harder for us to see Paul’s touchstone of mutual submission: that there is no relationship in which the inequality of power is not balanced, if only by a matching inequality of responsibility.

Ephesians 5 does not ask us to overturn inequality – there are other texts which do invite us to challenge these authorities when the situation demands – but that is a whole different sermon.

The gift and challenge Paul’s perspective offers us is the question: how, in all our relationships, can we live in mutual submission? When others hold power over us, how do we live with that graciously.

And in those cases where we hold the power, how do we submit ourselves to those over whom we have authority?

Where there must be submission, Paul challenges us, let it be like our submission to Christ.

But much more: where there must be authority, let it be exercised like the authority of Christ.

And where there can be equality, that is surely the most complete form of mutual submission that can possibly be achieved.

Paul was not a twenty first century feminist. He was not an egalitarian. But even those writings most influenced by his patriarchal worldview can be a gift to our understanding of God, and our fight for equality.

Amen.