Loving and generous God, guide us to seek your Truth: come whence it may, cost what it will, lead where it might. Amen.
As you’ll recall from the past several Sundays, we are in the midst of a seven week run of readings from the New Testament epistle of Ephesians. The book is six chapters long, and so to fit it into seven nuggets that are short enough for the context of Sunday worship, the lectionary has to leave out parts of the letter.
As edifying as it might be to preach on the end of what we heard read this morning – which is where we get our Offertory sentence “Walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself for us, an offering and sacrifice to God” from, that’s just not what the Holy Spirit has given me to preach on this week. Instead, let’s consider part of what the lectionary leaves out. If you want to follow along, it is printed in your bulletin in the announcements section.
“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. ‘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. Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as you obey Christ; not only while being watched, and in order to please them, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart. Render service with enthusiasm, as to the Lord and not to men and women, knowing that whatever good we do, we will receive the same again from the Lord, whether we are slaves or free. And, masters, do the same to them. Stop threatening them, for you know that both of you have the same Master in heaven, and with him there is no partiality.”
Now, maybe you’re thinking, “Robert, let the lectionary let you off that hook, why are you walking into that trap?” And that’s a reasonable question – why would I want to preach about wives being submissive to their husbands and slaves to their masters? The short answer is “because it’s there.” But not only is this a challenging passage, those words are the most infamous in the entire book. We’ve all heard these words used to argue for sexist and racist positions.
The purpose of the lectionary is to help us grow in our faith and worship of Jesus Christ. You aren’t done any favors if, in your entire life, you never have a wrestle with a passage like “Wives be subject to your husbands.” And that’s what we’re going to do today, we’re going to wrestle. The other reason why I’m choosing to preach on this passage today is that, as soon as the liturgy is over, I’m on vacation and am heading to the beach in the morning; the getaway car is ready and waiting.
So what do we do with a passage like this? And this isn’t the only tough passage in Scripture – this difficulty comes up in passages with violence, genocide, child sacrifice, sexual assault, condemnation of those with wealth, as well as the issues of patriarchy and slavery that we have before us this morning. One approach is to simply ignore these difficult passages. And this has been done often. In a sense, it’s what the lectionary does for us. It removes these “texts of terror,” as they are sometimes called, from our cycle of readings. You’ve perhaps heard of the Jefferson Bible – where Thomas Jefferson went through the Bible with a pair of scissors and cut out the parts that he didn’t like. But in the back of my mind I have that great prayer from our Prayer Book: “Blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant that we may hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that, by patience and comfort of your holy Word, we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which you have given us in our Savior Jesus Christ.” No, Scripture is not disposable. We don’t get to dismiss the parts that we don’t like. God deserves better than to have parts of God’s holy word tossed aside because we don’t like them.
Another approach to dealing with these sorts of passages really bothers me – I’ll call it “Paul-bashing.” It’s not uncommon to hear people describe Paul as a chauvinistic, out of touch, and misguided person. I remember in seminary, a classmate said “I follow Jesus, not Paul.” I’ll put it strongly because it’s such an egregious error – such an approach is lazy and ignorant. If your reading of Paul leads you to insult or dismiss him, then you haven’t understood what you’ve read. And the same is true for the many anti-Semitic arguments that you can find used to dismiss passages from the Old Testament, which often comes down to the suggestion that the Jewish people didn’t properly understand God. That is not only insulting and foolish, it’s wrong. The way to deal with difficult passages of Scripture is not to say that St. Paul or the Jews didn’t know what they were talking about; they deserve better than that.
Still another approach is to rationalize and contextualize the text so that the problem goes away. This passage from Ephesians has a long history of not being thrown away, but rather explained away. Some do this by saying that the argument has a chiastic structure, which means the argument is shaped like the letter X – the logic moves inwards towards a point and then moves outward from that same point. People who promote this point claim that it’s really a passage about glorifying God, and the example just happens to include husbands and wives. The point isn’t about marital relations, but rather the Church’s relationship to Christ.
Other people will point out that in the Greek, the part about wives actually says “wives to your own husbands as to the Lord.” The word “submit” actually isn’t there. Rather, the entire section starts with a participle “In reverence to Christ, being subject to one another…” This approach says that all are to submit to Christ, and by extension to the entire Body of Christ. So, they say, it’s more about mutual submission than a one-sided relationship. It’s about being subject to Christ which is expressed in terms of a human relationship, but the point isn’t to teach husbands and wives how to act, but is about teaching Christians how to relate to Christ.
We might also find context given about marriage and slavery in the Greco-Roman world. To put it succinctly, the way we understand the institution of marriage is not at all analogous to the idea of marriage in first-century Israel. It’s not apples and oranges, it’s more like apples and umbrellas. The same is true for slavery. Slavery in that culture was as widespread and accepted as electricity is today. When we think of slavery, we think of Africans who were kidnapped from home and brutally forced to work in the fields of the American south, being treated with no sense of dignity or humanity. But that understanding of slavery simply isn’t the understanding that the Ephesians would have had. And given those different contexts, some argue that this passage is actually pushing the boundaries of the society and is progressive because it insists that husbands care for their wives and that masters treat their slaves well.
One final way of contextualizing this passage is to note that many scholars very much doubt that St. Paul actually wrote this letter. Based on literary evidence, this letter is not widely considered to be a genuine Pauline letter. And when you compare Paul’s writings in his authenticated letters, his approach to slavery is even more radical, as he seems to suggest that slavery has no place in the Christian household. So some will argue that as Christianity was incorporated into Roman culture, some of its messages were domesticated. For example, in the book of Philemon, Paul writes “I hope that you will welcome him back into your house, no longer as a slave but as more than a slave, as a beloved brother.” But as Christianity was being adopted by those in power and who were reluctant to give up their power, the radical message of “slavery has no place” was diminished into “be nice to your slaves.”
Now, I don’t want to outright dismiss these moves to explore the context of Scripture. Putting Scripture into its historical and socio-political place is important in our understanding of Scripture. The problem is when our doing so neuters the text – robbing it of its ability to bear any fruit in our lives. If God deserves better than to have passages of Scripture tossed aside, then we deserve better than to have parts of Scripture robbed of their transformative power.
So we can’t ignore these passages, we can’t discredit their authors, and we can’t explain them away. The only thing left to do is to wrestle with them. And here, I’m thinking of a story from Genesis where Jacob has a dream in which he wrestles with an angel, and it is only ibywrestling with the messenger of God’s truth does Jacob receive a blessing. And though Jacob is blessed for his struggling, he also walks away with a limp. That is a metaphor for how we might deal with challenging passages of Scripture.
The reason why we chaff at this passage is the idea of submission. We have been lead to believe that being submissive is a sign of weakness. We live in a culture which values virtues such as independence, autonomy, self-sufficiency, and rugged individualism. Our religious landscape is Protestant, which has the word “protest” at its core. And the same is true of our nation – we only exist because we refused to submit ourselves to the Crown. Whether it is to a Pope, a King, a President, or to each other, challenging authority is a part of who we are and the idea of submission clashes with our religious, social, and national identities.
And even when it comes to Christ, if we’re honest about it, we don’t want to be submissive. We want to decide what our priorities are, how we make decisions, how we spend our money, how we raise our children, what we do with our spare time, how we treat others. In short, we say “It’s my life, I’ll live it the way I want to.” We might pretend that it is our sensibilities around gender-equality and emancipation for all people that make us uncomfortable with this passage, but the crux of the matter really is about our uneasy relationship with submitting ourselves to someone else, even if that person is God.
Throughout Ephesians, the discourse has been focusing on the unity and transformation that comes from being in Christ. Being “in Christ” is about defining our story as being wrapped up in the story of God’s creating, saving, and sanctifying love instead of seeing our lives as our individual stories. And if we can wrestle with the idea of submitting ourselves to the gracious love of God that has been given to us, we will indeed find the blessings of what it means to be caught up in the transformative and saving love of God in Christ.
Can we, with sincerity, pray “not my will, but thy will be done”? Can we create space in our busy lives to listen to the Holy Spirit through prayer, meditation, and Scripture reading? Can we submit our household budget to Christ by giving generously to the Church and those in need? Can we give ourselves to each other in the love of Christ, worrying more about their well-being than our own? This is hard work, I know. Wrestling with this may well give us a pronounced limp, but we will come away with the blessing of being a part of the New Creation in Christ. After wrestling with a tough passage, it’s okay to disagree with certain interpretations, even the most common ones. I would say that this passage should not be used for the subjugation of women or in defense of slavery, rather it’s a text about our total transformation in Christ, which includes even household relationships.
And it’s okay if, even after you wrestle with this passage, you still don’t like the sentence “Wives be submissive to your husbands” or “Slaves, obey your masters.” That’s not how I’d choose to put it, but that doesn’t let me off the hook from wrestling with it. What’s in this passage is a beautiful way of understanding the Church and the Christian life. We are the expectant bride, waiting for the bridegroom, Christ, to come so that we might partake of the festive wedding banquet. Sure, there is some cultural baggage that comes with the metaphor, but we can also find it to be full of grace if, instead of casting it aside, we wrestle with it.
