A Sermon Without Words

Ordinary Means · An Ephesians Study · No. 10

This is the passage everyone argues about — and the argument usually misses what Paul is actually doing.

Before a word about who submits to whom, notice this: Paul addresses both sides of every pair. Wives and husbands. Children and fathers. Servants and masters. The household codes are not a one-sided list of demands on the people with less power. They are a reordering of everyone — every party placed under the love and authority of Christ.

Yes, wives are told to submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. But watch where the weight of the passage falls. The husband gets the longer command, and the harder one — and it is not rule your wife. It is this:

The standard for the man with authority is the cross. He is told to die. Whatever "headship" means here, Paul has just made it impossible to read as a license to dominate — because the head is the One who bled for the body. The husband is head as Christ is head — but Paul guards the analogy carefully: Christ is also her Savior, and the husband is not. He images Christ's love; he does not replace Christ's saving work. The wife's deepest relation is always to her Lord, not to her husband.

Husband and wife are equal before God — equal in dignity, equal in grace, equal members of the new humanity in Christ. Within the marriage they are given different callings, and the husband's is the heavier one. And here is the honest part: no husband fully meets it. Every Christian husband loves with less than the love of Christ. So even the household runs on grace — the husband, like every believer, brought back again and again by daily repentance to the One whose love is the source of whatever love he manages to give.

Which raises a question. Why is marriage even in this letter? Three chapters of cosmic redemption — chosen before the foundation of the world, raised, seated, filled with the fullness of God — and now… wives and husbands? Paul answers it himself, and it is the most beautiful thing in the chapter:

Marriage was never merely a social arrangement. From the very first one flesh in Eden, it was a picture — pointing forward, all along, to the union of Christ and His people. Which means every Christian marriage, in its quiet daily fidelity, is a small icon of the gospel. A sermon preached without words. The husband, loving sacrificially, displays Christ. The wife, trusting, displays the Church. The marriage as a whole witnesses to the love at the center of redemption — usually without either spouse realizing they are doing it.

The same logic runs through the rest of the household. Children honor their parents — Paul reaches for the Fourth Commandment, the first commandment with a promise. Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger — do not exasperate them with harshness and constant criticism — but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. (Luther called the Christian father the bishop of his own household: for better or worse, he is the first picture of God his children will form.) And then the most radical move of all in a Roman world built on slavery: Paul tells slaves their real Master is in heaven, and tells masters to stop your threatening, because he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and there is no partiality with him. He does not abolish the institution in a sentence — and the Church was shamefully slow, often complicit, in drawing the conclusion — but he plants the charge that would eventually blow it apart: the master is himself a servant, the slave is his brother, and one impartial Lord judges them both.

Put it together and the point is unmistakable. The household is not tucked off to the side of the gospel, a domestic afterthought to the cosmic theology. It is the gospel — embodied, ordinary, daily. The front line where the love of Christ for His Church takes visible form, in a kitchen, at a dinner table, in the patience of a tired parent and the faithfulness of an ordinary marriage.

Next time we reach the end — the armor of God, the Christian's real fight against powers we cannot see, and a final, very human surprise: Paul, who has just armed us for battle, asks us to pray for him, that even in chains he might open his mouth boldly. Read Ephesians 6:10–24 before then.

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