40 Days Blog - Day 11
Ephesians 5:21-33 - Instructions for Christian Households
Dictionaries are among the most useful reference books to have in the home, along with cookery books and DIY manuals. They make concise and scholarly information readily accessible, and cover a whole range of subject matter. There are over thirty in this household. But they would be entirely useless if it were not for the fact they are compiled in alphabetical order, so that it only takes a few seconds to find what you’re looking for.
Order is important! Without it, chaos rules. In the creation story of the Bible, God establishes order out of chaos. The religious conviction that creation is ordered gave birth to modern science. The Ten Commandments lay out, in order, the principles that govern the order and wellbeing of human society; order leads to harmony (think Morecambe and Wise, “I’m playing all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order!”).
Therefore, it’s not surprising to find the Bible advocating order and harmony in the home. There is nothing new in what Paul insists about men being the head of the household (the Hebrew scriptures are unashamedly patriarchal). What is novel is the way he reinterprets this relationship in Christian terms: wives should be subject (the original word has in it the idea of order) to their husbands, “
As to the Lord”; Husbands should love their wives, “
As Christ loves the Church”.
In the 19th century novels of Thomas Hardy and Mary Evans (writing under the name of George Eliot), there is an infatuation with romantic infatuation; the psychology of sexual love between men and women is explored incessantly. Though Mary Evans had respect for religious tradition and its ability to instilled social order, she abandoned her faith at an early age and aligned herself with certain European philosophers who taught that God was a human construct. Among other things it was also held that the Christian god was immoral because he couldn’t experience sexual love. Evans’s rather tedious exploration of sexual love in her novels is perhaps a result of her believing that sexual love is the highest and purest form of love. Christians would beg to differ with her on that point.
When Paul tells the married Christian men in Ephesus to love their wives, he clearly isn’t talking about sexual love; he uses the verb
agapaw (from which comes
agapé, see previous blog), which is the unselfish and sacrificial love that God has for His people, which Jesus displayed on the cross, and which we are asked to imitate in our relationships.
In Paul’s mind the marriage covenant is a reflection of God’s new covenant sealed by the blood of Christ, and dependent on faith as opposed to works. Christ’s goal is to present His bride, the church, holy and blameless, without spot or wrinkle. That’s a beautiful thing to aim for in Christian marriage; for each to work for the purity and fidelity of the other, for each to strive for their mutual sanctification. Perhaps that is a definition we should add to the dictionary!
A Prayer
Almighty God, I marvel at the order and harmony of creation, and that there is a time and a season for everything. I thank you for the bonds of romantic love that bring new life into the world, and I pray that marriage and family life might be guided by the kind of love Jesus has for the church.
Amen.
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