In my previous two posts, I explored Paul’s instructions to wives and to husbands. This coming Sunday, I’m tasked with actually preaching 5:22—6:9. Since several of you have expressed interest in hearing how I would preach this, here is “how” I think I will preach this and, frankly, how I think other people should preach this.
Broaden the context.
Don’t start at 5:22, with “Wives, [submit]. I’ve already pointed out that this is a ghost verb, and it gives the impression that this unit of thought is about wives and husbands in particular, or social roles in general.
But don’t start at 5:21 either, with “submit[ting] to one another in the fear of Christ.” This gives the impression that this unit of thought is about ‘mutual submission’ in general.
No, the unit of thought is about being filled with the Spirit rather than with wine: “Do not get drunk with wine… but be filled with the Spirit” (5:15). Mutual submission to one another in the fear of Christ is one of five practices which concord with (cause? express?) being filled with the Spirit, alongside speaking, singing, psalming, and giving thanks.
Start this passage no later than Eph. 5:15, or else you miss this bigger point in Ephesians: God is uniting all things in Christ (ch. 1), making peace, by making a “new man” (2:15), whose body is “the fullness of him who fills all in all” (1:23), and which will be “filled with all the fullness of God” (3:19) by the one who ascended “that he might fill all things” (4:10).
Like Ch. 1-4, these passages in Ch. 5-6 are about God filling “Christ’s body” and “all things” with his fullness, which is the fullness of the Spirit. Domineering husbands, fathers, and masters—full of themselves, or full of wine—impede the gospel.
Broaden the context even more.
The discussion of submission is grounded “in the fear of Christ” (en phobō Christou). That’s how mutual submission is introduced at 5:21, and it is the mysterious rationale (musterion, 5:32) on the basis of which Paul instructs a wife to fear her husband (phōbetai ton andra, 5:33) and a slave his master (“with fear (meta phobou) and trembling… as [to] Christ,” 6:5).
When you see “fear,” “submission,” discussions of power dynamics among husbands and wives, and a mysterious reflection on Gen. 2:24, flanked by a discussion of how to speak (Ch. 4-5) and a united defense against the spiritual powers (6:10-23), you have to think Genesis 3.
The new man—Jesus Christ and his wife-body-fullness—have been raised above the powers (Ch. 2) in order to resist them (Ch. 6). Whatever Paul means by “submit to one another” at 5:21 is opposed to what both Adam and Eve did in Gen. 3.
Every tempted person should submit—unlike Eve—to the upbuilding words of the mature. Every guilty person should—unlike Adam—make his confession to God instead of shifting the blame onto another.
Again, the goal is to participate in the building of the body. And the specific addresses to wives and husbands in 5:22-5:33 don’t exhaust the meaning of the fundamental participle-imperative, be filled… submitting to one another.
Focus on wives and husbands in 5:22-33.
My sermon will be 15 minutes long, which will be barely long enough to address Paul’s words to one of the three pairs—husbands and wives, fathers and sons, masters and slaves—let alone his words to all three of them.
There was a time when the most important choice would have been Paul’s words to slaves and masters at 6:5-9. And many churches—Black churches, multiethnic churches, churches focused on understanding racism, churches with 30-45 min. sermons—may choose that one.
But in my view, it’s the words to husbands and wives that are most commonly misread. And I have this from Walter Brueggemann rolling around in my head:
The congregation gathers with a vague memory of the text—a memory that has the text mostly reduced, trivialized, and domesticated. It has been necessary to reduce the text all week, because there is neither time nor freedom for nuance, and because reductionism may permit one a tenacious hold on just a hint of the claim of the text. The community does not doubt the text, but it has been mostly impossible to remember the text all week with its angular scandal, its tensiveness, its density, and its amazement…
All week the ideology of our nation, our class, our sect, our sex has seemed closed, settled, and ready for defence. We trust excessively and vigorously in our ideological commitments, which we accept as a rendering of the text. In such excessive trust, we do not venture beyond the little commitments of our ideology to face the troubled mysteries of life…
So we cling to the biblical text, now domesticated by our tenacious ideology. The text lingers in our midst, but it has been misshapen and diminished, and robbed of its dangerous power.
For some of us, our “vague memory” remembers that “Wives submit” (5:22) is explained away by “submit to one another” (5:21). Others of us remember that the text says “Wives submit,” not “Husbands submit.”
Anyway, this is my operating principle when preaching familiar texts: Preachers should focus on defamiliarizing the parts of the text of which we have the strongest “vague memory,” in order to facilitate an authentic encounter between congregation and Word.
But still pay attention to “doing” (poieō) verbs in 6:5-9.
I have pointed out the cluster of poieō verbs that are obscured in the ESV’s translation of Eph. 2. Here’s the sense of it:
When you were dead, you were “doing” (poiountes) your own desires (vv. 1-3). [That’s why] your works don’t save you (vv. 8-9). You are saved because you are God’s “doing” (poiēma), created for good works (v. 10). You know, God “did” (poiēsas) unity and “did” (poiōn) peace (vv. 14-15).
The point of the “dead in your trespasses” bit is not that what we did was particularly heinous—though, in any one of our cases, it may have been—but that our works can’t amount to the works of God, whose eternal purpose has been to unite all things in Christ (1:10). Because God does that, his works are our salvation. In his kindness, he has prepared good works—that is, works of one-making—for us to walk in.
In our mutual submission (5:21-24), in fear of Christ, and especially the submission of wives to their own husbands, our works make us one body. In a husband’s sacramental “leaving” and “loving,” God makes husbands one with their wives (5:25-33).
The dignity of the slave—which is also the dignity of the freeman (“whether slave or freeman,” 6:8)—is that she might “do (poiountes) the will of God (to thelēma tou theou) from her inner self (ek psuchēs)” (6:6). Therefore, masters can be told, as an appendix to Paul’s words on the dignity of the service of a slave, to “do the same (ta auta poieite)” (6:9).
While the husband has a sacramentally distinct work (“leave,” 5:31), and the submission of a wife to her own husband is transfigured into a sacramental work (5:22-24, 33), the master does not. The master is to do toward his slave what the slave does toward him. The master’s works are measured against the Christ-fearing works of their slaves. In Ephesians, the work of the servant is the epistemic locus of Christian work.