Putting Women in Their Place

     One day a young mother happened by the nursery and noticed her husband standing in rapt contemplation beside the crib of their sleeping son.  Silently, she watched him for a while, wondering what thoughts filled his mind as he looked at his own flesh and blood asleep in the crib.  At last she slipped into the room and put her arm through his and asked, “What are you thinking of, Dear?”

       He came to with a start.  “Oh, I was just wondering how in the world they can make a crib like this for only $59.95.”

       This story is but on example of a well-known fact -- that men and women are different from each other.  Still, in spite of the differences, we are called to live together in harmony and in mutual love, respect and support.   Men aren’t from Mars and women aren’t from Venus. Women and men are both from earth and we need to deal with it.

       It’s not so hard when we first start.  For the first year of marriage it’s all:  “Sugar dumpling.  I’m really worried about my little girl.  You’ve got a bad sniffle and there’s no telling about these things with all the strep going around.  I’m putting you in the hospital this afternoon for a general check-up and a good rest.  I know the food’s lousy, but I’ll be bringing your meals in from Bauducco’s.  I’ve already got it all arranged with the floor superintendent.”

       The second year of marriage sounds like this.  “Listen darling, I don’t like the sound of that cough and I’ve called Doc Miller to rush over here.  Now you go to bed like a good girl, just for Pappa.”

       The third year goes: “Maybe you’d better lie down honey.  Nothing like a little rest when you feel lousy.  I’ll bring you something.  Have we got any canned soup?”

       The fourth year of marriage becomes: “Now look dear, be sensible.  After you’ve fed the kids, and got the dishes done and the floor finished, you better lie down.”

       Then there’s the concern of the fifth year.  “Why don’t you take a couple aspirin?”

       Now comes the sixth year: “If you’d just gargle or something instead of sitting around barking like a seal all evening.”

       The finale comes the seventh year: “For Pete’s sake stop that sneezing!  Are you trying to give me pneumonia?”

       That’s the way it often goes --  the decline of a marriage.  But that is not the way God intends it to be.  The keep marriages vital and healthy, God gives some important instructions to both husbands and wives in the third chapter of Colossians that he mirrors and expands on in the fifth chapter of Ephesians.

       Last week in the sermon and small groups, we looked at God’s command to Christian wives in Colossians 3:18 and Ephesians 5:21-24.  They are to be “subject” to their husbands.  Subjection is not subjugation.  It is not based on a real or imagined inferiority.  It literally means to “rank under” -- to adapt your movements to the movements of your partner for the sake of achieving a mutual goal.  This is because God has given the husband the “Headship” of the family -- he bears authority and responsibility in God’s plan for the family.

      This teaching for the wife carries with it an important limitation.  The subjection of the wife to the husband is to be “as to the Lord.”  This means that it should be joyful, natural, and done in great confidence.  It also means that the authority of the husband ends when he is in fact attempting to lead in a way that is contrary to the revealed will of the Lord for himself, the wife or the family. 

       Now, in Ephesians 5, the style of the husband’s headship is also prescribed.  It is to be reflective of the model of Christ who is the head of the church.  Headship is not for the purpose of dominance but for the purpose of nurture.  And, I might add, most people, women included, would not find it too hard to be subject to one whose only goal is to seek their highest good.  

       Last week when I read the instructions to wives, it was the husband’s turn to say “listen to this” and “how true, how true.”  I warned you then that today would be the husband’s turn to get nudged in the ribs.  I’m glad you had the courage to show up.  You’ll notice that I am safe up front.

       Men, listen to what God has to say to you in Ephesians 5:25-33.

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       Did the requirement of “subjection” sound hard to a wife?  I think what is required of a husband is harder (though I may be biased on this).  The husband is not to love his wife with the romantic, sentimental or even aggressive passion which frequently passes for genuine love today.  Instead he is to love her with the self-giving love of Christ.  The husband’s obligation to love his wife is repeated three times in Ephesians 5 and so is the requirement that he model his attitude and behavior on Christ.  He is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church.  He is to love his wife as Christ loves the church and he is to nourish and cherish his wife as Christ does the church.

        The trouble with many who have read this section of scripture is that they only read the instructions to wives.  They have been so busy putting women in their place that they fail to notice the beautifully high place God has given them.

       The contrast is especially and dramatically apparent when measured against the customs of the time and culture when Paul first wrote these words.

       In Rome , for example, marriage was a ruined institution.  For the first five hundred years of the Roman Republic there had not been a single case of divorce. The first divorce was that of Spurius Carvilius Ruga in 234 B.C.  But by the time of Paul, Roman family life was wrecked.  In Rome dating of events was done according to the period of service of the consuls,  But Seneca wrote that upper class women commonly dated their years by the names of their husbands… that was the year I was married to Sergius Paulus and that was the year I was married to Flavian Junias.  St. Jerome , writing in the third century, tells of a woman who was married to her twenty-third husband and that she herself was his twenty-first wife.  That was a record I guess but the rest of society was not all that far behind.  Juvenal tells of one woman who had had eight husbands in five years.  Even the great Cicero , in his old age, put away his wife Terentia so that he could marry a young heiress, whose trustee he was, and get a hold of her estate to pay off his debts.

       This is part of the background against which Paul writes this letter.  It’s important to learn that when he wrote these instructions, he was not stating the commonly accepted view of things.  He was calling men and women to a new purity and a new fellowship in the married life.  It is almost impossible to exaggerate the cleansing effect Christianity had on life in the ancient world and the benefits it brought to both women and men.

       And it’s still very much needed today.

       Some years ago the Fisher Price Company test-marketed a family play house in child-care centers across the country.  They found that most little boys played house by walking in slamming the door and demanding dinner.  I wonder where they learned that?  One executive wrote:  “I often think that many a top executive would lose his secretary in a month if he treated her the same casual way as he treats his wife.”

       And in contract to all of this, Paul tells us as Christian husbands that the mutual subjection he speaks of back in Ephesians 5:21 should be shown in us by our willingness to put our wives’ interests first…giving ourselves up for our wives.  This is the kind of love that is more interested in the wife’s welfare than in the husband’s selfishness.  Our model is Christ who emptied Himself of everything to serve and save humankind.  His are the shoes we are supposed to fill.

       The husband is to nourish and cherish his wife.  These words have the connotation of helping the wife grow into all she can be.  Could this kind of love stifle a wife…forcing her to only beat a path from diapers to dishes?  Could this kind of love use a woman?  Could this kind of love rule a wife with tyranny?  Of course not.  This is the kind of love that sacrifices to make the partner the most happy and fulfilled person alive.

       Paul says that the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church.  We tend to think of head in terms of power and authority.  “Aha” we say, “Husbands rules, wives drool!”  However, the image here of Christ as head of the church is one of nourishment and nurture.  The head is the source of life…not frustration.  We must remember that Jesus’ concept of leadership is service, His concept of greatness is slavery, and His concept of the head is the one who sustains the body.  The husband is the head…not only as authority but also as nourisher.

       I found a true example of this in a man who had an alcoholic wife.  Again and again she disappointed him.  But he never lost hope.  One night she shamed him in front of old friends.  Afterward, she broke into tears.  “Why don’t you leave me?”  she cried.  “Because I remember a very beautiful person,” he answered, “and I have hope she’s still in there.”   As speaker Mike Mason observed, “Loving your wife is not to love her as a saint but as a sinner.  If we only love her for her saintliness, we don’t love her at all.”

       How different this all is from worldly marriages where both partners are in it to grab all they can get for themselves.  As one humorist wrote: “The Bible says the two shall become on flesh and in the first year of marriage they find out which one.”  That’s not the goal.  Paul’s teaching is also at odds with some Christian teachers who project a rigid “chain of command” where dad is the boss, mom his obedient worker and the children the peons.  In Paul’s vision of marriage, both partners are in it to give all they can to their spouse, to make that person happy and fulfilled.  These relationships are not in a line of authority but are governed by giving and service to one another where each believes that the partner is more capable of making them happy then they are of making themselves happy…and so devotes energy to the partners’ well being.  

       Can this really work?  Some immediately cry “Impossible!!!”  Can we expect modern, liberated women to subject themselves to their husbands?  And can we expect modern husbands on the way up – moving on the fast track to give themselves up in unselfish love for their wives.  “Who’s gonna look out for me if I don’t?”

       Well, such marriage is possible, but it is possible only in Jesus Christ.  I’m talking about marriages where both partners are determined to live with the power of Christ in their lives.  This makes a grand difference.  I love Gary Thomas’ emphasis in Sacred Marriage that marriage isn’t designed by God to make us happy but to make us holy.  It is the number one place where the mind of Christ growing in us is expressed.

       In Christ we begin with self-worth.  We don’t have to establish it.  Our needs have been met in Christ.  In Christ we do have the power to love and give in the way He modeled for us.  Christians are not without their failures…even grotesque failures at times…but they have the added power to move from their mistakes toward unselfish love.  This kind of love and this kind of marriage are possible in Christ.

       Now men, I want to give you a word of advice here.  Don’t go home from here and set out to consecrate your wife as Christ consecrates the church by changing her around.  Try cherishing and nurturing, and anything else that is God’s plans will follow.  What I mean is…be natural about it. 

       I like the way Gerald Kennedy states it in The Joy of Being Human.  He writes:  “How fortunate are those for whom their marital partner is not only their lover but also their best friend.  Such deep affinity within the bonds of matrimony is an almost indestructible commodity.  It can withstand the ravages of time and distance.  It can take the minor and major separations that demand patience and build peace and sharing that are sealed in the Holy Spirit.

       “Actually,” Kennedy continues, “two people who are close and supposed to enjoy each other in the simple and deep meaning of that term:  they must be able to be relaxed and at ease in each other’s presence, able to be quiet or just to smile in quiet appreciation of some shared event.  Friendship that generates tension like a hum around high wires is artificial and will quiver and snap under strain.  Genuine friendship has a lot of give in it; it seldom needs to be drawn taut.”

       There is a story about a schoolboy who did a paper on Benjamin Franklin.  He did his research and then he squirmed into his chair, chewed his pencil, took a piece of paper and wrote at the top of it: “Benjamin Franklin,” and produced the following masterpiece: “Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston but he got tired of that and moved to Philadelphia .  When he got to Philadelphia he was hungry, so he bought a loaf of bread.  He put the bread under his arm. He walked up the street and passed a woman.  The woman smiled at him.  He married the woman and discovered electricity.”

       Many of us have gotten married and discovered electricity.   But we are also called to discover another fact…the fact of unity.  God says that when we marry, we become “one flesh.”  We are united in a bond that God intends to be unbreakable.  Paul writes that we husbands are to love our wives as we love ourselves and to care for our wives as we care for ourselves.  For who ever hates his own flesh?

       At the end of the sermon on God’s command to wives I asked this question. “Wives, do you love your husband enough to live for him?” Now here’s the question for the husbands: “Do I love my wife enough to die for her?” …Not only the spectacular death of running into a burning building to save her, but the everyday death of giving myself for her.  Am I willing to make even the ultimate sacrifice and hand her the TV. remote?   That’s the symbol of power and selfishness in many homes.

       Listen to what Paul calls us to in verse 33: “Let each individual among you love his own wife even as himself; and let the wife see to it that she respect her husband.”

       As you can see, a wife’s subjection to her husband’s office of head of the marriage, and the husband’s giving of himself in self-giving sacrificial love end in the same place – in mutual subjection.  We end where we began in verse 21 with Paul’s command to subject ourselves to one another.

       Paul’s instructions to subject ourselves to one another -- for wives to subject themselves and for husbands to love their wives is directed here to Christians.  It is obvious not all Christian marriages and relationships reflect Paul’s admonitions.  But they can.  The distorted patterns of the fall can be restored to God’s original creation intention.  God by His grace working by the Holy Spirit makes this possible.

       But we can subject ourselves to one another only as we submit ourselves to Christ.  Woman can be freed to subject themselves to their husbands’ role of head and so be freed.  Husbands can be freed to love as a self-giving servant, so that their wives can fulfill their potential.

       The creative power of God can recreate us.

       Is your marriage a reflection of Christ’s self-giving love? It can be, if you will bow in surrender to Him and to on another.