Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior.
Ephesians 5:22-23 (NIV)
Both Halves of the Passage
Three weeks into the new apartment he still drives to work the long way, because the short way ends in a left turn across four lanes and he does not trust it yet. He knows one road in this town well. The rest of it goes past him at speed.
Before any wife is spoken to here, the whole congregation is. Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Husbands are standing inside that line when the next one starts. Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. Christ, the head of the church, is called Savior of the body in that same sentence. The husbands are addressed right after. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.
A man who takes the first line and stops has picked up the part that costs him nothing. The words written to him ask him to spend himself on his wife the way Christ spent himself on the church, all the way to the giving up. That line costs the most in the whole passage, and it rarely gets quoted at anybody.
The word given to wives stands, and it stands inside a house where both people are already handing themselves over to each other. That is the setting it was written for, and if you are the wife in it, the line above yours was addressed to him with the larger bill attached.
Nothing in it hands a husband a thing to use. Where a woman is being hurt at home, these words are not asking her to stay and take it, and the man hurting her left this passage a long time before she started asking questions about it. Driving away from that house is not disobedience.
Plenty of houses are nowhere near that one. Two people come home tired, one starts the dishes while the other goes through the mail, and what has gone quiet between them is nothing either of them could put in a sentence. A man standing in that kitchen has something to do in this passage, and it costs him more than the line he already knows by heart.
The giving up comes first there, and everything the church becomes comes after it.
Three weeks in, he still takes the long way. The left turn is the short one, and it is the one that costs something, and one of these mornings he is going to have to make it.
A Prayer to Remember
I read the line that lands on somebody else and I skip the one addressed to me. Tomorrow give me the one addressed to me. Let it cost an hour I had set aside for myself, spent on the person I made promises to, before I ask for anything back.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
