Friends
Peace be with you.
One of the hardest weddings I ever did happened in a previous assignment and is something I will always regret doing. I have never refused to perform a marriage. Sometimes, if one of the people need an annulment and I have to tell couples “not yet”, they decide there are easier solutions than getting married in the Catholic Church. Still, this was a different scenario. All throughout the preparation, there was something off about the couple. They needed a different sponsor couple than our normal ones for him to feel comfortable talking with any of them. It had to be someone he already trusted and knew. He answered almost all the marriage questions with unsure instead of agree or disagree, including whether he was almost always relaxed around his future spouse. They both always had excuses but they tended to be pretty flimsy ones. He’s shy. He doesn’t trust people. He doesn’t trust people because his parents were bad role models. It took until after the wedding for things to become clear for me what was happening. The groom was isolating the bride from all her friends, even moving her to a whole new town far away from everyone she knew. He was driving everyone who cared for her away, including me after the wedding. He would pick a fight with one of her friends and then go and tell her that they were mean to him and she shouldn’t talk to them anymore. And, wanting to make the marriage work and find a way to fix him, she always did it. I tried to contact her after the marriage but she blocked me on her phone and all social media and we still talked to each other since sadly.
Still, I think of her on this weekend when we hear Ephesians 5:21-32, “Wives, be subordinate to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is head of his wife as Christ is the head of the church”. For some people, that’s all they hear when they hear this reading. And there is many a preacher who is willing to stand up and say that St. Paul clearly meant that the man runs the show in a family, that he is in charge and the woman and any children they may have have to listen to him. However, be very careful if you decide to accept that interpretation because, when preachers interpret St. Paul that way, they are missing his entire point.
Let’s look, first, at how St. Paul starts the passage. He says to everyone “Be subordinate to one another out of reverence for Christ.” This should be a clue that St. Paul is doing something different here. It’s mutual subordination that he is seeking, not a one-sided subordination. To demonstrate this, he writes the two verses I quoted before about wives being subordinate to husbands, which was a common belief in the middle-eastern culture of his time. But what he says next is shocking because he also imposes demands upon the husbands. “Husbands love your wives, even as Christ loved the church and handed himself over for her…” He repeats over and over again that husbands should love their wives. I think we may be tempted to say the poor wife who is called to be subordinate gets the raw end of the deal and that definitely is true if we don’t understand what Paul means by love. Love isn’t just a warm feeling for St. Paul. Love is an act of the will that commits you to a certain life. And what life are husbands committing to? To die to your self and all your selfish desires and everything aside from focusing on what is best for your wife. You see, we don’t hear it this way but dying to your self should be harder than being subordinate. It’s supposed to sound more difficult but, as I say, because we tend to think of love as a touchy feely emotion instead of as a commitment to put the other person’s needs and wants before our own, to put their well being, their livelihood, their everything before our own, we distort what St. Paul says and, instead, justify seeing the man as being the head of the household, the one that makes all the decisions when, in fact, husband and wife are meant to be equals, each subordinate to the other.
Now, I know some of you may protest that, if there is no singular person who is in charge, that means the couple is essentially a ship without a pilot. First, it doesn’t mean that there can’t be division of labor. A husband may look at his wife and realize she’s a better cook or cares more about cleanliness or is better at maintaining their vehicle than he is and they may decide those are areas she is better in charge of. And a wife may look at her husband and realize he’s better at dealing with lawncare or better at organizing the family finances or better at cooking than she is and the two may decide that those are going to be his gifts. Those kinds of decisions are good to decide early into the relationship and also good to communicate about while the relationship goes on and changes with time. But, also, if there are children that come about as part of the union, it’s even more important for the kids that the parents be in charge of the kids while subordinate to each other. Parents who are not on the same page when it comes to discipline or education or religious involvement or even involvement in sports will not only frustrate themselves but make their children miserable. When parents support each other in their decisions, they will at least have one other person telling them they’re sane despite possible protests from the children and it’s good for the kids to see a model of healthy adult relationships.
I hope you can hear how this passage, Ephesians 5:21-32, not only shouldn’t be a justification for spousal abuse but should be one of the main arguments about how Christians can’t tolerate it. If you are in an abusive relationship, I hope you are getting the help you need. Please, when you are safe, contact Catholic Charities for help or, if it’s really bad, call the police. And, if you are an abuser, whether it’s verbal or physical in nature, please know that, by, justifying it because of these and similar passages, you are abusing God’s word for your own ends. Today is the day to recommit your life to the gospel. Get the help you need to die to yourself so you can rise with Christ.
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