Sermons
July 14, 2024 (Proper 10)
Hierarchy
Ephesians 5:21—6:9
If you or someone you know is experiencing abuse, please visit thehotline.org
When we translate from one language to another, things get lost in translation. There are words that have so many different meanings that you have to choose one as you translate. Or, as in the case of the three terms in New Testament Greek that are all rendered with one English word, love, there are simply no equivalent words in the new language that can fully communicate the meaning.
When we read today’s text, with its instructions about submission, there are some things that have been lost in translation. And one of those words for love is involved, as we’ll see in a moment.
You may or may not be aware that the oldest manuscripts we have of the books of the New Testament didn’t have any punctuation, no divisions into sentences, paragraphs, verses, you name it. In some I’ve seen, there is barely any space between words, even! So we have to do a whole lot of interpreting in order to translate a biblical text into our own language so it can be understood. That’s before we can even begin to figure out how to interpret the text itself and what it might have to say to us.
The words that are chosen are also a matter of interpretation, and if we don’t have at least a basic guide to what the original language actually says, we can miss the mark pretty spectacularly.
Many pastors in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and other mainline denominations choose their preaching texts based on the Revised Common Lectionary. There are some positives to that. The RCL is set up so that, if we use it as intended, we actually have the opportunity to preach most of the Bible over three years.
The RCL has its weaknesses, too, though. There are some serious issues with how the RCL divides up passages; a lot of the time in the Gospel readings we get dropped into the middle of a scene, and we have to spend quite a bit of time backtracking for the assigned reading to make any sense at all. Not only that, but the RCL leaves out some passages that are difficult or controversial, or which have been misused. Our text for today is one of these.
Most of the letter to the Ephesians is covered in the summer of Year B. But in August of Year B, Proper 15 assigns Ephesians 5:15-20—then Proper 16’s text from Ephesians starts at 6:10. Everything in between—in other words, our reading for today—is left out.
It has been misused, even to the point that I’ve heard of some pastors telling battered wives[1] that the Bible requires them to stay in their abusive marriages. “If you would just go home and be ‘more submissive,’ everything would be all right.” That can get women killed.
It’s also been used to allow parents to treat their children any which way, because children are required to obey, and to justify slavery.
So the people who put together the RCL thought maybe we should just skip that passage. I do not agree; if we omit it because we don’t like the way it’s been misinterpreted, then we let that wrongful interpretation have the last word.
We’re probably most familiar with the first bit, about how wives are required to submit to their husbands. And when I was a child in Sunday school, I remember having to memorize Ephesians 6:1: “Children, obey your parents…for this is right.”
What we don’t realize when we yank verses out of their context is that we cannot understand them fully that way. The context for these two verses starts a few verses before our reading for today—and if we look at how the passage is constructed in Greek, what words and word forms are used, we discover something that’s very important when we think about what’s probably the second least popular of the spiritual disciplines (behind fasting, I’d suspect): submission. So let’s look at that context and see what we can find out.
We’re going to go back to verses 15-20 of chapter 5; most modern English Bibles have this as a separate paragraph before our passage for today. Here’s what Ephesians 5:15-20 says, in the New Revised Standard Bible:
Be careful then how you live, not as unwise people but as wise, making the most of the time, because the days are evil. So do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is. Do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery; but be filled with the Spirit, as you sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves, singing and making melody to the Lord in your hearts, giving thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.
That is a paragraph, then verse 21 stands on its own: “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.” Then the three sets of instructions about submission are each two paragraphs, with the second one—the instructions to husbands—being the longest. But if you look at the text in Greek, you find that verse 21 belongs with what comes before it, and everything from there to 6:9 are examples of what it means to be subject to one another.
English translations put a verb into verse 22, where there isn’t one in Greek. It doesn’t say, “Wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord.” It literally says, “the women to their own men as to the Lord.”
That’s because the verb comes earlier. Submission is—in keeping with its status as a spiritual discipline—an example of what it is to be filled with the Spirit, along with the following:
- singing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs among yourselves,
- singing and making melody to the Lord in your hearts,
- giving thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Verse 21’s verb is a participle, indicating it’s part of that list:
- submitting yourselves to one another out of reverence for Christ.
There probably shouldn’t be a period at the end of that, and it sure shouldn’t stand alone as its own paragraph.
What comes after is a fleshing-out of what it means to submit ourselves (the Greek here doesn’t indicate that one person makes another submit; it’s supposed to be voluntary: “submitting yourselves”). And it’s a whole lot more mutual than we tend to believe if we haven’t read the whole thing.
This is especially evident in the first part, the instructions to wives and husbands. The Greek word translated in the NRSV as “be subject” is actually a lovely word; it doesn’t mean “let your husband have his way, never question, never assert yourself.” It means, wives, attend to the needs of your husband before your own, take him into consideration in everything you do and all the decisions you make.
The business about “headship” that comes right after that is based on another word whose meaning is lost in translation on the journey from Greek to English. “…the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church, the body of which he is the savior.”
There is a Greek word often translated into English as head that means “the boss.” That’s not the word used here.
Instead, the word used is kephalē, which you might recognize as the root of medical terms like “encephalitis,” or the category of marine animals known as “cephalopods.”[2] It literally means “head,” as in “the part of your body that sits atop your neck.” It can also be used in a military sense, in which the kephalē[3] isn’t some officer sitting on a hill apart from the actual fighting, giving orders, but the person at the front of a formation of soldiers, the one who leads them into battle, the one who is most in danger as the battle begins.
After these verses about how wives are to relate to their husbands comes a longer section describing how husbands are to treat their wives. I’ve heard people object to what is said to husbands here: “Wives have to submit, and husbands only have to love?” It would be a problem if the word rendered as love here just meant warm fuzzy pink feelings. But it doesn’t.
The word is agapaō, the verb form of the noun agapē. Agapē is the kind of love God has for humanity, the kind of love revealed, as this passage makes clear, in Jesus Christ. It’s unconditional and self-giving: “…Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her…” It’s the kind of love Paul extols in 1 Corinthians 13, a love that is patient, and kind, doesn’t insist on its own way, and doesn’t keep a tally of how it’s been wronged.
Honestly, we could translate the instruction to husbands almost exactly like what the instruction to wives says: “Wives, be attentive to the needs of your husbands and put them first as you make decisions…Husbands, be attentive to the needs of your wives, and don’t insist on having your own way, but put your wives first as you make decisions”—just as Christ set aside, as it says in the hymn Paul quotes in Philippians 2, his claim to divinity and even his very life for his body, the church.
This isn’t a case of one party in a relationship lording it over the other and the other one having to submit. It’s mutual. Both husbands and wives are meant to submit themselves to one another.
As an introduction I sometimes use in wedding services says, “From this day on, your lives will not be the same as in the past. You will no longer be single. You will always think of the other when you think of yourself.”
Similarly, when we get to chapter 6, we find that mutuality continuing in what might be a surprising way—and especially would have been in the first-century world, where children were essentially the property of their parents, with no status of their own other than the potential one day to be a contributing member of the family and society.
“Children, obey your parents…” That’s obvious.
“Fathers,” or we might simply say “Parents,” “do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord”—again, the Lord who gave himself up for our sake. Raise your children into Godly adults, not through harsh discipline that breeds anger and resentment, but through discipline born of the kind of love Jesus has for each of us.
Some people are bothered by 6:5-9, because it describes the relationship between masters and slaves, and assumes slavery is a given and will continue to be a given. “Slaves, obey your masters”…again, this is an obvious thing in the relationship between slaves and masters.
But listen to how the instruction to slaves ends and the instruction to masters begins:
Render service with enthusiasm, as to the Lord and not to men and women, knowing that whatever good we do, we will receive the same again from the Lord, whether we are slaves or free.
And, masters, do the same to them. Stop threatening them, for you know that both of you have the same Master in heaven, and with him there is no partiality.
Wow.
Yes, this seems to assume there was slavery at that time and likely would be in the future, but can you see how it might plant seeds that eventually flowered into a conviction among many Christians that slavery should be abolished?
When we look at submission in this way, as something voluntary that doesn’t set up hierarchies but puts us in relationships of mutual love and service, it doesn’t seem quite so objectionable, does it? It’s when people get hold of it and twist it to sinful ends that submission becomes a problem.
And lest you think that this is only a matter for households, marriages, and families, consider what Richard Foster says in the passage I quoted in the bulletin insert for today: “…almost all church fights and splits occur because people do not have the freedom to give in to each other. We insist that a critical issue is at stake; we are fighting for a sacred principle. Perhaps this is the case. Usually it is not. Often we cannot stand to give in simply because it means that we will not get our own way.” I’ve been in churches like that; perhaps you have, too, or know people who have. When there is any person or group of people in a church—whether that is a pastor, the top giver in the congregation, a founding family, the women’s group,[4] or whoever—that insists everything must be done their way, it stifles a church’s ability to minister in the name of Jesus Christ and damages our witness to the world around us.
Years ago I was part of a church where two factions insisted on their own way as the budget for the following year was being developed for the congregation to vote on. The details aren’t important; quite honestly, the budget was the surface issue but there were other problems simmering below the surface that were ignited by the conflict over the budget.
We had a congregational meeting between the two services to approve the budget. (It was, incidentally, Girl Scout Sunday, so there were a great many visitors present for the second service.) Normally that meeting would have taken no more than ten or fifteen minutes, so it was scheduled for half an hour before the second service began, intending that people would have time afterward to visit the facilities or have a quick cup of coffee.
That’s not how it worked out.
Each side came armed with their facts and figures, with statistics and charts and all sorts of other stuff intended to demonstrate how they were in the right. Each side was also convinced that the other side was evil, to be defeated at all costs. Instead of lasting ten or fifteen minutes, that meeting lasted over an hour—well past the scheduled start of the second service. There were arguments, accusations, name-calling, and just general awfulness as each side insisted on their own way and refused to budge.
So much damage was done that day.
How many of those visitors to the church for Girl Scout Sunday do you imagine ever went back to church—not just to that church, but to any church? We had active members who couldn’t bring themselves to come back; those of us who remained were the walking wounded.
Some lay leaders in the congregation were stripped of their positions because they had been on the opposite side to the pastor—and both the pastor and those lay leaders had been stirring up trouble for weeks before that meeting. That pastor didn’t stay there much longer; and he ended up also splitting the next church he served.
It took quite a few years after that meeting, but that church is no more. It’s closed, and its building now houses a mortuary.
Submission—not one party forcing another to submit through manipulation or abuse, but everybody seeking what’s best for the others, having, again as Paul said in Philippians 2:5, “…the same mind…that was in Christ Jesus”—can transform lives, marriages, families, communities, and churches. This passage doesn’t set up hierarchies; it dismantles them so that we are all able to love one another as Christ loves us, without fear and without partiality.
[1] I do know, of course, that not all abused spouses are wives; husbands who suffer abuse are often invisible, which is a shame.
[2] Cephalopod literally means “head-foot.”
[3] I think kephale is a feminine noun in Greek, so the form used for a (presumably male) soldier probably has a different ending, but I don’t know for sure at this moment.
[4] Many a pastor, in days gone by, began their ministry after being admonished, “Whatever you do, don’t cross the women’s group.”