‘Marriage is not about a hierarchy or a chain of command’

Well yes, I think we should submit. But before those who know me fear that I have lost my previously feminist mind, I believe that men should submit to their wives too. Let me explain. That notorious passage in Ephesians starts with the statement: “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ” (5:21). Unfortunately, many translations put a subheading right after this verse, separating it from the verses that follow. This means that when the passage is read, we often begin with: “Wives, submit to your husbands” and totally lose the context of all Christians submitting to one another. I’m no Greek scholar, but in a modern context I would prefer the verb ‘defer’ to ‘submit’. Deferring to one another essentially means the same thing: putting the other person’s needs, calling and vision ahead of your own – and we are all meant to do that to one another.

A much longer message for men

And another thing: it is rude to read letters addressed to another person, yet men will persist in reading the portion of this letter addressed to their wives, and not the following, much longer, portion addressed to them. What does it tell them to do? It starts in verse 25 with: “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (or in some translations, “laid down his life for her”). Now I ask you, in the relationship between Christ and the Church, who makes the greater sacrifice? Is it not Christ? Then who is called to make the greater sacrifice in a marriage relationship? If the husband stands for Christ, the emphasis is surely on his call to surrender his wishes and power for his wife’s sake? 

Incidentally, I’ve asked a number of men in the past what this command means to them, and without exception they have said: “I should be prepared to die to save my wife.” Men want to do something heroic for their wives. Yet actually having to die to save your wife’s life is a vanishingly small possibility. Surely what it really means is the daily ‘little deaths’ that we all have to undergo in order to put the welfare of others first – and which is true heroism.

Working with each other’s strengths 

“But”, I hear you say (I’m sure some of you will), “what about when a husband and wife disagree – who has the casting vote, who makes the final decision?” Well, the good marriages I know simply don’t work that way. Show me a marriage that does, and I think you will be showing me a very dysfunctional marriage. In this passage, with its talk of submission, there is nowhere a single word that instructs or allows a husband to command his wife. Submission is voluntary; that is its value and its glory, and it is also mutual. If there is disagreement, say about a vocation one partner has, or a decision to move house or job, or to have or not have children (lucky if you have the choice), then both partners should seek God together for guidance. I once had a boyfriend who would go off into his room alone to pray intensely about something and then come out with a decision, without consulting anyone else. He’d say things like: “When we go on holiday in the Lake District in September” and I’d say: “What? We’re going on holiday in the Lake District in September? You didn’t ask me.” I hope that habit of his changed when he got married – I presume it did as he’s still married decades on. 

Marriage is not about a hierarchy or a chain of command. Couples should play to each other’s strengths, not to a pre-planned model of how a marriage ‘ought’ to work. I remember our son, aged about seven, saying: “I’ve worked out how this family works: Mum decides what’s going to happen and then Dad does it.” We laughed at the time, and those with a complementarian view of marriage might be horrified, but actually it was an arrangement that made perfect sense: I’m good at having ideas, which he isn’t, and he’s good at making things happen, which I’m not. It doesn’t mean we don’t consult or discuss our lives, but it gives us a freedom to be ourselves and exercise our distinctive gifts. In fact, we do have a complementarian marriage: we are very different, and our strengths (and weaknesses) complement each other.

Men are generally physically stronger than women, and have many social privileges in a patriarchal society. But the writer of Ephesians calls them to set aside these ‘might is right’ advantages, to give them up for, as I would translate 1 Peter 3:7, ‘the more vulnerable sex’. What could be more Christlike?