NOTES for Eph 5:22-33

²²Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord.

²³For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body.

²⁴Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing.

²⁵Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it;

²⁶That he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word,

²⁷That he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish.

²⁸So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself.

²⁹For no man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as the Lord the church:

³⁰For we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones.

³¹For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh.

³²This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church.

³³Nevertheless let every one of you in particular so love his wife even as himself; and the wife see that she reverence her husband.

Paul draws on traditional Jewish understandings of marriage in the context of the human relationship with God. On the one hand, the relationship between husband and wife is not merely established and blessed by God but directly sustained by him: it is he who, from the very beginning, makes spouses ‘one flesh.’ For us today, ‘flesh’ often means something base in comparison with ‘spirit’ and ‘soul’ as we understand them.

In biblical usage, however, ‘flesh’—or rather, the corresponding Hebrew word and its Greek equivalent in the New Testament books—means human nature in all its fullness, including embodiment as an integral, God-given element of the person. In marriage, two people share a single stream of life (what the Bible usually calls ‘soul’) and also become one at the level of the human nature called ‘flesh.’ But God, too, participates in this union. Even the relationship between God and God's people was often conceived in Yahwism, and later in Judaism, on the model of family and marital relations; the preaching of the prophet Hosea began this tradition.

All this was familiar and intelligible to Jews, but for recent converts from paganism—and the Ephesian church included both—it was new and unusual. It should be noted that the traditional Jewish view of marriage made the husband responsible for the spiritual well-being of the family: first of all his wife, and also his children. In marrying, a young woman entrusts herself to her bridegroom, just as a person entrusts themselves to God if they want a full spiritual life.

That is why the apostle says that a wife should ‘fear’ her husband—in the same sense that anyone living a normal spiritual life ‘fears’ God. Of course, this fear, like the fear of God, can be understood in different ways, but Paul has in mind a proper understanding, which involves above all an awareness of one's responsibility for the choice one has made. At the same time, the apostle places all this within the context of the new Christian revelation. He speaks no longer only of God and the people; he speaks of Christ and the Church, to whose relationship he compares that of husband and wife.

Indeed, if we are speaking of Christians, it is clear that all their relationships with one another must be situated within the relationship of the Father and the Son, without which there is no Kingdom; Christ himself must participate in those relationships, or else a full Christian life will be out of the question. This is what Paul reminds Jewish Christians of and tells recent converts from paganism, perhaps for the first time. He tells them of that without which there is, and can be, no normal family life in Christ.

Other notes

For Eph 5:22-33