NOTES for Eph 5:22-33
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.