Mutual Submission and Mutual Love

I bet you’ve been waiting for this one. Wives, submit to your husbands and husbands, love your wives. This passage is notorious for being used as a justification for men being in charge, men being the head of the household and men getting their way in every marital discussion. So how biblical is that view?

First let’s read the passage:

²² Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. ²³ For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Saviour. ²⁴ Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.

²⁵ Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her ²⁶ to make her holy, cleansing^[a] her by the washing with water through the word, ²⁷ and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. ²⁸ In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. ²⁹ After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church – ³⁰ for we are members of his body. ³¹ ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’^[b] 32 This is a profound mystery – but I am talking about Christ and the church. ³³ However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.

Reading the Bible in English makes it easy for us to understand, but sometimes the truth is clouded in the translation. Oddly verse 22 has no verb in the sentence, it actually says in Greek “Wives, to your husbands.” Which sounds like permission for wives to  do whatever they like. Turns out the Greek has a way of being read where a sentence that has no verb inherits the verb from the previous. So what did the previous sentence say?

Mutually assured destruction? No! Paul calls to mutual submission.

²¹ Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.

You could call that a call to mutual submission. So the verb gets inherited and “submit” inserted in the sentence and we get the suggestion that wives need to submit themselves to their husbands. But that is not the context. The context is not of a one-sided, subservient relationship – the context is mutual submission. And not just mutual submission for its own sake, but we do it out of reverence to Christ.

Paul is clear – wives should submit to their husbands but only in the context of the husbands submitting to wives. This nuance is clear in the Greek but lost in the English. This is mutuality of our submission.

Another misinterpretation is that there is something about how a husband loves his wife that makes her “presentable” to God. A married woman is presented to God via her husband. Again this misses the point of the passage. The main thrust of this passage is how relationships are like Christ’s relationship with the Church. And Paul uses the passage to emphasise the perfection of Christ being the head of the Church. The analogy is not meant to be drawn that because Christ is the Saviour of the church, the husband is the Saviour of the wife!

So the passage is pretty simple in essence. Paul wants to communicate two truths:

• Husbands and wives submit to each other and love each other
• That love should be as pure as the love that Jesus has for his church.

As Paul says “This is a profound mystery – but I am talking about Christ and the church. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.”