The best and worst (read: most squirm-inducing) part of premarital counseling was when our pastor asked us to read Ephesians 5:22-33 and explain what it meant to us. If you are engaged or newly wed, or a woman, I don’t need to tell you this is the passage that begins, “Wives submit to your husbands….”
I was honest: I’ve always struggled with this passage, I said. But maybe it wasn’t so bad. I trusted Joel, and I knew he wouldn’t make any decision that didn’t put me first. Joel said something equally diplomatic about the heavy responsibility of decision-making.
Then our pastor asked,
Where does it say anything about decision-making?”
Over the years, Pastor Aaron Baker of Covenant Presbyterian Church of Chicago said, he has become “increasingly dissatisfied” with boiling that passage down to “who gets tie-breaking authority in a marriage.” For one, it never mentions decisions, Pastor Aaron said. At all. Also, he said, he’s never met a Christian couple that hasn’t, after a lot of prayer and conversation with each other and with wise people, been able to reach a decision together.
Instead, Pastor Aaron said, he has come to understand the role of a husband as the “head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church” (verse 23) as one of “responsibility and accountability.” That means God holds husbands accountable for all that goes on in a marriage, he said. And that means they probably won’t make all the decisions.
Someone who’s responsible usually lets the most qualified person make the final decisions—and sometimes that’s someone outside of the marriage,” he said.
Not that this is any less controversial or difficult for wives and husbands than the more common decision-making reading of Ephesians.
It means God calls men to do the hard thing. Men tend to shy away from responsibility for others, Pastor Aaron said.
It also means God calls women to do the hard thing. Women tend to be better at being responsible for others, he said. Submitting to their husbands, then, means they shouldn’t try to be the one responsible for everything. They should support their husbands in taking responsibility, he said.
I read through Ephesians 5 again just recently, after a friend lent me a book about marriage with the words “help meet” in the title. This time, what struck me most wasn’t verse 22, about wives submitting to their husbands, or verse 25, about husbands loving their wives as Christ loved the church. It was the verse immediately before Paul launched into wives and husbands, the verse in which he tells everybody to submit to everybody:
Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ” (Ephesians 5:21).
Clearly, there’s more than decision-making at play here, or no decisions are going to get made.
Submission is more than “yielding oneself to the authority or will of another,” even according to the simple definition of the word in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. You submit an application—“present or propose to another an idea for review, consideration or decision,” according to the dictionary. Or submit to surgery—“permit oneself to be subjected to something.”
In marriage, you submit your plans for dinner, for the weekend, for where you’ll spend the holidays. You submit to washing floors or making dinner or being kind when you feel anything but. You submit to putting this person somewhere between God and everything else on the priority list.
You submit to doing the hard thing. And that’s not just a wife thing. That’s an everybody thing. Let me ask you a question,
What does submission look like in your marriage?
FEATURED CONTRIBUTOR:
Emily McFarlan Miller is an awards-winning education reporter and adventurer, a social media-er, a Christian, a Chicagoan and, as of May 2011, the unlikeliest of newlyweds. Mostly, she writes. Connect with her at emmillerwrites.com.
