SEVERAL YEARS AGO, a friend of mine who was a pastor asked me to come speak at his church. I had spoken at the church before, so it was to me an ordinary request. His preaching style was often to choose a book of the Bible and work his way through it, Sunday by Sunday. At the time he messaged me, he was beginning a series on the book of Ephesians. But he had a family vacation planned some weeks down the road, so asked if I could sub for him while he was gone.

I replied that I’d be happy to help. Then I asked the fateful question, having a sneaking suspicion as to what the answer would be: “What passage do you want me to preach on?”

You guessed it. Ephesians 5:21-33 — the controversial passage in which Paul instructs wives to submit to their husbands.

Gee, thanks, brother, I thought to myself.

We had discussed the passage before, over coffee. Pastorally, he had had to deal with men in the church who verbally or physically abused their wives. The women wanted to leave, but the men pointed to Ephesians 5 and accused their wives of being disobedient and sinful because they refused to submit to the husband’s authority. And as you might suspect, the women had a sensitive enough conscience that their husbands’ self-serving use of Scripture made them stay. But they did ask their pastor what to do, forcing him to find a way to faithfully navigate these potentially explosive situations.

. . .

EPHESIANS CHAPTER 5 (together with the beginning of chapter 6) is the more famous cousin of a similar but briefer passage in Paul’s letter to the Colossians. If it’s true that Colossians and Ephesians were written at about the same time, it makes sense to read and interpret them together. Thus, over the next few posts, I’ll toggle back and forth between the letters to help us get at what Paul says in Colossians.

But first, let’s get a little historical context under our belts.

Paul was writing moral instructions for Christian households, and in some ways these households were quite different than the kind of family and home in which I grew up in the modern-day United States. Our household consisted of my two parents, my sister, and myself. No one ever came to stay with us for an extended period of time. We had only occasional contact with the extended family, and if the truth be told, we didn’t even know our neighbors all that well. For the most part, we were a relatively self-contained social and economic unit, a nuclear family living in our own house. Dad was the sole wage-earner, and Mom stayed at home to tend to the house and kids. She was the primary disciplinarian, and Dad had little to do with our upbringing.

Still, in theory at least, Dad was the “head” of the household, especially where control of the finances was concerned. But I’m reminded of the famous line from the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding, spoken by the main character’s mother: “The man is the head, but the woman is the neck, and she can turn the head any way she wants.” At some level, I think, Dad knew this to be true, and didn’t always know how to respond to my mother’s more forceful personality.

Contrast all of this with the kind of household that was the basic unit of the Roman society into which Paul wrote his letters. “Household” was not a synonym for “nuclear family.” Yes, it included parents and their children. But it also included slaves and other servants and employees, plus anyone who by agreement was allowed to join the household for mutually beneficial reasons. By Roman law, the man was the paterfamilias, though there were households headed by women, as was the case with Lydia in Philippi. The paterfamilias was the lord and master who had near-absolute power to decide the fates of those in his household. He had legal authority over his wife, and children could be sold into slavery or put to death.

The broader cultural expectation, of course, was that the paterfamilias would discharge his responsibilities honorably, in a way that benefited society. But as you can imagine, some men ruled their households with iron fists, and there was little anyone could do about it.

. . .

WHEN PAUL WRITES his instructions to Christian households in both Ephesians and Colossians, much of what he says seems to reflect and reinforce the patriarchy of the day, and as I’ve suggested already, some men today still leverage that fact to their own selfish advantage, thinking they are biblically justified in doing so.

But just think about that for a moment, in the context of what Paul says in Colossians 3 and elsewhere. This is the man who just a few verses earlier proclaimed that in the community made new through the death and resurrection of Jesus, “there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all” (Col 3:11, NIV). Similarly, in Galatians 3:28, he says, “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” He says these things to gatherings of believers who bring their cultural prejudices and patriarchal values into their new life of worship together. Gentiles worshiped side by side with Jews; slaves with former slaves and slave owners; men and women. All were in Christ, and Christ was in all.

How can we read that man as simply saying, “Just keep doing what you’re doing”?

Paul has no power to set aside Roman law, nor would it have been wise for him to try to do so. He had no power to transform society from the outside in. But as an apostle, teaching and caring for new believers in Christ, he had the opportunity to transform society from the inside out. Christian households would be different from other Roman households, because churches would gather there and all would be transformed together by the Spirit as they sought to put on their new humanity. And that, of course, had implications for their family relationships, as we’ll see next.