“Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her, that He might sanctify and cleanse her with the washing of water by the word.” — Ephesians 5:25-26 (NKJV)
Paul spends eleven verses talking very specifically about husbands and wives. There is a tendency in some circles to grab the small phrase in verse 32, where he says he is talking about Christ and the church, and use it to reframe the entire passage as a metaphor as if Paul wasn’t really talking about marriage at all. That doesn’t hold up. If the whole thing were just a metaphor for Christ and the church, why would he spend that much space giving very specific instructions to husbands and wives? Paul uses that phrase to point out that the grand relationship is actually Christ and the church, and that human marriage is meant to be a reflection of that, not the other way around.
What he describes is a specific design. Wives are called to submit to their husbands’ leadership the way the church submits to Christ. Husbands are called to love and sacrifice for their wives the way Christ loved and gave himself for the church. That’s the picture. And it is a genuinely beautiful one when it works the way it’s supposed to. The problem is that we are humans, and our sin nature has a way of mucking up even the most beautiful design.
Here is where it gets complicated, and where I think a lot of honest conversation tends to stop. When the system breaks down, both sides tend to make their obedience contingent on the other person going first. The husband says he’ll sacrifice once she submits. The wife says she’ll submit once he leads and puts her first. And so both sides wait, and nothing moves. But Christ didn’t make going to the cross contingent on the Church doing the right thing. He sacrificed for people who were actively working against him. That’s the standard Paul is holding up for husbands. And wives aren’t called to submit only to husbands who are leading perfectly. If that were the condition, it wouldn’t be much of a calling at all.
I’ll be straight with you, I don’t have this figured out and I’m not going to pretend I do. I think that this is one of the hardest teachings in the New Testament to actually live out, for both sides. In my observation, it’s easy for a wife to follow a husband’s leadership when he’s heading exactly where she wanted to go anyway. That’s not really submission, that’s just walking in the same direction. It gets real when he points somewhere she doesn’t want to go. And on the other side, it’s easy for a man to lead and sacrifice when he’s being respected. The harder question is what he does when he isn’t.
I don’t have a tidy answer to what happens when one side consistently refuses to hold up their end. Paul doesn’t address the breakdown here. Other passages handle that. What I do know is that the calling on each side isn’t contingent. We are human, and we’re much more focused on how we are treated than how we treat others.