Ephesians: Lecture 38
Speaker Notes
The Collect for Lent
Almighty and Everlasting God, who hatest nothing that thou hast made and dost forgive the sins of all who are penitent: create and make in us new and contrite hearts, that we worthily lamenting our sins and acknowledging our wretchedness may obtain of Thee, the God of all mercy, perfect remission and forgiveness: through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians 5:21-33 The Husband and Wife Relationship (Part 2)
Instructions for Christian Households
21 Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.
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 Savior. 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 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.” 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.
The Mystery of Marriage [As Iron Sharpens Iron] by Mike (Michael Ross) Mason (1985 edition)
(chapter 6 Submission pages 142-143)
That is why matrimony may correctly be termed a holy order, a special category, in fact, of the religious life. It is a monasticism in which the vow and discipline of chastity becomes the vow and discipline of fidelity, in which the vow of poverty is translated into an unqualified sharing of the totality of one’s life and possessions, in which the vow of stability applies not to a place or a fraternity but to a particular person, and in which the vow of obedience is practiced not in community but in partnership, and not toward a superior but to an equal. Matrimony is a holy order because in it the meaning of holy is interpreted in the light of its homonym wholly: for only through wholeness of dedication can human life begin to approach wholeness, or holiness.
(chapter 6 Submission page 138)
The fact of the matter is that holy matrimony, like other holy orders, was never intended as a comfort station for lazy people. On the contrary, it is a systematic program of deliberate and thoroughgoing self-sacrifice. A man’s home is not his castle so much as his monastery, and if he happens to be treated like a king there, then it is only so that he might be better enabled to become a servant. For marriage is intended to be an environment in which he will be lovingly yet persistently confronted with the plainest and ugliest evidence of his sinfulness and thus encouraged on a daily basis to repent and to change.
(chapter 6 Submission page 139)
In marriage it so happens that the Lord has devised a particularly gentle (but no less disciplined and effective) means for helping men and women to humble themselves, to surrender their errant wills.
(chapter 6 Submission page 142)
… Just as the man who loves God will almost certainly incur greater suffering in this world than the man who does not, so it is that a man who loves a woman may, by virtue of that very fact, open himself up to deeper levels of suffering than a man who will not commit himself to any love at all. For it is not in the nature of love to deflect pain, but rather to absorb it, and to absorb greater and greater amounts of it. Marriage gives a face to suffering, just as it gives a face to joy, and thereby enables the suffering not to be lessened, but rather to be transformed from something inhuman and faceless into something fully human, something which registers in the depths of relational personhood. It is true of all intimacy, but especially of marriage, that it creates the unique and miraculous circumstances in which suffering cannot be extracted from love.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer Letters and Papers from Prison (Chapter 3 “A Wedding Sermon from a prison cell” (May 1943)”, page 28)
… It is not your love that sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love.
Jürgen’s Blog