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Submit and Run

19/8/2021

12 Comments

 

A Reflection on the Second Reading for August 22nd, 2021:
Twenty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time


Ephesians
4.32 – 5.1-2, 21-32


Brothers and sisters: Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you. Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.

Wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the Church, the body of which he is the Saviour. Just as the Church is subject to Christ, so also wives ought to be, in everything, to their husbands.

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her, in order to make her holy by cleansing her with the washing of water by the word, so as to present the Church to himself in splendour, without a spot or wrinkle or anything of the kind — yes, so that she may be holy and without blemish. In the same way, husbands should love their wives as they do their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hates his own body, but he nourishes and tenderly cares for it, just as Christ does for the Church, because we are members of his body.

For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. This is a great mystery, and I am applying it to Christ and the Church.
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How, in the name of all that’s good and holy, did this scripture passage wind up in my queue?! I have spent years on the lookout for Ephesians 5:21-32 and, whenever I catch a glimpse of it, I immediately do a 180 and run. St. Paul has many wonderful things to tell us through his epistles, but the way this particular passage has been interpreted and, dare I say, perverted in meaning, is just plain demoralizing.


On the other hand, let it never be said that I am a chicken. So, I resolved to engage with St. Paul’s words, write a reflection on them and make peace with them at long last.


However, it was tough. No lie: I pondered, read commentaries, and listened to videos for hours and, when I was done, I had no clearer an understanding of what St. Paul is saying than I did before I started.


Here are a few of the most common interpretations I discovered. Take 1: The husband is the head of the household. He should take his wife’s wishes into consideration. However, where they differ from his own, the husband’s will prevails. Take 2: The man is the spiritual head of the household and is responsible for his wife’s salvation. That is why his wife should submit to him. Take 3: Headship is the divine calling of a husband to take primary responsibility as leader, provider, and protector in the home. Submission is the calling of a wife to honour and affirm her husband’s leadership and help him carry it through. A husband should not abuse his headship but should love his wife and not debase her.


Other interpretations challenge the translation of certain words in the original Greek. For example, rather than “wives, submit to your husbands,” St. Paul’s words are more accurately translated as “wives go to battle for your husbands”; in other words, support your husband, defend your husband, have your husband’s back in all things.


For every interpretation, I readily found detractors. I did not find a definitive answer.


It was frustrating.


Then I began to reflect on who Jesus is and what, in His infinite generosity, He has revealed to me about Himself. First, Jesus loves women. Disrespect based on gender has no place in a Christ-like approach to others. Second, husbands and wives must always seek to support each other. Spouses working at cross purposes are not acting as one body. Third, when spouses cannot agree on decisions, they should pray to God for guidance, not simply adopt the husband’s point of view. Fourth, in washing the feet of the disciples and in dying to save us, Jesus has given us an example of servant leadership, which we all are called to follow, husbands and wives alike.


In my haste to be done with this scripture passage, I missed the gem at the end: that marriage is not about differentiation (he is the head and she is the helper). Instead, it is about amalgamation: two persons becoming one body just as Christ and the Church are one body. And that is something I can run toward.



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Donna Davis

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12 Comments
Donna Benigno
19/8/2021 08:38:12 am

Thanks Donna for your reflection today. This is for sure a troubling passage of scripture and I appreciated your outlook in it. God Bless.

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Donna Davis
20/8/2021 11:25:49 am

Bless you, Donna. I have found it troubling too. I read some of the interpretation and immediately thought: "Whaaa? That can't be right ..."

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Alana
19/8/2021 08:43:54 am

Thank you so much Donna. I totally related to this - I used to always shirk at this passage and want to avoid it and if I’m honest it made me angry. Until - I heard an interpretation several years ago while listening to Catholic Answers that I found exceedingly helpful. It explained it like this - that what “submitting/being subject to” really means is saying yes to placing yourself “under the mission of”. So what is your husband’s mission? To love you (his wife) and to lay down his life for you. With this perspective - it is easy for me to see that this is something that is NOT the least bit degrading or diminishing of women - furthest from it - it is an expression of complete self-gift of love from husband to wife (or Christ to each of us). That is still something that is hard for me to receive and accept - whether it’s Christ doing it (or God willing one day a human man) - because I often don’t feel worthy of a love like this. But it is something I certainly WANT to be able to receive and say yes to - wholeheartedly - because I AM worthy of that kind of love - not because of anything I do - but because of who I am in Christ - His beloved daughter. The harder part - I think is that it also says: “Be subject to one another.” Which I think means I too have to love the other with the same kind of 100% self-sacrificial love. An even harder task. 😬 Thanks be to God for His never ending mercy, love, and grace that help me to receive His love for me and share it with those around me. Amen! And Amen for amalgamation that we can run towards! 😊🙏🏻💕xo

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Donna Davis
20/8/2021 11:53:57 am

Well put, Alana! THAT is what the Good News is about: laying down our lives for love of each other and trying always to honour the gift of that kind of self-sacrificing love. We often hear in popular culture that "people just want to be loved," but allowing yourself to accept and receive the kind of love described in this scripture passage is tough stuff. It is truly humbling, and not at all about who gets the final say on how long the countertop should be (which, by the way, was one of the examples I heard a guy use when giving a sermon on this passage: disagreement between wife and husband about length of countertop and he's such a good husband that he let her decide, and I'm thinking man, this goes so much deeper than countertops, buddy). 🙄 ...😁

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Sandy Graves
20/8/2021 07:01:57 am

I, too, was one of those who discarded this passage. Refused to have it read at our wedding. Submit? I think not!!! And then God gave me a whole new perspective on the meaning and intent. I am being asked to be as subject to my husband as I am to the Lord …. Good opportunity to reflect on whether I actually yield myself to God’s will. And when we pray with it together as a couple, my husband is asked to reflect on whether he loves me as Christ loves me. And my new experience is that when we live our lives in this manner, our sacrament comes alive. I needed so much maturity to get to this understanding and am so grateful that He was patient enough to help me get there. Thanks for your reflection!

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Donna Davis
20/8/2021 12:11:13 pm

Sandy, I believe it is especially hard for women to be loved in this way. Love is patient and kind. I often ask myself if I am patient and kind with myself. Do I submit to the kind of love that Christ wants for me and wants to give me? Or, do I get tied up in the pressure of self-sufficiency (bringing home the bacon and frying it up in the pan)? Am I humble enough to need other people and to need God in a daily, hourly way? Or, do I call on God only when my own will fails and I need a bail-out? It's as you say: we need to be seeking, actively seeking, God's will first and then be humble enough to yield to it. You hit that nail right on the head! Thank you!

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Noreen
20/8/2021 08:26:42 am

I love this Donna — from stem to stern. The struggling through and the landing!

I had to wrestle with this passage as a new Christian while taking Greek in university. Translating Ephesians as a class was our entire final year — translating and then critiquing each other’s translations for months. It was way more fun than it sounds:) One of the fun parts is that there aren’t any paragraphs in the original text. Actually, there isn’t any punctuation or capitalization either. All that is added by translators using context.

My favourite part of the class debate was which paragraph, which thought cluster, did St. Paul attach this phrase to: ‘…submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ’. Did he mean it as a capper to verses 1 to 20 or a header to verses 22 to 33?

Was the participle (verb acting like an adverb) ‘submitting’ meant to be the final item in a list of how Christians should treat each other if they live in love? (This list is the bulk of Eph 5 skipped over in this weekend’s reading, verses 3 to 20, take a boo:)

Or was this participle ‘submitting’ meant as the first instruction, invitation, in how husbands and wives should treat each other as they live in love? They are to live ‘submitting to one another’ and what follows are really two ways of expressing submission. Amalgamation indeed!

Myself, I think St. Paul was a poet and he meant ‘Submitting to one another out if reverence for Christ’ as the pivot point. As a fulcrum bearing the weight of both what came before and what comes after.

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Donna Davis
20/8/2021 12:29:36 pm

Get.Out.Of.Town! Did you really study this passage in Greek?! That is so exciting! I have been fascinated by the punctuation thing. I recall seeing photos of ancient manuscripts, and there wasn't a comma or semi-colon to be seen, and I thought, "Aha! Sorting all that out has certainly kept a lot of people up late at night." I like your interpretation, Noreen. Full disclosure: in my earlier years I would always give St. Paul the mental side-eye because of this passage. But, I have grown to love him, and your description of him as a poet rings true. He certainly was passionate, and he lived his life so as to keep the main thing the main thing.

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Lindsay
21/8/2021 07:46:57 am

Donna - thank you so much for your humorous, humble and honest approach here. What a gift it is to open the door to these discussions and to explore these ideas that are so important to our identity as women! May God bless you and your marriage abundantly!

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Donna Davis
22/8/2021 02:39:45 pm

And yours too, Lindsay. What a gift you and Rob are to his ministry and everyone you both serve so faithfully!

You mentioned humble and humorous in your comment, so you’ll appreciate this: months ago I was scheduled to serve as a lector at Mass this morning and wound up reading this very passage — the extended version. This was me: 😑. This was God: 😝.

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Stephanie Potter
22/8/2021 07:12:59 pm

You did a good job wrestling with common assumptions to cut through to a meaningful moment of truth - any passage that references spouses is meant to be applied to Jesus and His Bride too. I think there’s a lifetime worth of insight to unpack there!

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Donna Davis
22/8/2021 07:55:41 pm

I agree, Stephanie. St. Paul acknowledges that this oneness is a great mystery, and surface treatment is not going to disclose to us the richness of what Christ has done and is doing in the sacrament of marriage and in the Church. A lifetime of exploration, for sure. Blessings on you and Tim and your beautiful family!

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