FIRST READING Isaiah 29:11–19
11 The vision of all this has become for you like the words of a sealed document. If it is given to those who can read, with the command, “Read this,” they say, “We cannot, for it is sealed.” 12 And if it is given to those who cannot read, saying, “Read this,” they say, “We cannot read.” 13 The LORD said:
Because these people draw near with their mouths and honor me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me, and their worship of me is a human commandment learned by rote; 14 so I will again do amazing things with this people, shocking and amazing. The wisdom of their wise shall perish, and the discernment of the discerning shall be hidden. 15 Ha! You who hide a plan too deep for the LORD, whose deeds are in the dark, and who say, “Who sees us? Who knows us?” 16 You turn things upside down! Shall the potter be regarded as the clay? Shall the thing made say of its maker, “He did not make me”; or the thing formed say of the one who formed it, “He has no understanding”? 17 Shall not Lebanon in a very little while become a fruitful field, and the fruitful field be regarded as a forest? 18 On that day the deaf shall hear the words of a scroll, and out of their gloom and darkness the eyes of the blind shall see. 19 The meek shall obtain fresh joy in the LORD, and the neediest people shall exult in the Holy One of Israel.
PSALM Psalm 14
1 Fools say in their hearts, “There is no God.” They are corrupt, every deed is vile; there is no one who does any good. 2 The LORD looks down from heaven upon us all, to see if there is anyone who is wise, who seeks after God. 3 They have all proved faithless; all alike have turned bad; there is none who does good; no, not one. 4 Have they no knowledge, all those evildoers who eat up my people like bread and do not call upon the LORD? 5 See how they tremble with fear, because God is in the company of the righteous. 6 Your aim is to confound the plans of the afflicted, but the LORD is their refuge. 7 Oh, that Israel’s deliverance would come out of Zion! When the LORD restores the fortunes of the people, Jacob will rejoice and Israel be glad.
SECOND READING Ephesians 5:22–33
22 Wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord. 23 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 Savior. 24 Just as the church is subject to Christ, so also wives ought to be, in everything, to their husbands. 25 Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, 26 in order to make her holy by cleansing her with the washing of water by the word, 27 so as to present the church to himself in splendor, without a spot or wrinkle or anything of the kind — yes, so that she may be holy and without blemish. 28 In the same way, husbands should love their wives as they do their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29 For no one ever hates his own body, but he nourishes and tenderly cares for it, just as Christ does for the church, 30 because we are members of his body. 31 For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. 32 This is a great mystery, and I am applying it to Christ and the church. 33 Each of you, however, should love his wife as himself, and a wife should respect her husband.
GOSPEL Mark 7:1–13
1 Now when the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around him, 2 they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing them. 3 (For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders; 4 and they do not eat anything from the market unless they wash it and there are also many other traditions that they observe, the washing of cups, pots, and bronze kettles.) 5 So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, “Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” 6 He said to them, “Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written,
‘This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; 7 in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.’
8 You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.” 9 Then he said to them, “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition! 10 For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother’; and, ‘Whoever speaks evil of father or mother must surely die.’ 11 But you say that if anyone tells father or mother, ‘Whatever support you might have had from me is Corban’ (that is, an offering to God) — 12 then you no longer permit doing anything for a father or mother, 13 thus making void the word of God through your tradition that you have handed on. And you do many things like this.”
GODS DESIGN FOR MARRIAGE
I saw a cartoon somewhere which showed a preacher crouched behind a pulpit that was arranged like a fortress. He was peering out through a crack in what looked like a machine gun nest. The preacher says to the congregation, “Today my text is Ephesians 5:22, ‘wives, submit to your husbands.” Today we have another one of those texts that I’ve been very reluctant to preach on for quite some time. For one, it’s not on the top ten list of the feminist movement of America. And number two, it was a text that came up during one of my seminary classes and it generated a lot of very heated discussion. As you can imagine, the class was divided into those who saw the passage as patriarchal and oppressive and those who held a more fundamental view. Needless to say, the class ended on a very tense note and discussion over the next few weeks was tenuous at best. I think we can all agree that this passage has been a difficult one for Christians to digest for many decades.
I heard a story the other day about a missionary in the depths of the Amazon who was talking to a native who had five wives. The missionary said, “You are breaking God’s law. You must tell four of the women that you are no longer their husband.” The native thought for a few moments, and then said, “I’ll wait here; you tell them.” Maybe it would have been better for me to have written an article about it in the Rock. But as I’ve said before, I didn’t write the Bible; all I can do is deliver to you the truth.
As I was preparing for today’s sermon, I was reminded of the final I took for my public speaking class. The day of the final I was told that after the written portion, I would be able to choose a topic from a list and I would have 15 minutes to prepare an extemporaneous speech. To ease my anxiety, I was told not to worry, the topics from which I was to choose, were ones I was guaranteed to have an opinion on. They were right. The topic I chose was, how to dispose of a dead body. I received an A in the class. Like the topic for the final, it’s hard to read this passage and not have an opinion.
In an age where the subject of equal rights is of great concern, a passage like the one from our epistle lesson, appointed for today, is one that people will have an opinion on. However, there’s a problem. The problem is, people most often misunderstand what Paul is saying here. Like my seminary class, too many view Paul’s words here as oppressive and patriarchal, while a good many others view this passage in a literalistic or fundamental way.
If you’ve been taught that Paul’s message here is that women should be relegated to a subservient place in our society, than the teaching was wrong. Paul is not saying that women should be barefoot and pregnant, or seen and not heard. Paul isn’t being a chauvinist. I know this passage is often placed next to the Corinthians passage where Paul says that women need to be silent in church, (1Cor. 13:34) as some sort of evidence about Paul’s hatred of women. However, like the Corinthians passage, Paul’s statements are misunderstood. First of all, Paul had a great respect for women. Take Pricilla for example, in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians.
The New Testament references to Priscilla and Aquila make it clear that, despite the male-dominant culture, Aquila was not the leader and Priscilla his assistant. In fact, of the seven times the two names are mentioned together, Priscilla is listed first, five of those times (Acts 18:18-19, 26; Rom. 16:3; 2 Tim. 4:19). Because it was the custom to list the husband’s name first, this reversal could very well indicate Priscilla’s importance in the minds of the New Testament writers Luke and Paul. This could also be seen as evidence that Priscilla wasn’t teaching as a secondary partner under the ‘covering’ of her husband’s spiritual authority. Again both Paul and Luke see Priscilla as a valued member of the ministerial community. Therefore, before we can truly understand what Paul is saying here we first need to go back to Genesis and see what God’s original intension was from creation.
Paul as a Pharisee was well educated and understood the book of Genesis as well as God’s intension at creation. In Genesis 2:19-24 we read, “Now out of the ground the Lord God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” Now skip back one chapter and in Genesis 1:27-28 we read, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them.
From the beginning God created and blessed humankind, male and female to take care of His creation, to be in a relationship with Him and to mutually support each other. It wasn’t until sin entered into the world that the natural order of God’s creation was corrupted. Original sin is placing one’s self before God; wanting to be like God. (Genesis 3:5) This is where this whole problem of race, sex and class struggle comes from. The sin in the garden started a cycle of self-centeredness that drives us to think in terms of subjugation of others. Because of sin, we think in terms of wanting to be in charge, to be the boss and thus failing to recognize that we are always subject to God.
Additionally, in Galatians 3:27-28 Paul wrote; “For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. One in Christ. That doesn’t sound to me like Paul is putting one over the other rather that with Christ as our head, we are workers with Him in God’s kingdom, for the glory of God. However, we do need to look at the practical. In any organization there are those who have the burden of leadership.
Whether it’s a business, social club, military, church or a family, there are those who are considered the leaders. If everyone held the same station, how would anything ever get accomplished? As a supervisor in the military I would often go and ask the folks that worked for me their thoughts on a subject in order to gain their unique perspective. And just as often, I would take those thoughts and pass them on to my superiors. And what I found was that by working cooperatively together we could usually solve a problem much more quickly and efficiently than if I were simply making decisions on my own. In the same way God has given us responsibilities and we are to work together to accomplish the work of the kingdom; not as male and female, master or slave, Jew or Greek, but as fellow workers in accomplishing God’s desire for us. Again there will be those who take what I just said and say, it proves my point.
However, to truly understand this passage we need to back up one verse and see what Paul wrote just prior to this passage. In verse 20 Paul wrote, “And further, submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Other translations phrase it differently by rendering the passage as “be subject to one another in the fear of Christ.” If we are subject to one another, than how can we see this as an oppressive passage? If we truly submit ourselves to one another out of fear of Christ, how could we then oppress or dominate another person? What Paul is talking about is good order within the family.
In the beginning God created the family when he commanded Adam and Eve to be fruitful and multiply. And in order to enable that command to be accomplished, God made us uniquely male and female to share in the work. The key here is shared. A man and a woman enter into marriage to mutually support each other. Again back to Genesis 1, “God blessed them.” The blessing wasn’t strictly for Adam nor was the blessing strictly for Eve. God blessed them and told them to be fruitful. God made Eve to share in the work that God gave to Adam. God didn’t create us to simply wander aimlessly about, God created us with responsibilities. But as I said, sin came into the world which changed our focus from God to ourselves and thus changed our definition of the marital relationship.
Again looking at the Ephesians reading, we have a pair of admonitions, one for the wife and one for the husband. I’ll address these in reverse order because I think this is an area that men have failed to fully understand. First we have the warning for the husband: husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church. Paul is telling us husbands that we are to cherish our wives because Christ surely cherished the church. To cherish means to treat as dear, to care for tenderly, to regard our wife as a person of enormous value. Jesus said to the infant church, “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you. Dwell in my love.” How are we to love God? With heart and mind and soul and strength. That’s the language of cherishing.
Now, I’m very reluctant to say that all wives feel a particular way about anything. I suppose you can find some wives who are exceptions to any rule. I was listening to satellite radio the other day and an old Joe Diffy song came on. The refrain of the song includes the phrase, “I met all my wives in a traffic jam; there’s just something women like about a pick-up man.” Evidently, some women are powerfully attracted to pick-up trucks and those who drive them. It takes all types. But I think I am safe in saying that almost all wives want to be cherished. A prominent woman in the newspaper business said, “I can find lots of men to love me, if you define that term loosely, but that’s not enough. I want a husband who will cherish me.” Husbands, when our wives look into our eyes, they ought to see that we cherish them. They need to know that we love, appreciate and care for them just as Christ cares for His church.
The second implication for husbands in our reading is that we’re to serve our wives as Christ served the church. Consider at least one way that Christ served. On Maundy Thursday before He sat to eat the Passover He humbled Himself and washed the feet of the disciples. Jesus also went on to say, “I am among you as one who serves.” We can also look at this in a different way, Husbands, with Christ as our example, we should be the top servants in the home. And at times this may mean we need to set aside our agendas in order to support our wives.
Now I’m not a fan of Garth Brooks but I do have to recognize when someone shows that they have their priorities straight. Several years ago, Garth Brooks skipped the Country Music awards where he was to receive the Entertainer of the Year award. The reason he was a no show was because it was too close to the scheduled date his wife was to give birth to their second child. But Garth’s actions aren’t as typical as they should be. Truth be told, we act more like the servee rather than the server.
Historically speaking, husbands haven’t been noted as the primary servers around the house: Our wives have. If we aspire to be leaders, in the New Testament style, it begins with service. However, it goes beyond service. We must be willing to lay our lives on the line for our wives, even as Christ died for the Church and for the rest of humanity.
Using the language of teamwork in combat, if someone has to dive on a live grenade for the sake of the family, that’s the husband’s role. There was a comment I heard some time ago from a young wife, she said, “If my husband loves me as Christ loves the church, if he cherishes me, puts my happiness above his own, and is willing to sacrifice unselfishly for me, I’ll be more than happy to take all the leadership he wants to hand out.”
This of course make for a great segue to the second admonition: “wives, be submissive to your husbands.” First, we need to understand that this isn’t an isolated scriptural command. You’ll also find it in Colossians 3:18, Titus 2:5, and I Peter 3:1. Submission here doesn’t mean to be a doormat or a “yes-person.” Submission does not infer that a husband should make unilateral decisions without discussing them with his wife. It means that they work with each other as God originally intended; as partners. Each are equally as responsible for the decisions and needs within the marriage. Of course people are different and one person may have a talent that the other doesn’t. This means they complement each other. For example, if the wife is better with finances, then it only makes sense that she should manage the family finances. Sometimes this may mean that traditional roles get reversed.
Terry and I have friends where she is the “bread winner and he was the stay at home dad.” Does this mean that the wife was somehow the leader and him the follower? For me this is a prime example of how mutual support is supposed to work in a family. The situation dictated that one of the parents had to stay at home and she happened to have the job that support the family as a single source of income. Both understood Paul’s reason for writing this passage. Submission doesn’t mean being subservient. Submission means to acknowledge the sovereignty of God and to respect His delegated authority. It’s a concept Christ understood.
Jesus submitted to established authority, even when it was wrong. He acknowledged the authority of an evil high priest and of the pagan governor of his country, Pontius Pilate. In Philippians 2 we read that He was “obedient unto death, the death on the cross. Wherefore God has highly exalted him and given him a name that is above every name.” When we’,re submissive to God’s delegated authority, it’s not degrading. It’s our glory as a Christian. So what does it mean for a wife to be submissive to a husband?
Being submissive means first to look to him for leadership in spiritual matters. Husbands listen up! It’s our responsibility to see that the family gets to church, that children read their Bibles and pray, and that the family is growing spiritually. Too often, in our society, husbands refuse to accept their responsibility as the family spiritual leader. This of course forces the wife to do it by default. What example does that set for the kids? The harsh reality is, that likely when the children are old enough to decide for themselves, they, especially the boys, are more likely to follow a spiritually dead father than a spiritually alive mother. Husbands don’t neglect your spiritual responsibilities and force your wife to take up the slack. It’s our calling to be the spiritual leaders in our homes. There was a saying that I think is very true. The family that prays together stays together.
This of course brings us to a final practical point. We should support each other in not only making decisions but in supporting those decisions. I’ll bet, if we were to be honest, we’ve all played the pit mommy against daddy thing. As children we’d run to the parent that we thought would give into our requests. When husbands and wives make decisions together, asking one parent is like asking the other. This also means supporting a decision made by your spouse, even when it’s easier to give in. Husbands cherish your wives as Christ cherishes the church. It’s a big command and to fulfill this command, as well as being the spiritual leader of your home, you’re going to need all the love and support of your wife.
In closing I think it’s appropriate to read what Solomon had to say about a good wife. In Proverbs 31 starting in verse 10 we read: “A wife of noble character who can find? She is worth far more than rubies. Her husband has full confidence in her and lacks nothing of value. She brings him good, not harm, all the days of her life. She selects wool and flax and works with eager hands. She is like the merchant ships, bringing her food from afar. She gets up while it is still night; she provides food for her family and portions for her female servants. She considers a field and buys it; out of her earnings she plants a vineyard. She sets about her work vigorously; her arms are strong for her tasks. She sees that her trading is profitable, and her lamp does not go out at night. In her hand she holds the distaff and grasps the spindle with her fingers. She opens her arms to the poor and extends her hands to the needy. When it snows, she has no fear for her household; for all of them are clothed in scarlet. She makes coverings for her bed; she is clothed in fine linen and purple. Her husband is respected at the city gate, where he takes his seat among the elders of the land. She makes linen garments and sells them, and supplies the merchants with sashes. She is clothed with strength and dignity; she can laugh at the days to come. She speaks with wisdom, and faithful instruction is on her tongue. She watches over the affairs of her household and does not eat the bread of idleness. Her children arise and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praises her: “Many women do noble things, but you surpass them all.” Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting; but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised. Honor her for all that her hands have done, and let her works bring her praise at the city gate.
Husbands cherish your wife. Wives submit to your husband and both of you do it as Christ cherishes the church and was submissive to our heavenly Father.
Amen