Permission to be Married

Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord.

For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body.

Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing.

 Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it;

Ephesians 5.

These can be challenging verses.  Enough so that the official Church header to this chapter has the extremely mealy-mouthed description “Husbands and wives should love each other.”  Right.

It has been suggested that one way of making sense of these verses is to see that Paul is giving people permission to do what they might want to do anyway but that their culture might tell them not to.  For instance, in Roman culture and other cultures of the empire, a man loving his wife could be seen as unmanly.

Another possibility is that Paul is giving people a way to elevate the role that their culture expects of them.  Instead of just being something you have to do, it becomes something that moves you more towards God.  For instance, in a culture like that prevailing in ancient Rome where women were very much expected to do as their husbands told them, Paul is giving them a gospel pattern for this cultural expectation.  In a bourgeois culture where men are expected to be affectionate and dote and cater to their wives, Paul is giving them a nobler way of doing it.

These are possibilities.  I don’t know if any of them are true or not.