Families: Total Submission (2)

Ephesians 5:21

You outrank me, what can I do for you?

Recap

With Thanksgiving and Christmas coming up, we are doing a short series on what the Bible has to say about families. The Bible presents an ideal of what family should be, then it presents a lot of examples of the craziness and brokenness of real families. We live in the tension between the real and the ideal.

Knowing that we are not alone in our craziness, today we look at a small step we can take towards the ideal. We some beautiful and oft-quoted advice in Ephesians 5:22

Ephesians 5:22 - The Trap

22 Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord.

Women in Submission to men! More specifically, wives in total submission to their husbands. Now, this may offend or challenge some of you. It’s the Bible, it is true, and it speaks to us today. But maybe this gets a little more palatable when we look at the word for “Submit.”

Define Submission

It turns out that, no, it makes it worse. The word for submit is mostly a military term. Our word “subordinate” is pretty literal. It is being placed in a position or hierarchy below another. Like a sergeant outranks his … privates.

So when you say “I submit to you” you are essentially saying "You outrank me."

This is one of the Hard statements of the Bible: "Women, you must submit to your husbands!" This is a hard thing, but it is absolutely part of God’s plan for family.

Let’s just stop there and close in prayer.

Absence of the Word

Ready for the great reveal? Ready for the "aha" moment I had this week? I started my study by looking in the Greek... and I had the hardest time. Here is my literal translation of the Greek.

Wives, so to your own husbands...

The word submit isn't even in the passage! English translations, to avoid Paul's tendency for epically long run-on sentences, can do us a disservice here. You see a new sentence. Mine even has a paragraph break here, which is a little bizarre. He is addressing a new subset of the audience... but the word submit is borrowed from the previous verse.

Whatever he means here by submit, it is borrowed in the same sense and application as from the previous verse. He, in the very same sentence, turns to apply what he just said up there to a particular group of people.

So, seeing as verse 4:21 precedes this verse, and verse 22 is only a run-on from the previous, let's look at 4:21

Ephesians 4:21

21 Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.

So take all that we said about submitting and, women forget about your husbands.

Okay, no. Don't forget about what that says, you do have to submit to your husbands. But husbands, you have to submit to your wives. She is a "one another." So is that guy. All the peoples here are one-anothers.

I have never done this, and all preachers have to at some point make you turn and say something to each other. So turn to your neighbor, and this is a military term, so you are going to salute and say "You outrank me."

You outrank me.

If you have family here, make sure to target them, "you outrank me!"

Applied to Family

So we have this command to mutually submit, each of us to each other.

Paul takes this idea of mutual submission, of "you outrank me" and then applies it to the most fundamental of human relationships, those inside the family. He covers the categories: wives, husbands, children and parents, and a category we don't have in the US anymore, masters and slaves. All the household categories.

If we go through each one, we can argue he is carrying on this idea of submission.

Wives, submit to your husbands, borrowing the very verb from 5:21. Enough about that.

Husbands, love your wives with the sacrificial giving-all kind of love Christ has for his church. That is at least this kind of submission.

Children, obey your parents. Parents, don't exasperate your children. A mutual submission within the bounds of an authority structure, but still mutual in expression.

Most obviously: slaves, submit to your masters as you would to God. Serve wholeheartedly as if serving the Lord...

and Most revolutionary: masters, you do the same.

Turning the social order on its head. Telling wives, children and slaves to submit and obey was totally expected and normal. Telling husbands, parents and masters to love, respect and obey was ridiculous, radical and revolutionary.

So does there remain some sense of hierarchy or authority structures here? Yes. Certainly with masters and slaves, certainly with parents and children, and it still seems, with wives and husbands. Though the headship of the following verses is more a metaphor of unity than the hierarchy we read into it... but...

the unifying idea, the launching point for all this application to family, the driving verb and the driving verse is Ephesians 5:21. Submit to one another...

Authority and leadership looks very different in Christianity. We cannot confuse authority with control. Control really has no place in Christian life. Confusing authority with control is the cause of much grief in the church, through church history, and in the family. Power, leadership among disciples of Jesus Christ looks like servant-hood, looks like foot washing, looks like menial and degrading work for the good and comfort of others.

Submit to one another.... You outrank me

Practical Submission

If you outrank me, if that is kind of what submission means, than I basically have to do what you tell me to do. You are the boss of me. Since that can't possibly be true, let's see some other spots in Scripture before we do something crazy.

Galatians 5:13

13 You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another humbly in love.

more literally, be one another's slaves! Okay...

Philippians 2:3

3 Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves

Literally think more highly of others... and it goes on to hold Jesus up as a model for his humility that condescended to human form and death on a cross.

So, unfortunately, it appears we are stuck with a rather ridiculous idea. This "you outrank me" idea seems to be "Jesus" thing, a "Bible" thing and it is really supposed to be an "us" thing. And it obviously applies to family, since that is the first thing Paul turns to in Ephesians 5

What does this actually mean in practical terms?

Let's start by making this really simple. Then we can attempt to make this more complicated later. Let's live in the land of the ideal for a moment.

I will place your needs above my own. In other words, even more simply, I will turn to you and ask:

"What can I do for you?"

"What can I do for you?"

This would solve the tension of James 4:1-2

It is everyone wanting and not having and so killing. If everyone involved were instead asking each other "what can I do for you?" and then serving each other, there would be no conflict, no tension, no wanting and therefore no killing.

Obviously still in the world of the ideal.

Imagine that for a moment. Imagine everyone in your family asked each other this simple question and followed through.

You outrank me, what can I do for you?

Beautiful picture.

Two Major Objections

Now, let's face the real world. Because we live in the tension between the real and the ideal.

There are at least two major objections that could tear this whole beautiful ideal down.

Objection 1: Who Outranks Me

First: have you met my husband? Have you met my wife, my parent, my child? My cousin, my brother? They aren’t worthy of my respect or a dinner invitation, much less submission.

You submit, not because they are worthy, or because they "should" outrank you. You submit out of reverence to Christ.

Out of fear. Out of "awe". The one you are ultimately submitting to is Jesus Christ, who first submitted himself to death for you, to sin for you, and is raise to glory so you know he outranks you. Also, he is God, so he has got that on you as well.

You submit to one another, not because your one another is great. Sometimes they are, but this is real life, and quite often, in fact, always, they are sinners just like you.

You submit in reverence to Christ. And that is the case in each example in the family that Paul goes through here in Ephesians. Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. Husbands, love as Christ... Slaves, obey as you would Christ, and Master's the same; Christ is both of your Masters.

You submit to Christ... so you submit to one another. This is an application in practical love.

You claim to love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and soul? What is the next thing he requires of you?

Love your neighbor? Who is your neighbor, what does it look like to love a neighbor. To find someone and say "what can I do for you?"

Bandage the wounds, take you to get help, feed you.

What is true religion? James says, feeding woman and orphans.

What does this look like in family?

You outrank me, what can I do for you?

It isn't about worthiness, or their character, or really anything about them. It is about your obedience to God's command. It is in reverence, in fear, in awe, of Christ Jesus.

Objection 2: Operation Doormat

So now for the second objection: people are going to take advantage of me.

So, I get that I am actually submitting to Christ, but then the things that they ask me to do are menial, trivial or abusive.

Now often when the first two come up, we might just be making excuses for ourselves not to do this incredibly hard sacrificial kind of love. If, after some soul searching, you determine that to be the case, Man up, woman up, and serve.

But we know people who will take absolutely everything you have to give and suck up more. We also know people who can turn your willingness to serve into physical or emotional abuse. These are not good things.

Now, I do not have all the answers here. There is no passage on this in Ephesians 5. He does not go into the caveats or the what-ifs. But he does give us a model of what this looks like... he keeps referencing this Jesus character.

Now what did Jesus, perfect Son of God, actually do? In his case, he did not ask us what we wanted. He knew. Some very few people knew that they needed a Redeemer, a Savior... but mostly because God told them. No one, absolutely no one, was asking for someone to come and die on a cross, taking our sins upon themselves, and being raised from the dead...

but that was what we needed.

Jesus went straight to what we actually needed and submitted, served and met that need.

That neatly solves the problem of abusive relationships. What they truly need, even what they more deeply want, is not a target for abuse or a slave for their whims. They need structure or healing or discipline or consequence for actions. They need forgiveness, but they need truth;

Jesus was full of grace and truth.

Here is the tough part for us, the danger for us. Like the above objection, we could latch on to this idea and use it as an excuse for prescribing whatever we want on to other people's lives.

This is like when I buy Anna a new tech device for Christmas. Better yet, a video game that I want to play. "I know you will love this, you just didn't know that you needed it." But I am disguising my wants as her unexpressed wants so I can actually get what I want. That is just right back to my selfish desires.

Since we are not Jesus, it is very difficult for us to bypass the requests of others to get to the heart of someone else's needs. Sometimes it may be obvious: a person who is abusing their spouse does not need a punching bag but needs discipline; probably in prison. But often this is subtle thing.

So we have this simple phrase:

You outrank me, how can I help you?

and we can approach this at at least 3 levels

Beginner mode: just ask the question

Intermediate mode: do something with the answer

Advanced mode: discovering and meeting their deeper needs

Only by the grace of God

This is a hard thing.

This is love. Sacrificial love. Incredibly sacrificial.

We start with baby steps. We start with asking the question. Maybe once. Maybe once a day. We start by taking little steps towards the ideal.

But every step is only possible by the grace of God. Because he has modeled this love for us. He has enabled this love within us. He has given us the Holy Spirit to teach us this love and change us from the inside out. To give us the discernment to start to see and know people's truest needs.

We want to take a little step towards the beautiful ideal of family. We can only take a step in our ability and practice of love. We can, this coming week, especially at Thanksgiving, say in word and deed

“You outrank me, what can I do for you?”

And if you need it to be slightly less awkward, the first part is implied by just saying “What can I do for you.”

And by the grace of God, and only by the grace and power of God, we can move our real family just a bit towards the ideal.