“Brothers and sisters: Be subordinate to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives should be subordinate to their husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of his wife just as Christ is head of the church…” How should we understand this admonition? In the Greco-Roman world of that time, the social order was very hierarchical, that is, every person had a place in an ascending order of importance from slave to ruler. Persons believed that the social order could only be maintained if everyone knew his or her place in the social hierarchy and did not challenge his or her place. The author ‘baptizes’ this understanding of hierarchy and social order by incorporating it into his teaching of how the Christian household should be organized.
With two thousand years of progress in our understanding of the nature of marriage, we would not say that a Christian household should be structured as a strict hierarchy in which the husband is the head and everyone else is subordinate to him, especially his wife. Instead, we focus on the love that a husband and wife must have for each other –as this author does – and how this love must reflect the love of Christ who loves each of us with a deep and faithful intimacy. It is this deep and faithful intimacy of Christ to us that every husband and wife must reflect in their marriage which they do when they are faithful to each other, love each other exclusively and give of themselves to each other totally. When a husband and wife experience such a deep intimacy in love, their marriage becomes what it should be; an equal partnership in love in which each respects the other and each seeks to serve the needs of the other.
Today’s scripture text reminds us that we have to read the scriptures with care, and with the help of Church teaching, so as to distinguish between what is unchanging truth and what simply reflects the historical context in which the author was writing.


Fr. Mark Hallinan, S.J.