As a side note: it is safe to look up the word subordinate in google, but if you just look up the word submissive it does NOT take you straight to the definition, but rather yields some… less than savory results.
As to your question: you’ve got a contextual problem, because what you quoted was NOT the message of what Paul is saying at the end of Ephesians 5.
Let’s look at the whole thing in context, and I’m going to highlight some key parts:
***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 head of his wife just as Christ is head of the church, he himself the savior of the body.
As the church is subordinate to Christ, so wives should be subordinate to their husbands in everything.
Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ loved the church and handed himself over for her to sanctify her, cleansing her by the bath of water with the word, that he might present to himself the church in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. So (also) husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one hates his own flesh but rather nourishes and cherishes it, even as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body. “For this reason a man shall leave (his) father and (his) mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”
This is a great mystery, but I speak in reference to Christ and the church.
**In any case, each one of you should love his wife as himself, and the wife should respect her husband. **
Okay, let’s start off with the portion I highlighted in
RED:
Husbands and wives are called to be SUBORDINATE to each other. But submission here is not meant in the modern sense of the word. Submission here means to be under the mission of… we are called to SUPPORT (be under) the MISSION (salvation) of one another. In other words, in marriage we are to subvert our selfishness for satisfaction to support one another in our spiritual walk with Christ.
Now, let’s move to the part I highlighted in
ORANGE:
Wives are called to subordinate themselves to their husbands and all are called to subordinate themselves to the Christ. Is that such a heavy burden? No. We are called to follow the teachings of Christ (spiritual leadership) and to reverence the Lord. This is about a fundamental need of men: the need to be respected… men have a need to know that their wives respect them both privately and publicly. A woman here is being informed: a happy relationship with a healthy male involves giving praise for when he does right. Women are being told to: 1) build up their husbands to a healthy ego rather than trying to subvert them and 2) to follow the lead of the husband where it is appropriate.
Okay, now let’s talk about that
GREEN bit:
Men are being told that we need to love our wives… because affirming love and loyalty is IMPORTANT to a wife. Men are psychologically better at giving respect, but poorer at expressing emotions (a side effect of the fact that what we desire is respect rather than emotion). Paul is telling us here that we are to express love to our wives. He furthermore clarifies how this love is to take shape: in the form of the love of Christ (aka, expressing love does not mean sex). In other words, in expressing this love, the husband is to care for his wife, to provide strong and correct spiritual leadership (side note: I really can’t stand when I go to mass and see a whole family kneeling EXCEPT the father…
).
Paul sums this whole passage up in ONE sentence, that bit in
PURPLE:
Basically, thousands of years before the field of psychology was introduced and gender studies commenced in formal manner, St Paul is offering keen insight on the relationship needs and desires of men and women: men seek respect, women seek emotive love. What he’s doing here is not saying that women are inferior to men, but rather he is dispensing a condensed form of what hundreds of years of gender study has finally revealed to us to be true: that men and women have different needs in a relationship, and that we have to learn what the other needs in order to fulfill it and be successful in a marriage. Paul is giving the first recorded instance of Catholic marriage counseling, not disparaging women
uch: