Excellent posts. Two thoughts to add:
- Obedience comes from the Latin “ob audire”, which means to hear, to give audience to. It is interesting that the greatest act of submission and the greatest act of unconditional love are one and the same: to fully listen to the other person. What does it mean to fully listen? It means that you listen in hope, allowing for the possibility that you do not know everything the other person is going to say before they say it. It means that you don’t even start fashioning an answer until they have completely finished speaking and you have made certain that you have correctly understood what they are trying to tell you (as opposed to understanding the strict meaning of the words as they came out the first time), no matter how many times they have said something very similar. This can be very difficult to do! Yet it is what both husbands and wives are called to.
- To gild the lily of an already fine thread, here is Jesus, on the idea of what it means to lead a family as Christ leads:
“You know how those who exercise authority among the Gentiles lord it over them; their great ones make their importance felt.** It cannot be like that with you.** Anyone among you who aspires to greatness must serve the rest and whoever wants to rank first among you must serve the needs of all. Such is the case of the Son of Man, who has come, not to be served by others, but to serve, to give his own life as a ransom for the many.”
Matt 20:25-28
They returned to Capernaum and Jesus, once inside the house, began to ask them, “What were you discussing on the way home?” At this they fell silent, for on the way they had been arguing about who was the most important. So he sat down and called the Twelve around him and said, “If anyone wishes to rank first, he must remain the last one of all and the servant of all.” Then he took a little child, stood him in their midst, and putting his arms around him, said to them, “Whoever welcomes a child such as this for my sake welcomes me. And whoever welcomes me welcomes, not me, but him who sent me.”
Mark 9:33-37
Parents, note that Jesus waited until they were home and in the house to correct his disciples! There is a time and a place…
The role of Christian couples, especially parents, is to model the correct relationship between those in submission and those in authority, a relationship which, like all Christian relationships, is based first and last on love: patience, kindness, politeness, perserverance, trust, appropriate control over feelings of jealousy and anger (which is to say control and not repression or projection), submission of the self to the common good, and so on.
