Head and Shoulders

Yesterday my husband and I sat in an Ethiopian restaurant visiting with new friends at our nephew’s wedding reception. Rob digs wells in Ethiopia, and he fell in love with the clerk who sold him the souvenirs he bought to send home. So we were sitting around nibbling on wedding cake and talking about the subject of marriage. And Gary and I were saying how much we think a lot of people overemphasize separate male/female roles. (We weren’t saying our nephew does this, by the way. He doesn’t.) “So how would you counsel new couples?” we were asked. Here’s what we said… A lot of people say the Bible commands wives to submit and husbands to lead. That is wrong. That is flat-out wrong. That is so-o-o wrong. Husbands are never, ever commanded to do any such thing. The Bible commands wives to submit and husbands to demonstrate agape-love, which is the kind of love that lays down one’s life. It gives up everything. And it looks a lot like submission by another name. So who “gives up something” in marriage? Not the wife. But both husband and wife. Husbands are called the “head” (Eph. 5) but not in the sense of being the head of an organization. They are called the head in relation to the wife as body. It is a picture of a physical body in which two people are so interconnected that they become one. Picture his head on her body. Weird! But so metaphorical of oneness. This does not mean they give up their individuality. At all. The point is this: they are unified. They cannot hurt the other without hurting themselves. Nowhere is the husband told to “be” the head. It’s not something the husband becomes or “improves at.” It’s something he IS in this metaphor, just as the wife IS the body. If the husband is supposed to improve as the head, why is the wife never told to improve as the body? Ideally does the husband make the final decision? No way. Neither does the wife. They come to a place of unity in decision-making, as Paul assumed two mature people would do (see “by mutual consent” in 1 Cor. 7:5). If a couple comes to an impasse, we would counsel the husband to give up his life and the wife to give up her rights. So a mature argument looks like this:

“I insist that we do things your way.” “No, no, I insist we do things your way.” Can you imagine the marriages we would have if everybody lived this way?