Text:  Ephesians 5:21-31                                                                     14^th Sunday after Pentecost

Bearing God’s Image

            In the name of him whose words are spirit and life, dear friends in Christ:  This morning’s Gospel reading begins with the disciples’ reaction to Jesus’ “Bread of Life” discourse.   We’ve been following that discussion in the readings for the past several weeks.  And in the course of it, Jesus has said some things that are pretty hard to swallow.  He’s gone out of his way to say things that he knows will be offensive to his audience.  It culminated last week when we heard him say that unless a person eats his flesh and drinks his blood, he has no life in him.  To his original hearers, that was just plain gross.  It sounded like Jesus was promoting cannibalism; and the Jews to whom he spoke knew that drinking blood of any kind was absolutely forbidden by the Law of God, so it offended them morally as well as emotionally.  And so it’s no surprise that we read, “On hearing it, many of his disciples said, ‘This is a hard teaching.  Who can accept it?’”  And when they said “hard teaching”, they didn’t mean that what Jesus said was hard to understand, they meant that they did understand and were completely turned off.  They didn’t like what they understood, and many of them left Jesus on account of it.

Now, for us, with the advantage of a more complete understanding of what Jesus was saying, we know that Jesus wasn’t talking about cannibalism. On the other hand, if they had really understood what he meant, they would have been even more offended by his words.  That’s because Jesus was talking about his key role in God’s plan of salvation for sinful humans.  Specifically, he was telling them of how he had to be slain for us, and how we would be given life through his death.  The eating and drinking of which he spoke was spiritual in nature:  he was speaking of how we live by faith, thereby spiritually consuming and sustaining ourselves on his death.

And that’s a hard teaching.  Deep in the heart, none of us likes to face the fact that it was our own personal sin and rebellion that cost the Son of God his life.  The very idea that “he suffered what I deserved” places us in a position of absolute helplessness and dependence on him.  It’s an uncomfortable place to be because we don’t like being beggars.  It strips away every shred of self-worth we think we deserve.  It exposes all the achievements that we imagine that we have to our credit for what they are:  nothing but disgusting piles of filth before the Lord.  It confronts us with the awful truth of our condition with words like “lost”, “condemned”, “wicked”, and “unclean” – and they don’t sit too well with us.  Just the same, unless we come to grips with our guilt and complete lack of merit before God, we cannot by faith lay hold of the salvation Jesus died to secure for us. We must accept the hard truth: truth made hard to swallow by our own sinful pride and inflated self-esteem.

            Well, as it turns out, the Lord Jesus has other hard truths for us.  A few well-known and much debated examples appear in our Epistle lesson.  It is to these truths that I’d like to turn now. And what we’re going to find is that once again, what makes God’s truth so hard to receive and digest is our own sinful pride and super-inflated egos.

The topic is Christian submission:  that Christ-like attitude of humility and deference we are to internalize and display in our dealings with one another.  It’s an attitude of the heart that places the greater good and needs of others on level higher than our own.  It’s a desire to cast ourselves in the role of a servant, to set aside our own desires and surrender our rights, for the benefit of someone else.  It’s part of what it means to follow the Lord Jesus, because that’s precisely what he did for us.  He set aside the rights and privileges of his Godhead and glory, and took upon himself the role of human slave.  In that role he carried for us the crushing weight of our sin, and suffered the full force of God’s righteous anger when he was crucified. He submitted himself totally: body, soul, and spirit for our sakes.  And, now through his spokesman and apostle, St. Paul, he asks us to behave in like manner for one another.  And that’s incredibly hard to do because even though there’s a part of us that rejoices to live in the Lord’s command, still, it runs against every fiber of our fallen frames.

So he doesn’t just leave us with general instructions; he breaks it out in detail to help us understand exactly what this is supposed to look like in the lives of Christian people.  Specifically, in the portion of Scripture we heard, Paul takes the concept of Christian submission and applies it to the closest and most basic human relationship there is:  that of a husband and wife united in marriage.  Now, I know that not everyone here is married, and so what follows may not seem to have immediate application to you; but even if you are single, be it by not yet having married, or being widowed or divorced, you still live among people who are – your family, friends, and neighbors – and therefore you have a duty to them to understand, honor, and support them in their marriage relationships.  Besides, no matter how single you may think you are, that status is always subject to change.  So it’s good for all of us to know what the Lord intends the proper relationship for husband and wife to be.

The words are clear, unmistakable, and hard:  “Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is head of the wife as Christ is head of the church … Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.” Ouch.  These words are offensive to the ears of many of the last couple generations of the world’s women who have been struggling so hard for equal rights and authority, and who have been attempting to throw off the shackles of countless centuries of male domination and repression.  But though many attempts have been made to soften, explain away, discount, or ignore the words, there can be no question about what they mean – and those who believe in the inspiration of God’s holy Word know it. Wives, the Lord says, your husband is in charge.  He is your immediate leader and the head of your family and household – just like Christ is the head of the church.  Your husband has the last word in any debate or discussion, and unless they are illegal or immoral, his decisions are final.  You are to encourage, respect, honor, and obey him in that role; cheerfully surrendering your will to his so that the mantle of leadership he bears may be as light and pleasurable as you can make it.  This is what Christian submission means to wives.

This, however, does not mean that the husband is to conduct himself as her high and mighty lord and master.  Quite the contrary:  where she is required to surrender her will, the Lord directs him to surrender himself.  “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her … husbands are to love their wives as their own bodies … for the two are one flesh.”  The model for a husband’s leadership is not an earthly king seated on a throne in pomp and glory, running roughshod over his oppressed subjects; rather it is the kind of leadership Christ displayed.  During his ministry on earth, as Jesus went around with his disciples, there was never any question about who was in charge.  And yet, he led them as their gentle shepherd, seeing that all their needs were taken care of, and steering them out of harm’s way.  On the night he was betrayed, he got down on his hands and knees and washed his disciples’ feet – a task considered beneath the dignity of the lowest slave.  When he finished, he told them, “You call me ‘master’, and that’s right because that’s what I am.  And now I have set the example for you.”  In the same way, a Christian husband is to lead in humility and self-sacrificing service. That’s what love is.  He is to give himself to the task of caring for his wife, devoting himself to ensuring that she is provided for in all her needs of body and soul – just like he does for himself.  In fact, her needs come first:  for he is called upon to sacrifice his own life, if necessary, for her sake.

And just as women balk at the notion of submitting to the authority of their husbands, men resist assuming the kind of loving and sacrificial leadership role they are called upon to fulfill.  It’s so much easier, in the name of “modern enlightenment” and “equal rights” to step down from their God-given burden of headship in family and spiritual matters, and thereby fool themselves into believing that they are passing the buck of ultimate responsibility.  They are not.  One day they will have answer for their stewardship of what God entrusted to them:  “I gave you this wife and family.  I put you in charge.  What did you do with it?  What did you allow to happen on your watch?”

Now, all of this sounds pretty hard to accept to our modern ears. First, because each of us knows that if this is what God expects of us, whether you are a husband or a wife, you have to admit that you haven’t come anywhere near close to living up to his standard.   Secondly, and for many, more importantly, all of us have been influenced and conditioned by the philosophical winds of this age that tell us that this whole concept of marriage is an idea that’s time has come and long since gone.  We’re constantly being told that the arbitrarily imposed patriarchy that’s described in these passages is part of a dark and primitive past that we have gratefully outgrown.  We’re told that we must continue to push forward to newer and better models of marriage relationships that are more open and flexible, and based on equally shared headship and authority.  We’ve all bought into this to some degree.

            And I know I’ve mentioned it before, but of all the creatures God made, none of them was designed to have two heads.  Now, it happens that once in a while in this sin-corrupted world a creature is born with two heads.  Mercifully, such monstrosities rarely live long, and their stuffed or formaldehyde bathed remains end up displayed in carnival sideshows with other accidents of nature.  In some ways it’s sad that the same thing cannot be said of marriages that attempt to survive with two heads.  Rather than dying swiftly and ending the misery, such a distortion of God’s design can limp along unhealthy and unhappy for years before it dies and becomes at least two badly wounded and bitter souls – and very often also a number of collateral damage cases in the form of traumatized children. 

You’d think, in the wake of so many such tragedies, which are all too common these days, that maybe we’d learn not to try to improve upon the Creator’s perfect design.  Instead of going on performing experiments that destroy human lives, maybe we should reexamine what God says.  And when we do, we’ll find that his plan for the structure of a marriage is not arbitrary or archaic, but it is instead rooted in the reality of who and what we are as people created in the image of God, and therefore a reflection of who and what God is.

We’re talking about the first and most fundamental relationship; specifically, how two relate to each other in love and harmony.  Now, we know that the first human relationship was a marriage of two becoming one – but there was another relationship even before that: the relationship between the persons of the Godhead.  And I want to focus in at the relationship between God the Father and God the Son. What is that relationship?  Well, obviously they love one another; but more than that, we say in the creed that the Son is begotten of the Father; begotten, not made.  Great. What does that mean?  Bear with me here because this is important.  What that means is that the Father didn’t just go “poof”, there’s the Son, like he did with all things created. Instead, it means he gives of himself, he gives some of his essential being, to beget God the Son – so that they two, Father and Son are of the same divine essence.  And this didn’t happen just once in the distant past; it is instead an eternal and continuous thing.  It’s always been going on, and always will; like we heard Jesus say in last week’s Gospel reading:  “I live because of the Father.”  So the Father is continuously giving himself so that the Son is.  The person of the Son is dependent upon the Father for life. And that’s how the Father shows his love to the Son:  by giving himself for the life of the Son

Well then, how does the Son show his love for the Father?  Obviously he cannot reciprocate in kind.  The Son cannot give of himself to beget the Father. That’s impossible and unnecessary. So, how does he show his love? The answer is that he submits to his Father’s will.  Jesus said, “I’ve come to do the will of my Father.”  And in the garden he prayed, “Not my will, but yours be done.”  So, the perfect relationship of love that’s existed from eternity is the Father giving himself for the Son, and the Son surrendering his will to the Father; and they two are one God (and no, I haven’t forgotten the Holy Spirit, it’s just that he’s not part of the model we’re unraveling).

Okay, then, look what happens now when the Lord creates man in his own image.  First he shapes Adam from the dust of the earth and breathes into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man becomes a living being.  But there’s something missing.  The man is alone.  There’s no one of his kind to relate to – no one of his kind to love.  And God is love.  And so, anything created in God’s image would have to love too, wouldn’t it? So, we need another.  But how does God do that?  Does he just form another from the dust of the earth?  No – because that wouldn’t be in God’s image. Instead, he puts the man into a deep sleep, opens him up, and takes some of what he’s made of from his side.  From this God makes a woman.  The man has to sacrifice of himself for her life.  And then the Lord brings them together:  the two become one flesh in perfect harmony and love.  The husband giving himself for his wife, the wife submitting her will to his – and so they bear the image of God in their relationship of love for one another.

Now, I don’t need to tell you that this perfect relationship was destroyed when sin entered the world.  When our first parents rebelled against God and ruined their relationship with him, we find that their relationship between one another also changed.  They each became self-centered instead of loving. The man no longer wanted to give himself; the woman was no longer willing to submit.  Their once beautiful union no longer reflected God’s image, and as a result, their lives together became hard and bitter.  So it has been (to greater or lesser degree) with every marriage since. 

But here in the Christian church we celebrate the fact that our loving God did not want to leave us in the misery of all these strained and broken relationships.  His great plan has always been to reconcile us to himself first, with the necessary consequence that we be reconciled in our relationships to one another.  To do this, he had to recreate us in his image.  His image was the thing that was missing in creation.  And so, no surprise, when he recreated us, he did it in exactly the same way he did at the beginning.  He started with the perfect man – a man who shared his divine essence, and who was willing to give himself completely.  On that man he placed the penalty of everything that was wrong in his creation because of our sin.  He made him suffer the agony of all the broken relationships between God and mankind, and placed him in the deep sleep of death.  While he was asleep, he opened his side from which flowed water and blood. And with that water and blood, he fashioned a bride for the man:  the church of all God’s faithful people.  In the water he gives her birth and cleanses her of sin, and with the blood and crucified body he feeds her and sustains her life.  He continues to so give himself in love; and she, in turn, to show her love, submits to his holy will.

So, do you see what I’m driving at?  In these so often despised instructions about what Christian marriage should be, the Lord is not giving us anything unnatural or oppressive – he’s simply calling us to live out what we were created to be in the first place:  a reflection of God himself.  He’s calling us to live out what we were recreated to be by the Savior who gave himself for us.  And so, in light of these very clear instructions, we ought to examine ourselves to see where we have failed to be what God designed, and for our failures repent. Then, receiving his forgiveness and relying on the power of his Spirit, commit ourselves to fulfilling the roles we were made for.  We understand the words – though they are hard to accept.  The world does not accept them and wanders off to its own devices. And the Lord now asks, “Will you leave me too?”  May he give us the grace and faith to respond, “No, Lord, your words are life for this world and the next.  As for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.”  In his holy name.  Amen.

Soli Deo Gloria!