“Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.”
— Ephesians 5:1-2
Context & Key Themes
Chapter 5 continues the practical walk Paul began in chapter 4, but the imagery intensifies. The believer is called to be an imitator of God — the Greek word is mimetes, from which English gets mimic. The standard is nothing smaller than the character of the Father himself, reproduced in his children as beloved children reproduce the manner of their parent. And the specific imitation Paul names is love as Christ loved — a love defined not by feeling but by self-offering, a fragrant offering and sacrifice in the language of the old covenant altar. The kind of love Paul is describing cost Christ his life, and he is setting it as the pattern for the household of God.
The chapter then divides into three large movements. First (vv. 3-14), a sharp contrast between the darkness of the old Gentile life and the light of the new — sexual immorality, greed, foolish talk, and coarse jesting have no place among the saints; instead, let thanksgiving replace them, and let works of darkness be exposed by the light. Second (vv. 15-21), a call to walk carefully, redeeming the time because the days are evil, understanding what the will of the Lord is, being filled with the Spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, giving thanks always for all things. Third (vv. 22-33), the extended analogy of marriage as a mirror of Christ and the church — the passage most often quoted and most often flattened.
Summary
The middle section closes with the command that serves as the hinge into the marriage passage: submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ. This verse, v. 21, is grammatically tied to the Spirit-filling of v. 18 — it is one of the results of being filled with the Spirit, alongside singing, giving thanks, and the other participial phrases. And it is addressed to all saints toward all saints. The verse after it, often read as a new sentence, actually has no verb in the Greek; wives to their husbands borrows its verb from v. 21. The mutual submission of the Spirit-filled community is the umbrella; the marriage instructions are a specific application of that larger pattern.
Within that umbrella Paul addresses wives and husbands in turn. Wives are instructed to submit to their own husbands as to the Lord, for the husband is head of the wife as Christ is head of the church. Husbands are instructed to love their wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her — language that lands with crushing weight given what Paul has just said in v. 2 about Christ’s self-offering. The husband’s headship is defined not by command but by crucifixion. He is to nourish and cherish his wife as he does his own body, for no one ever hated his own flesh. And at v. 31 Paul reaches back to Genesis 2 — they shall become one flesh — and then names what he has been doing the whole time: This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. The marriage is not the main subject. The marriage is the parable. Christ and the church are the reality the marriage points to.
Reflection
The marriage passage has been read in roughly two streams across church history, and both are honest readings of what Paul wrote. The traditional reading holds that Paul is ordering the household along a structure of headship and submission that reflects a permanent creational pattern — the husband occupying a role of loving leadership, the wife a role of respectful following, each responsible to Christ for how they carry their role. The contextual reading holds that Paul is taking the standard Greco-Roman household code — a well-known literary form in the first century that addressed the paterfamilias as absolute authority over wife, children, and slaves — and fundamentally subverting it by (a) opening with mutual submission, (b) addressing wives, children, and slaves as moral agents in their own right, which household codes typically did not, and (c) defining the husband’s authority as self-sacrificial love unto death, which no Greco-Roman code ever did. Neither reading is dishonest. Both are serious, Christian, and textually grounded. Careful believers disagree about which better captures Paul’s intent.
What both readings share, and what must not be lost, is the staggering redefinition of headship Paul performs in this passage. In the world Paul was writing into, a husband’s authority over his wife was legally absolute. He could divorce her at will, control her property, determine the fate of her children. Paul takes the word head and fills it with a new content: head as Christ is head of the church, head as the one who gave himself up for her. Whatever else headship might mean, it cannot mean less than this: a husband who models Christ’s love does not command his wife; he dies for her. He washes her, in Paul’s imagery, as Christ washes the church with the word. He presents her, cherished, without spot or wrinkle. Any reading of this passage that uses the language of submission to justify domination, coercion, or contempt has read Paul against Paul. The passage is not a ceiling placed on wives; it is a cross placed on husbands. And both are held together under the one verb Paul actually stated first: submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ.