Ephesians 5:21-33

²¹Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. ²²Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. ²³For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. ²⁴Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. ²⁵Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her ²⁶to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, ²⁷and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. ²⁸In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. ²⁹After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church— ³⁰for we are members of his body. ³¹"For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh."  ³²This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church. ³³However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.  

As we look to society today, we are confronted with myriad views on what marriage is and is not. Each week, newspapers, magazines, and the internet are strewn with images and headlines of engagements, weddings, infidelity, marital strife, and divorce. This should cause us to give pause and ask what is marriage? What is its purpose? How has contemporary society's view of marriage deviated from its initial intent? The passage from Ephesians 5 allows us to understand the purposes of marriage as: intimacy, holiness, and mission.  

First, verses 21-23 speak to the intimacy of marriage as they recall the first marriage—that of Adam and Eve. In Genesis 2, we see God giving away a daughter to a marriage relationship in which Adam and Eve "were naked and they felt no shame." They were utterly vulnerable with one another before God. This is where the language of submission enters in. True love is always marked by self-forgetfulness—those moments when you are not obsessed with yourself, but instead are taken with another. This is a truly liberating and enthralling intimacy. You are free to desire someone else's good even at the expense of your own.  

Often, this text can be uncomfortable because it seems so regressive. When we hear it that way; however, we misunderstand what is really being said. We clearly see that wives are called to submit to their husbands; however, this call is not only given to the wives. Verse 25 calls the husband to not only submit his own desires (v. 21), but also to give up his life for the good of his wife. He must be willing to lay aside his interests and his life "as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her." The way to intimacy is not demand that the other give you what you have rights to.  It is instead laying down your rights to give someone else what they need. 

Secondly, we see in verses 24-27 that one of the purposes of marriage is holiness. Holiness is just a fancy word for being set apart, and made distinct. We must be clear that scripture calls us to holiness, not happiness. Marriage, therefore, is not about making me happy. Instead, it is about making me loving. This completely changes things. If marriage is supposed to make you more like Christ, then there will be certain moments that will feel like death.  As long as marriage is about self-fulfillment (happiness), then we will be unable to persevere when difficulties arise. We will quickly say, "I need to get out." When we realize, however, that marriage is about making us holy, we are able to handle difficulty in a different light. This does not mean that marriage is devoid of happiness; however, as Victor Frankl wrote,  "... happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself ... in the long run, [happiness] will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it."  The true joy of marriage comes as you see yourself and your beloved being transformed into the man or woman Christ intended them to be.  

Finally, marriage is also a mission (v. 32). God is not saying here is married love now let me come up with a good analogy to explain it. Conversely, God is saying here is Christ's love for his church and marriage is God's analogy, a living breathing parable of that love.  We are not meant to look at marriage to solve our problems. We are meant to look through it to a love supreme, the Love that is the root and source of this human love.  

The New Testament tells us the story of this lover, who walked across the universe to win his beloved—the beloved who persistently ran, who persistenly resisted the love of this great lover. This came at an unspeakable cost to himself.  It is ultimately a story of a bridegroom who did not just promise to give all for his bride. It tells us of a bridegroom who actually chose to give is all to win his bride's heart.  

What Paul is saying here is remarkable: People are meant to look at marriage and say, "Maybe there is a God who actually loves us and desires right relationship with us."