Colossians 3:18-4:1

Wives, be subject to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord. Husbands, love your wives and never treat them harshly. Children, obey your parents in everything, for this is your acceptable duty in the Lord. Fathers, do not provoke your children, or they may lose heart. Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything, not only while being watched and in order to please them, but wholeheartedly, fearing the Lord. Whatever your task, put yourselves into it, as done for the Lord and not for your masters, since you know that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward; you serve the Lord Christ. For the wrongdoer will be paid back for whatever wrong has been done, and there is no partiality. Masters, treat your slaves justly and fairly, for you know that you also have a Master in heaven.

“I met my husband at an Anglican church. One of his qualities I found attractive back then was the way he took control whenever a decision had to be made at the church fellowship group we attended. When I was a relatively new Christian, I heard people talking about how the wife had to promise to “love and obey” her husband in her wedding vows. I couldn’t understand that. Why was the husband the “head” of the relationship? I thought, “They’re just playing with words”, and a wife would get to make half of all the decisions, surely. The whole concept of “submission” was bizarre to me — I was a professional woman who’d spent most of my life making all my own decisions.

“For many years during our marriage I heard sermons on the husband’s headship and wife’s submission, the tone of which often made me uncomfortable. My husband went ballistic every time I “undermined his authority”, as he called it, justifying his anger with the preached line: “The Bible says ‘wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord’.” He never once hit me, but he dictated everything right from the start: simple things like what activities we did together in our joint leisure time, what he would do with our money.

“Whenever I asked my husband where all his pay was going, he’d rant and rave about “submission” and how, as head of the family, he didn’t have to tell me what he was doing with his pay, and how un-Godly I was to distrust him. I became so scared of making him angry by spending money on myself. He made me “service him” as a prostitute would, and he made me dress up for sex just how he liked — it was disgusting and humiliating. He would get angry if I objected, saying, “the Bible says I’m the authority”.

“After many years of marriage, he came home from church and threw the print-out of the sermon at me, angrily saying: “You don’t get it, do you! The wife is to submit.” The sermon had been about how God has a particular role for wives, a place in his order that is designed for the wife’s good and God’s glory. The saved woman is called upon to make a decision to submit to and help her husband, because God has put her husband in authority over her. These words gave my husband such fuel for his cruelty. If I ever voiced a contrary opinion to his, or made a simple and entirely reasonable request, he would say with indignation: “You constantly challenge my headship. God intended that I have the authority and you just can’t accept that. Until you can accept it, our marriage will be hell.”

“To this day, I think my husband has it wrong. Surely no loving God would intend a marriage to be so hard? I am ashamed and humiliated that I allowed this man to treat me as he did for so long.”

That was a true testimony of someone interviewed by the ABC on their investigation into the connection between domestic violence and Protestant Church teachings on marriage. It’s about as heavy a sermon introduction as I’ve ever given and I’m guessing as you’ve ever heard, but I do this to ensure that we begin by knowing just how important it is to do mature Bible study on passages such as the one we have before us today. Simplistic, ill-thought-out Bible study has the potential to harm and terrorise innocent people. And it is passages like these that give Paul the reputation of being someone who really doesn’t like or respect women, if we take it at face value. This passage and ones like it have served as strong arguments to support the subordination of women and slaves, historically and today. But this is what I want to suggest to you this morning, as we explore this passage in detail: Paul does advocate for the hierarchy of certain figures within a household structures, and the subjection of others; however, there is more to this passage than that. I’m going to be looking at some of the original Greek words that this text was written in, because translations can often be misleading – but in your own Bible study, you can gain a clearer sense of the intention of the text by reading different English translations side by side.

So, Colossians up to now has spoken a lot about talking about the new spiritual family we have in Christ. Now, Paul gets practical, by showing the Colossian people what this new humanity might look like in practice, in a 1st Century Roman household, where each household member has a particular role within that household. He does this by using words like “submit” and “obey”, which do carry inherent qualities of repression, both in the original Greek and in English. The word Paul uses for submit, which is ὑποτάσσω in the original Greek, is a compound word, the first part meaning “under”, and the second meaning “order”. So there is no denying that Paul is instructing wives, children and slaves to come under the command or direction of their counterparts – to submit to them. And this is not uncharacteristic of Paul: elsewhere in his letters, he continues to affirm the headship of men (1 Corinthians 11:3, Ephesians 5:23), by relating it to the mandate of God’s creation of man and woman (Ephesians 5:33).

But this is also characteristic of the whole message of the New Testament: to exhort listeners and readers to actively put themselves under the authority of someone else. Believers are to subject themselves to God (Hebrews 12:9, James 4:7); believers to God’s law (Romans 8:7); the Church to Christ (Ephesians 5:24); Jews to the righteousness of God (Romans 10:13), humanity to the authorities (Romans 13:1, Titus 3:1, 1 Peter 2:13); Christians to leaders (1 Corinthians 16:16), slaves to masters (Titus 2:9, 1 Peter 2:18); children to parents (Luke 2:51); and wives to husbands (Ephesians 5:22, Titus 2:5, 1 Peter 3:1). The whole point of Christianity or faith in general, one could argue, is to denounce your own autonomy, and put yourself under the direction of someone or something else. So, is this text revelatory or counter-cultural in any way?

Let’s go back again. Household codes like the one we have before us were written prior to and during the time of the New Testament, and they were intended as guidelines for the constitution of a household. Greek households would generally include the pater familias or head of the house, his one wife, their children, their extended family, slaves and other employees. It is in this context that this and other Christian household codes were written, and the point of these was to remind the new Christians that the social institutions continued to exist in this new Messianic age, and so believers needed to relate appropriately to one another within these institutions. Gaining a new spiritual family in Christ did not eliminate the significance of the physical family and household relationships appropriate for its smooth functioning.

Now Colossae the city was fairly accommodating of new Christians, but the rest of the area was pretty suspicious of any revolutionary movements, particularly those like Christianity that advocated for the equality of all people. So Paul made deliberate accommodations to this prevailing culture, urging Christians to respect the structure of the Greco-Roman household, so they could safely defend their faith from accusations that they were going to overthrow society’s structures.

And yet, Paul does something radically different to other household codes of the time. In usual Greek codes, the male head of the household was described as its absolute sovereign ruler; in fact, the Mediterranean household was essentially a patriarchal institution, with other members of the household subject to the authority of its male head. Paul however changes the focus of power through his repeated use of the title “Lord”, insisting that it is actually Christ the Lord to whom all should submit (3:24). Therefore, instead of conforming to the usual Greek social code, Paul redirects our attention to the One who is truly Lord of all. Because of this, Paul is able to directly address women, children and slaves, who Hellenistic philosophers rarely considered worthy of moral exhortation, or even addressing at all. So the Colossian household code is not a reaffirmation of the status quo of pagan ethics, nor is it a mandate for revolution of everything; rather, it concerns the authority of the Lord Jesus over the household of faith, and the mutual obligations that follow from the subordination of all authority under the Lord. Again: Jesus is number 1, everyone else is underneath.

Along with this, Paul departs from Greek household codes by giving attention to the duty of all the authoritative figures (husbands, parents, masters), thus shifting the focus of this code; the power of these figures are substantively relativized – it’s not all about the head of the house anymore. So when we hear Paul’s exhortation to husbands to “love” their wives, it’s another departure from normal Greek codes; prior to this, the focus in household codes was almost entirely on the rights of the man. In fact, Aristotle once claimed that husbands had the innate right to exercise “marital authority”, since the “male is naturally fitter than the female”.

Like all good Bible study, we have to look at passages within the rest of the book in which they are written. So Paul’s command to husbands to “love” their wives has to be read in light of the whole book of Colossians, which is all about the new creation and systems that Christ brings. So this love isn’t just emotional or sexual love; this is Christian love – the will and action of one willing to consider another as the object of their concern. This love is like that of God the Father for his son (1:13), and is the critical ingredient in God’s act in the creation of a new humanity (2:2, 3:14). Looking at it from a wider lens, Pauline theology suggests that husbands must love their wives in the way of Christ, giving himself up for her, and placing her wellbeing above his own.

Looking particularly at the wife-husband relationship in this way, and hypothesizing that similar conclusions could be made for the parent-children and master-slave relationships, it seems that Paul’s intention was not to further demean the inferior people. Rather, he aimed to keep them where they are, so as to avoid confrontation with the suspicious Greco-Roman authorities, but he also found ways to level the playing field, by exhorting their superiors to embody Christ-like qualities of respect, honour, love, patience and generosity. I mean, masters being charged with acting justly towards slaves, and being threatened with chastisement for unjust behavior, would have been confronting and radical news. But it makes sense: in the new creation, slaves are no longer the property of their masters, but fellow members of the body of Christ, to be honoured and embraced in love.

So actually, Paul rejects his dominant culture worldview that denied any sense of equality between the two genders. Paul’s qualification of the power and status of the head of the household, and his statement elsewhere about the equality of both genders (Galatians 3:28), points to a vision where the term “subordination” actually becomes misleading in characterizing the effect of the Gospel. Everyone is equal under Christ. Paul is quite clever here really: he reshapes a basic Roman institution around Lord Jesus who rules not with armies but with self-giving love. Paul doesn’t abolish the usual household structure outright; instead, he demands of them and us that it be transformed beyond the point of recognition to any Roman in Colossae.

This, for me, is the most relieving, comforting Good News of the New Testament, particularly for me as a woman. There really is something revolutionary, counter-cultural, and Gospel-centered in this passage: that is, that Paul exhorts those in superior positions within household structures to act and treat their inferiors like Christ would: with grace, gentility, justice, and above all, love. His exhortation is grounded in the simple Gospel truth that it is Christ, not Man, who is the true Lord of all things.

This bears perhaps even more confronting truth for us today. Any sermon or teaching that advocates for the raising up of men over women, or parents over children, or masters over slaves, is actually a sermon or teaching that confines itself to the old world order. We are members of Christ’s new creation, so we are commanded to live differently, to live counter-culturally, to live so that people know that we don’t march to their drum. Christians cannot worship King, or country, or capitalism, or wealth, or power. We are called to be utterly sacrificial, selfless and compassionate, in our dealings with our spouses, children and those who work for us, modeling ourselves on Christ, our true Lord. And maybe, if we work harder at that, our evangelism may not need words. May this be so; Amen.