EPHESIANS 5 — WALKING IN LOVE, LIGHT, AND THE SPIRIT; MARRIAGE AS A PICTURE OF CHRIST AND THE CHURCH

Chapter 5 continues the moral instruction of chapter 4, and the first section is closely linked to the last verses of chapter 4, which ended with forgiving as God in Christ forgave. Now Paul commands imitation of God Himself. The chapter has three major parts: the call to love and purity (verses 1–14), the call to wisdom and Spirit-filled worship (verses 15–21), and the household instructions on marriage (verses 22–33), which continue into chapter 6 with parents and children and masters and slaves. The household code was a recognized literary form in the Greco-Roman world, which typically addressed husbands, fathers, and masters about how to keep control of their households. Paul's version is radically different. He addresses the subordinate members, wives, children, and slaves, as moral agents, and he directs the heaviest demands at the husbands, fathers, and masters. And he roots everything in the gospel, so that marriage becomes a picture of Christ's love for the church. The passage has been controversial in modern debates about gender roles, and it needs to be read with care and humility.

Verse 14 appears to quote a fragment of an early Christian hymn, and verse 19 describes the singing of psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. Together they show that Christian worship was marked by music from the earliest times, and that Christ was a focus of that worship. The independent testimony of Pliny the Younger, who wrote to the emperor Trajan around AD 112 that Christians gathered before dawn to sing a hymn to Christ as to a god, agrees with this picture. Hymns found in the New Testament, such as Philippians 2:6–11, Colossians 1:15–20, and possibly this one, reflect very early devotion to Jesus as divine. The moral teaching of the chapter also illustrates the distinctive character of the early Christian movement. In the Greco-Roman world, household codes normally instructed the head of the household on how to maintain control. Paul addresses wives, children, and slaves directly as responsible agents, and he commands husbands to love sacrificially. This vision of marriage, grounded in the self-giving of Christ, was a historical novelty, and it had a lasting effect on the dignity of women in the ancient world.