Meeting at the Bottom

Our home offices shared the same corner of our two-story home—one stacked on the other. From my upstairs office, I heard the low-toned chime that signals the end of a video conference coming from my husband’s space below me. I heard him set down his headphones and dial down the space heater, push his office chair back, and groan a tired sigh. Then I heard his footsteps lumber toward the kitchen. 

I was studying upstairs, deep in a concentration that doesn’t come naturally. But I could hear the sounds of kitchen labor. Cabinets opened. Drawers pulled out and pushed back in. The refrigerator. A tea kettle. The interruption of a dishwasher in process—he probably needed a clean spoon. 

I decreased the volume of YouTube’s Jazz Sounds of an Autumn Afternoon. Had I heard the shuffle of the medicine cabinet? Was he searching for headache relief? The clock showed another forty-five minutes of productive time before we were to move on to grocery pickup and dinner prep. I was just making sense of so-and-so’s thoughts on the cultural context of first-century Ephesus, and I needed the minutes. But below, I heard the soap dish slip into the sink. So, I pressed save on my notes, collapsed the lid of my laptop, and hoped I wouldn’t lose the important idea I had been forming. I lowered the blinds and blew out the candle beside me. Then I climbed down the stairs to where my husband toiled.

He circled the countertop with a damp rag, his back to me. 

I came in quietly, “Hey, husband. How can I join you?” 

When he turned toward me, I saw the items beside him—oat milk, vanilla syrup, Earl Grey loose-leaf tea, and a tiny bottle of bergamot oil. These were the ingredients of my favorite tea. He smiled, slid a hot mug toward me, and addressed the voice device in the corner, “Hey, Alexa, play Jazz Sounds of an Autumn Afternoon.” 

This, I thought, is the submission and sacrifice of the apostle Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. I took note. I had surrendered my last forty-five minutes of work time to share my husband’s burden. “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ; wives to your husbands” (5:21—22). And my worn-down, emptied-out husband had paused his work of overseeing a technology organization to serve me tea and wipe our counters. “Husbands love your wives as Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her” (5:25). My submission and his sacrifice—these are synonyms that incite us to lower ourselves in such a way that we find ourselves united—in the kitchen with tea and jazz and each other.

This is what Paul wanted for marriages. He wanted unity. And the path to unity is the humble way of submission and sacrificial love. 

Paul prioritized unity.

Paul begins his letter to the Ephesians by pointing out God’s will, which was purposed in Christ. It was “to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ” (Ephesians 1:10). The concept of unity persists throughout this letter. Believers are included (1:13), joined together, and built together (2:22—23). They are heirs together, members together, and sharers together (3:6). Believers are empowered together (3:18), unified by the Spirit into one body (4:3–4), and held together (4:16). And in the case of wives and husbands, to whom Paul gives extended attention, Paul appeals to pre-fall Genesis 2, “a man will . . . be united to his wife and the two will become one flesh” (Ephesians 5:31 and Genesis 2:24, emphasis mine). 

One flesh from two. Total connectedness. This becomes the perspective from which we realize the metaphor Paul uses for husband and wife in Ephesians 5—head and body. In recent decades, debates have centered primarily on one part of that metaphor—the head—and with only two options, hierarchy or source. Perhaps, though, we should search beyond the template created by a tired debate.[1] Perhaps our marriages would be best served by understanding Paul’s metaphor through Paul’s priority of unity. A head and body are so thoroughly joined that together they are one flesh. And, if severed, neither functions nor exists. Paul illustrated the husband and wife as head and body and affixed the caption One Flesh through the letter’s context of unity and his recall of Genesis 2, which was God’s pre-fall intention for marriages. Paul’s hope for wives and husbands was no less than his objective for the Jews and the Gentiles and no less than God’s purpose for all things in heaven and on earth—unity. 

Paul repeated, then rearranged, his culture’s stratiform marital relationships.

When he wrote to the Ephesians, Paul repeated a familiar idea in the Greco-Roman societal structure—the submissive wife. Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, and Josephus, are a short list of philosophers who shaped the hierarchies of first-century Greco-Roman households. For many of these philosophers, “ruling and being ruled” were “necessary” and “advantageous” things for the health of a society.[2] In the case of marriages, these philosophers believed the husband should rule and the wife should be ruled. Paul used the recognized hierarchical concept to elaborate on his instruction to “be filled with the Spirit . . . submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ (5:18—21).”

From the hierarchical layers of Greco-Roman household codes, Paul adjusted the context of a wife’s submission. Instead of being forced to the bottom, a Christian wife continually and voluntarily chose to place herself lower than her husband as a reverence for and imitation of Christ. And still, the Christian ethic demanded even more changes to the first-century marital structure. Paul pulled the husband from his position of prominence and insisted, instead, on the type of love that imitated Christ’s love for the church. He insisted on a love that sacrificed, cleaned, emptied, cared for, and fed (5:25—33) the other. Paul insisted on love that buried the husband’s status. Paul’s instructions were at first familiar: Wives, make yourself low. Then, his instructions were radical: Husbands, make yourselves low. But in the end, the instructions brought unity—sending both husband and wife to the bottom of social hierarchies, in imitation of the self-giving humility of Jesus Christ. 

The path to unity is the humble way of submission and sacrificial love.

On that fall afternoon of submission and sacrifice, my husband and I mingled in the kitchen for a few minutes. United. We sipped tea and watched a funny video. We opened the window and did silly voice-overs for the backyard critters. We laughed and snuggled and swooned. And then, we went back to finish the last moments of work. 

Steaming tea in hand, I ascended the stairs to my office, raised the lid of my laptop, and opened up the commentary on my desk. In the office below, I heard the knob of the space heater being dialed up and the click, click, click of the volume increase on Spotify’s Work Day playlist. My husband and I returned to our tasks elevated by our time together and by each other’s willingness to be made low. We each knew we would be meeting at the bottom over and over again, as is the humble, unifying way of submission and sacrifice.