By Colleen Vermeulen, Director of Mission & Instructor

Have you ever heard “Wives, submit to your husbands” in the pew on Sunday and thought, huh? When placed in the context of Paul’s message to all believers, this verse is not justification for male dominance over women, abuse, manipulation, or unequal dignity of wives and husbands before the Lord. 

A key verse comes right before Paul’s statement on wives, where Paul writes more broadly “hypotossomai to one another out of reverence for Christ” (5:21). 

The form of this Greek verb is specifically a form that refers to something you do to oneself, like “I dress myself.” Literal English translations could be:

• To place oneself under
• To submit or subject oneself under another
• To defer to another
• To arrange oneself (sub-ordinated to) one another
• Being stationed under one another

In 1982, Saint John Paul II wrote of this passage of Scripture:

“Love excludes every kind of subjection whereby the wife might become a servant or a slave of the husband, an object of unilateral domination.

Love makes the husband simultaneously subject to the wife, and thereby subject to the Lord himself, just as the wife to the husband.”

I love the challenge of dissecting this chapter of Ephesians because Paul speaks of the earthly reality of human relationships and the greater, eternal reality of Jesus the Messiah who gives himself for his beloved, the Church.

his passage is one that I dug into even deeper (i.e. Paul’s statements on children and enslaved people) as a contributor, along with Tamra Fromm and Cathryn Torgerson-Wade, for the Living the Word Women’s Bible, available from Ave Maria Press.

Fun Fact: Ave Maria Press is publishing our first Catholic Biblical School-inspired book, Simply Scripture in fall 2024.