Facing Prometheus — Week 15 (Sacred Lives in a Secular World) | “Sacred Marriages” | Pastor Jason Parrish
Some passages of Scripture are beautiful and uncomplicated. Ephesians 5:22–33 is beautiful, but it is anything but uncomplicated. For many in the room, words like submission, head, love, and respect arrive carrying decades of pain, frustration, hurt, and hard-earned opinion.
In Week 15 of Facing Prometheus: A Letter to the Ephesians and the Future Church Dilemma, Pastor Jason Parrish opens our weeks-long study of this passage with a posture of pastoral care — and a clear, foundational thesis about what marriage actually is in the heart of God before we ever get to the more contested instructions Paul gives.
The Text — Ephesians 5:22–33
“Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord, because the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church. He is the Savior of the body. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives are to submit to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her to make her holy, cleansing her with the washing of water by the word. He did this to present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or anything like that, but holy and blameless. In the same way, husbands are to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hates his own flesh but provides and cares for it, just as Christ does for the church, since we are members of his body. For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. This mystery is profound, but I am talking about Christ and the church. To sum up, each one of you is to love his wife as himself, and the wife is to respect her husband.”
— Ephesians 5:22–33 (CSB)
The Thesis: Marriage Matters
Words like submission, head, love, respect, and sacrifice lend a seriousness and heightened awareness to this text. We will deal with each of these in the coming weeks. But before we get to the directions, we have to grasp the overall reality of what marriage actually is in the eyes of God.
Here is the thesis that will frame our entire study:
★★★ Strong marriages are not simply private contracts. They are covenantal structures that build stable families, form Christ-centered children, build strong churches, and preserve society.
★★★ In other words: Marriage matters.
Marriage is not to be treated lightly or carelessly. It is to be held in high esteem because it is a sacred institution created and ordained by God himself. And yet — even within the Christian community — we are facing a crisis of staggering proportions in the covenant of marriage.
The Current State of Marriage in America
A recent Forbes Advisor article surfaced some sobering realities about where marriage stands in the U.S. today:
- Over half of marriages will end in divorce. Second, third, and fourth marriages have an even higher rate.
- The average length of a marriage is roughly eight years.
- Men who experience divorce have a higher mortality rate from the divorce than women do.
- Cohabitation predicts divorce: 57% of couples who did not live together before marriage stayed married 20+ years, compared to 46% of those who cohabited first.
- Friendships matter. Couples whose friends divorce face a 75% increased risk of their own marriage ending. Even two degrees of separation from divorce raises the risk by 33%.
- The number-one cause of divorce is not infidelity — it’s lack of commitment. 75% of divorcing couples cite this as their primary reason.
- 60% of divorces involve infidelity.
- 58% of couples cite arguing and excess conflict.
- 45% indicate they married too young; 38% report financial problems as a cause.
And one statistic that stands out for the church specifically:
★★ Evangelical Protestants divorce at a higher rate than any other religious group — 14% — more than double the rate of Hindus (5%) and even higher than the religiously unaffiliated (11%).
The data on the exclusivity of marriage tells a parallel story. When one spouse is using porn, 68% of couples report a decrease in their sex life. In 68% of divorces, one spouse has met a new lover online. In 56% of divorces, at least one spouse has an “obsessive interest in porn.” 70% of wives who discover their husband’s porn addiction display signs of post-traumatic stress disorder.
These numbers are startling. And as Christ-followers, the call is to a better way.
★★ Marriage is one of God’s primary instruments for creating stability, healing, formation, and flourishing in a broken and fractured world.
It is incumbent upon those who enter this sacred and covenantal act to realize their marriage is so much more than an agreement between two people for as long as we can put up with each other. Because of the collapse of covenant, we are watching: fractured homes, isolated children, emotionally exhausted moms, absent fathers, confused identity, relational destruction, and deep loneliness.
Paul wrote to the Ephesians because they were navigating a culture that was just as fractured as ours: sexual confusion, paganism, unrestrained and demonic power dynamics, domination, exploitation, and spiritual darkness. The Christian household was meant to be a holy residence — a counterculture to all of it. And that countercultural witness begins with marriage.
Theologian Grant Osborne summarizes this passage’s place in the letter:
“This section unifies and culminates the discussion of ethics in this central part of the letter (4:17–5:21). The mindset of the believer is to exhibit wisdom and perception; we are to discern the will of the Lord in the daily decisions of our life. Such a life is Spirit-filled… The result is a new joy and attitude of worship in the Spirit, on the vertical plane, and a mutual submission on the horizontal.”
— Grant R. Osborne, Ephesians: Verse by Verse
★★ We must see the discussion on marriage as part of the Spirit-filled and Spirit-empowered life. Christ-centered marriage is a holy resistance to the carnality of our modern, self-determined world.
Three Foundational Truths About Marriage
1. Marriage Is God’s Design, Not Man’s Invention
“For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.”
— Ephesians 5:31 (CSB)
Paul roots the conversation about marriage not in a system, procedure, or culture — but in design. He reminds the Ephesians that marriage is born in the heart of God and his created order. It is his design, not man’s. We are not allowed to adjust, tweak, or redefine it. Paul brings the institution of marriage all the way back to Genesis:
“Then the Lord God said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper corresponding to him.’ …So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to come over the man, and he slept. God took one of his ribs and closed the flesh at that place. Then the Lord God made the rib he had taken from the man into a woman and brought her to the man. And the man said:
This one, at last, is bone of my bone
and flesh of my flesh;
this one will be called ‘woman,’
for she was taken from man.This is why a man leaves his father and mother and bonds with his wife, and they become one flesh.”
— Genesis 2:18, 21–24 (CSB)
Before government, before cities, before economies, before nations — there was the covenant of marriage. Marriage is not a social construct made by the whims of man. It is a creational covenant birthed in the heart of the God who has made all things — Yahweh.
This matters because if God has in fact designed the covenant of marriage, then marriage carries divine intention and weight. Jesus affirms this directly:
“‘Haven’t you read,’ he replied, ‘that he who created them in the beginning made them male and female, and he also said, “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh”? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, let no one separate.'”
— Matthew 19:4–6 (CSB)
Early church father John Chrysostom captured the public weight of this private covenant:
★★ “The love of husband and wife is the force that welds society together. When harmony prevails in the home, peace reigns in the city, and the entire church benefits.” — John Chrysostom, Homilies on Ephesians, Homily 20
Marriage has lost its sacredness — both in the church and in the culture. That has happened because it has been disconnected from its origin story and the purpose for which God created it. Paul wrote to the married believers in his letters because he was pastoring them with the conviction that marriage should be held in esteem. He did not assume perfection — he assumed they wanted healthy, vibrant marriages and were striving for them. Marriage was meant to be honored and protected.
2. Marriage Is Meant to Be Holy Ground in a Profane World
“This mystery is profound…”
— Ephesians 5:32a (CSB)
Paul does not just hold marriage in high regard — he sees it as holy in an utterly profane world. Abigail Favale, PhD, professor at the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame, captures the foundation of this in her book The Genesis of Gender:
“The Genesis cosmology bestows upon human beings an exclusive kind of dignity, a dignity rooted in their roles as image bearers. Moreover, Genesis recognizes the duality of humankind, male and female; this difference is part of the goodness of creation, and both sexes share fully in the divine image and the commission to tend the earth. There is no sense here of hierarchy between male and female, but rather a shared, benevolent governance over the rest of creation.”
— Abigail Favale, The Genesis of Gender
And then she names what sin does to that goodness:
★★ “The body becomes a hotbed of resistance to the spirit. The body is objectified, becoming a terrain of appropriation.” — Abigail Favale
Because of sin, a war is fought within our selfhood — and the body animates and expresses the victor of that war. The body often reveals what is going on in our personhood. In the theology of marriage, we see that God both designs and declares a sexed nature for humanity, corresponding to the other.
Marriage, therefore, often becomes the battleground of this war if we are not careful. And because of this, our marriages often reflect the profane world in which we live.
Favale continues:
“Genesis, in contrast, uniquely foregrounds the importance of the male-female relationship, and this is a relationship not of domination, but of reciprocity. There is no hierarchy of value, no dynamic of superiority and inferiority. Sexual differentiation is not a mishap, but cause for celebration and wonder. This difference is good, our bodies are good, and both of these are an integral part of the created order, which is good. The emergence of man and woman from the sleep of nonbeing is not a footnote in our origin story: it’s the ecstatic culmination.”
— Abigail Favale, The Genesis of Gender
Marriage highlights and celebrates the unique givenness of ourselves seen in our created sexed order. As Richard Batey, in his New Testament Studies article on the union of Christ and the church, writes:
“Each personality is enlarged by the inclusion of the other, ideally effecting the perfect blending of two separate lives into one. Continuity with the old personality is not broken, but the radical transformation resulting from the intimate personal encounter creates a new self.”
— Richard Batey, “The Μία Σάρξ Union of Christ and the Church”
3. Marriage Is Meant to Be a Mirror That Reflects Christ
“Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her to make her holy, cleansing her with the washing of water by the word. He did this to present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or anything like that, but holy and blameless… For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. This mystery is profound, but I am talking about Christ and the church.”
— Ephesians 5:25–27, 31–32 (CSB)
Notice that Christ sits at the center of Paul’s entire treatise on marriage. The cross should sit at the center of our marriages.
You and I cannot literally place ourselves on a cross the way Christ was placed on a cross. But our marriages should be such that each of us is trying to be the first to the foot of the cross.
Both husband and wife are called to acts of mutual sacrifice. Husbands are called to love. Wives are called to honor. Both are called to lay themselves down. Both are called to race toward the cross before the other.
★★★ Marriage is meant to show the world what covenant love looks like. Not perfect love. Faithful love. Not glamorous love. Enduring love. Not consumer love. Cross-shaped love.
What Comes Next
Over the coming weeks we will continue working through Ephesians 5:22–33 verse by verse — addressing submission, headship, love, respect, and the profound mystery Paul says marriage is meant to display. But everything begins here: with the recognition that marriage is sacred, designed, and reflective of something far greater than the two people inside it.
If you’re married, your covenant is holy ground.
If you’re single, your future relational life is being formed by what you’re learning now.
If you’ve been wounded by marriage — your own or someone else’s — there is healing available in the One who created the covenant in the first place.
Marriage matters. And it matters because God said so.
References
- Batey, Richard. “The Μία Σάρξ Union of Christ and the Church.” New Testament Studies 13, no. 3 (1967): 270–281.
- Campbell, Constantine R. The Letter to the Ephesians. Edited by D. A. Carson. Pillar New Testament Commentary. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2023.
- Chrysostom, John. Homilies on Ephesians, Homily 20. In Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series. Vol. 13. Edited by Philip Schaff. Translated by Gross Alexander. New York: Christian Literature Company, 1889.
- Cohick, Lynn H. The Letter to the Ephesians. New International Commentary on the New Testament. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2020.
- Favale, Abigail. The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory. San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2022.
- Forbes Advisor. “Divorce Statistics and Facts in 2024.” Forbes.
- Osborne, Grant R. Ephesians: Verse by Verse. Osborne New Testament Commentaries. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2017.
This Week’s Podcast
Want to learn more about mutual submission? This week’s episode of The Analog Gospel podcast with Jason Parrish is for you!
