Two become one

Has it only been three months since she moved out? Well, our daughter has decided to move back home, but only on one condition: that we treat her like an adult. That’s certainly our intention, although she might have forgotten that it’s a two-way proposition. Her reasons are, of course, complex and she knows that the welcome mat is always out. There is the jumble of her acquisitions strewn about the once empty hallway and the decorative pieces we placed in her room have been ejected unceremoniously into rubbish bags. It’ll only be temporary, of course, six months, a year – then she will move on. The empty nesters have a nestling, albeit, an adult.

Representations of daily life in biblical Palestine in movies and television documentaries seldom reflect the lives of women, let alone slaves, or the poorest of the poor. Women’s lives were hard. From sowing seed, harvesting, grinding grain to making bread, our lives would be unrecognisable. The role of women in society was to nurture and support the family, and that meant serving the needs of their husbands, preparing food, providing care for children.

In writing to the Ephesians (5:21 – 32) Paul explores the mystery of the Christ-dimension of marriage. It is startling at first, and it would be easy to dismiss his words as cultural determinism, as sexist, as offensive to women. He claims that the husband is the head of the wife, and she should submit to him, and he compares that relationship to Christ as being head of the church which itself submits to Christ. Husbands on the other hand ‘should love their wives as Christ loved the church’. Husbands must love their wives as they love their own body, in the same way that Christ cares for his church. And that is why, according to Paul, a man must leave his family to be joined with his wife, and the two become one body. And this, this is the mystery.

This mystery is not what roles we play – it is about love and one’s capacity to give, to be generous and selfless – that is what true submission is, it is the sharing of a singular will and desire, not power or control. Jesus’ own submission to his Father’s will is the exemplar. It is divine love.

While Paul’s analogy is about marriage and the Body of Christ it has an equal affect on all of our relationships. We are all members of the Body of Christ.

We are all much more than the sum of the roles we perform, of our public and private faces, of our singular parts. And so I welcome the return of my adult daughter, I look forward to our shared space, time and energy. I can even put up with her overflowing possessions filling the hallway.