You have to love the big picture… but what’s the old saying, “the devil is in the details.” The mission of the corporate executive is to reposition the company to face an evolving and changing landscape for their business – all very exciting. But the plan includes forced early retirements, restructuring, and moving work overseas. The Normandy landings in 1943 were necessary and a key first step to ending World War II, but someone has to be in the first wave at Omaha Beach.

Today’s first reading from St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians is no exception. Here is “the big picture” of this letter: it offers up a vision of a church much larger than the Christian community of Ephesus; it puts on display a vision of a universal church, katholica (Greek). At all levels and in every instance of the Church, the head of which is Christ, the mission is to be the instrument for making God’s plan of salvation known throughout the world. And the mission is to be anchored in God’s saving love.

Even this mission will bog down in the small details: “Wives should be subordinate to their husbands as to the Lord.” (Eph 5:22). To our modern ears, the verse is cringe worthy and has been used/misused for human purposes. But they were originally speaking to a society that is different from our era.

St. Paul wrote in a time when the society was heavily shaped by Greco-Roman norms and Jewish traditions. The family structure in this period was hierarchical and patriarchal, placing husbands at the top of the household structure. In Roman society, the father of the family held significant authority over the household, which included his wife, children, and even slaves. This structure was culturally ingrained, with social expectations that wives would submit to the authority of their husbands.

The passage “Wives should be subordinate to their husbands as to the Lord” reflects this prevailing cultural view but should be read in the context of the entire passage. Paul then tells husbands to “love your wives, even as Christ loved the Church” (v.25). We modern folk need to pause and consider the details of what has just been said. How did Christ love the Church? I think we can agree it was a sacrificial love. So, St. Paul is telling husbands to model Christ such that sacrificial love redefines the husband’s role as one of loving leadership rather than oppressive authority. This emphasis on mutual love and sacrifice was groundbreaking, suggesting a Christian ideal of marriage that transcended the patriarchal norms of the time, urging husbands and wives to respect and care for each other deeply.

In this way, Paul’s teachings were a call for believers to model a Christ-like love within a cultural structure, gently subverting traditional power dynamics and setting a standard for relationships within Christian households with an emphasis on mutual respect, love, and self-giving. This Christian perspective encourages believers to transform traditional roles through the lens of love, although it was still expressed within the framework of a patriarchal society.

It was a radical message for its time – and ours: Christ is the big picture and we do well to have Christ in all the details of our lives and relationships – even when the culture around us would hold to a different standard.

Image credit: Saint Paul Writing His Epistles | attributed to Valentin de Boulogne | Houston Museum | PD-US