Section 4

Just as the Son of God took part in our nature, so we take part in what belongs to Him; and just as He has us in Himself, so we have Him in us.

“For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” Here is a third ground of obligation. Paul shows that a man leaves those who gave him birth, those from whom he came, and binds himself to his wife. The resulting “one flesh” includes father, mother, and child, for the child is formed from the union of both. Through the mingling of what comes from the two, the child is born, so that the three are one flesh.

In this way we too become one flesh with Christ through participation—and even more truly than a child shares the flesh of the parents. Why? Because this has been God’s purpose from the beginning.

Do not tell me, “My wife has this fault,” or, “She has that fault.” Do you not see that even in our own bodies we have many defects? One person is lame; another has crooked feet; another has a withered hand; another has some other weak member. Yet he does not hate it or cut it off. Often he cares for it even more than for the healthy member, and rightly so, because it is his own.

Paul wants each man to have as much love for his wife as he has for himself. It is not merely that husband and wife share one human nature; the claim is stronger than that. They are no longer two bodies but one, the husband as head and the wife as body.

But how, someone may ask, does Paul say elsewhere, “The head of Christ is God”? That is exactly my point: just as we are one body, so Christ and the Father are One. The Father therefore is also found to be our Head. Paul sets before us two examples: the natural body and Christ. For this reason he adds, “This mystery is great; but I speak concerning Christ and the Church.”

What does this mean? He calls it a great mystery because blessed Moses—or rather God through Moses—hinted at something great and wonderful. For the present Paul says, “I speak concerning Christ”: Christ, leaving the Father, came down to the Bride and became one spirit with her, for “the one who is joined to the Lord is one spirit.” He rightly says, “This mystery is great.”

Then, as though to say that the deeper meaning does not cancel the literal bond of marriage, Paul adds: “Nevertheless, each one of you must love his own wife as himself, and the wife must fear her husband.”

It truly is a mystery, a great mystery: a man leaves the father who gave him life and raised him, and the mother who bore him with labor and pain—those who have done him so many good things and with whom he has lived in long familiarity—and he joins himself to a woman whom he may scarcely have known before and who previously shared none of these ties with him. He prefers her to everyone else. This is indeed a mystery.

And parents are not distressed when this happens. They are more distressed when it does not happen. They even rejoice while their money is being spent and the wedding costs mount up. Truly this is a great mystery containing a hidden wisdom. Moses proclaimed it prophetically from the beginning, and now Paul cries out the same thing when he says, “concerning Christ and the Church.”

Yet this teaching is not given only for the husband’s sake, but also for the wife’s: he must cherish her as his own flesh, as Christ cherishes the Church, and “the wife must fear her husband.” Paul no longer speaks only of the duties of love. He also says, “Let the wife fear her husband.”

The wife, he says, holds a second authority. She therefore should not demand the same role as the head, since she is under the head; but neither should the husband despise her because she is in submission, for she is the body. If the head despises the body, the head itself perishes with it. Instead, the husband must set his love as a counterweight to her obedience.

Think again of head and body. The body gives hands, feet, and all its other members for the service of the head; the head in turn cares for the body and contains the senses by which the whole is directed. Nothing, he says, is better than this kind of union.

Someone may ask, “How can love exist where there is fear?” It can exist there especially. The wife who fears also loves; the wife who loves fears her husband as head and loves him as a member, because the head itself is also a member of the whole body.

For this reason Paul places one under the other and the other above, so that there may be peace. Where competing claims to the same authority exist, peace is difficult: a household cannot function as though every member were equally the ruler; there must be an ordered principle of leadership. This applies to ordinary bodily and social arrangements. Yet when people are spiritual, there is peace of another kind. There were five thousand souls in the Church, and no one said that any possession was his own, but they submitted to one another. This is a sign of wisdom and the fear of God.

Paul has shown the manner in which the husband must love. He has not yet explained in the same detail what he means by the wife’s fear.