The Household, Named One at a Time

Read aloud

Paul has been describing what the new self wears. Now he walks through an actual house and speaks to the people in it, one group at a time, and nobody is left standing there while the others are addressed.

Wives, submit to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord. Husbands, love your wives and do not be harsh with them. Children, obey your parents in everything, for this is pleasing to the Lord. Fathers, do not provoke your children, so they will not become discouraged.

Two of these carry a qualifier and the qualifiers are easy to read past. As is fitting in the Lord. This is pleasing to the Lord. Neither instruction is offered as the natural order of a household or as how things have always been done. Both are measured against somebody outside the room, which means neither can be enforced by whoever wants their own way.

Four instructions in four sentences, and they come in pairs. Each pair speaks first to the person with less power in that relationship and then to the person with more, and the second instruction of each pair is a restraint on the one who could throw their weight around. Husbands are told not to be harsh. Fathers are told not to provoke, and the reason given is what it would do to the child, who would become discouraged.

That last word is the one that matters at a kitchen table. Paul does not say disobedient and he does not say rebellious. Discouraged, which is what happens to a child who is corrected more often than they are encouraged and eventually stops trying.

Then Paul turns to the group he has not spoken to yet.

Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything, not only to please them while they are watching, but with sincerity of heart and fear of the Lord.

This passage has been used badly. We should have that in the open before we go any further. Paul is writing to enslaved people rather than about them. That does not make the command harmless, and it does not abolish the institution. It does mean that people whom the household treats as property are addressed as moral agents before the Lord. Reading this aloud without saying any of that would be its own small dishonesty.

What he says to them is the strangest part.

Whatever you do, work at it with your whole being, as for the Lord and not for men, because you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as your reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving.

Work at it with your whole being is a large thing to ask of somebody with no choice about the work, and Paul does not pretend otherwise. He gives them a loyalty and dignity their owners do not control, but he does not erase the coercion of the work or excuse the master's power. As for the Lord and not for men, he says, without pretending that the job itself has changed.

Then comes the promise, and it is the one word in the passage that should not fit. An inheritance is a strange word to hand somebody he has just told to obey in everything, and Paul hands it to them anyway, then tells them whose household they are actually working in. The last line closes the loop for everybody: whoever does wrong will be repaid, and there is no favoritism. The master who mistreated somebody gets the same accounting as the slave who wronged him.