Colossians 3:18-21 — Household Code

FRANK EDWARDS: An oil lamp, a low room, maybe thirty people packed in tighter than the room was built for. This is a house in Colossae, evening, and the letter that came in from Paul is being read out loud for the first time. The man who owns the house is standing near the front, because that is where the owner stands. His wife is a few feet behind him. His children are along the wall with the household slaves. And the reader has been going for a while now... "put on compassion, kindness, humility"... and then he turns the page and says one word. "Wives." And every head in that room comes up, because nobody in that world writes a letter and talks to her.

LINDA BROWN: Nobody talks to her. That is the part I want to hold onto today, because I think most of us hear this passage and the only word we notice is "submit." Welcome to Dig Deeper. We are in Colossians chapter three, verses eighteen through twenty-one, four short commands that, Frank is going to argue, were quietly outrageous in that lamp-lit room. Read them for us. All four, straight through.

FRANK EDWARDS: 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.

LINDA BROWN: "Wives, submit" is the first thing out of the gate, and for a lot of people listening right now that is the passage. That is where they stopped. So you have to sell me on this. Why is a first-century Roman letter telling women to submit anything other than... a first-century Roman letter telling women to submit?

FRANK EDWARDS: The form is Roman. I will give you that up front, and it matters that we say so, because this is a recognized genre. Scholars call it a household code. Aristotle wrote one, centuries before Paul, in the Politics. Stoic teachers wrote them. Jewish writers in the Greek world wrote them. The idea was that a well-run house was a small model of a well-run city, and so a moralist would lay out the three relationships every household had, husband and wife, father and children, master and slaves, and explain how order flows down through each of them. Same three pairs Paul uses. Anyone in that room who had any education would have heard the opening and thought, ah, I know this speech.

FRANK EDWARDS: Now here is what every one of those codes has in common, and it is the thing Paul breaks. They are addressed to one person. The master. Aristotle tells the husband how to rule his wife. He tells the father how to govern his children and the owner how to handle his property. The wife is discussed, the child is discussed, but they are the subject matter, like the furniture. They are never spoken to. And Paul takes that exact familiar shape and, in each pair, he turns first to the person with the least power in the room and addresses her directly. Wives. Children. And in the verses right after this, slaves. Not "husbands, here is how your wife should behave." Wives. You. So before anyone has heard the content of a single command, the address itself has already said something the culture never said: you are a soul who hears God and answers to Christ for yourself.

LINDA BROWN: The shape is borrowed and the audience is brand new. That is your claim. He walks in wearing the culture's clothes and then talks to the people the culture only ever talked about. Fine. I feel that. And I still have "submit" sitting right there, unmoved. Being spoken to is nice. Being spoken to and told to submit is... still being told to submit.

FRANK EDWARDS: Four words carry it, and they are the words almost everyone reads past. "As is fitting in the Lord." Every command in this passage is bent toward Christ. Fitting in the Lord. Pleasing to the Lord. Go one verse earlier, three seventeen, "whatever you do, in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus," and you realise this passage is not a new rule. It is that one rule walked into the house. The doctrine underneath it is the lordship of Christ, and specifically that his lordship does not stop at the sanctuary door. Roman religion was fine with gods in the temple and the harvest and the senate. The household ran on something else entirely, the raw authority of the father. What Paul does is put that authority under a throne. So the wife's submission is not to whatever the man wants. It is "in the Lord," which means it has a shape and a boundary, and the boundary is Christ himself.

FRANK EDWARDS: And then read the husband's line against the world it landed in. "Love your wives and do not be harsh with them." No Roman code bothers to say that. Why would it? Power owed the weak nothing. But Paul has Genesis in his ear. Go back to the garden, chapter three, the curse falling after the fall: "he will rule over you." The tenderness of Eden curdled into domination. That harshness is not the design, it is the wound. So when Paul tells a Colossian husband to love and not grow bitter, he is not adding a soft clause to the Roman order. He is reaching back past Rome, past Sinai, to how the home was made, and he is reversing the curse in the one room where it does the most damage. Headship shaped like the cross is a different creature from headship shaped like Caesar. Ephesians, written about the same time, says it out loud: husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.

LINDA BROWN: "Do not be harsh" is where the cost is, though, not "love." Love is the easy verb. I can picture the man listening right now. It is late, he is wrung out, and she brings up the thing she has brought up before... money, the kids, how little they have actually talked this week. And the sentence is already there in his mouth. The one that ends the conversation. The one that wins. Paul gives him no exception for that night. No "unless she started it."

FRANK EDWARDS: Wins. That is the word to stay on, because the sentence does win, and it costs him the thing he actually wanted, which is her trust. Peter presses the same point even harder in his letter. Live with your wife in an understanding way, honour her as a fellow heir of grace, "so that your prayers will not be hindered." Think about that. The man's standing before God is tied to his tone at his own kitchen table. Harshness upstairs, silence downstairs. And the reason Paul can ask a husband to swallow that sentence is not that gentleness is a good technique. It is that the Lord he answers to "did not open his mouth" when he was reviled, and now lives in that man by the Spirit. You love her out of a fullness that is already yours. And that raises the second pair, which I think is even more startling than the first.

LINDA BROWN: Which brings up the line I would have skipped entirely. "Fathers, do not provoke your children." That sounds like a parenting tip. Something you would put on a mug. Why is that startling?

FRANK EDWARDS: Because of what a Roman father was. The law had a name for it, patria potestas, the father's power, and it was very nearly absolute. It did not end when a child grew up. A forty-year-old man with his own household was still, legally, under his father's hand until that father died. The paterfamilias owned every scrap of property. He arranged the marriages. He could disinherit a child, sell a child into bondage, and in the oldest layer of the law, when a newborn was laid at his feet, he decided whether it would be raised or exposed on a hillside to die. His word was the household's law in the most literal sense a modern person can imagine. Now hold that next to verse twenty-one. To that man, a child's inner life... whether the child's spirit was strong or being ground to powder... was simply not a category. Nobody had ever suggested it was his concern. And Paul writes: fathers, do not provoke your children, so they will not become discouraged. The one with total power is told to watch the heart of the one with none. Does that still sound like a mug to you?

LINDA BROWN: The limit is the point, that is what you are saying. Not the advice. The fact that someone dared to put a fence around a Roman father at all. [short pause] And the fence is made of the child's feelings. Which, in that world, nobody had ever counted.

FRANK EDWARDS: Fence is a good word, because Paul's verb tells you what kind of damage the fence is keeping out. The Greek is erethizō, and it is sharper than "provoke" lets on. It is a word for stirring something, needling it, keeping a low fire going under something until it flares. Not one explosion. He is not primarily warning about the day a father loses his temper and shouts. He is warning about the steady wearing down. The criticism that never lets up. The standard that moves every time the child reaches it. Correction delivered with contempt in the voice. And then the result, and I find the tenderness of this remarkable in a letter from that age: "so they will not become discouraged." The word pictures a spirit going slack. Losing heart. A child who stops trying because nothing was ever going to be enough. Paul saw that child, in a world that did not think to look.

FRANK EDWARDS: And this is not Paul being softer than God. It is Paul telling fathers to father the way God fathers. Isaiah forty-two, the servant who will not break a bruised reed or snuff out a smouldering wick. Psalm one hundred three, "As a father has compassion on his children... He knows our frame; He is mindful that we are dust." Earthly authority is real, Scripture never pretends otherwise, but the authority it upholds it also hedges in, because that authority answers upward. The father is under a Father.

LINDA BROWN: I have a face in my head right now, and I suspect a lot of people listening do too. Not a monster. A parent who corrects something real, and then... keeps going. Past the point where the wrong was named and into the place where the child is being told what he is. And the child's shoulders drop. You can watch it happen. The correction was right. The extra thirty seconds were the fire.

FRANK EDWARDS: Thirty seconds. That is precisely the scale erethizō works on, and it is why the fix Paul implies is so ordinary. Name the wrong, give the consequence, and then let the child see your face turned toward him. Now, I do not want to skip the children's line to get there, because it does the same thing from the other side. "Children, obey your parents in everything, for this is pleasing to the Lord." That sits on the fifth commandment, honour your father and mother, the first of the ten to carry a promise attached. But look at what Paul is assuming. He is talking to the children. In that room, along that wall. He assumes a child can hear the Lord and choose to please him. That is a moral agent, and it is why a nineteenth-century preacher, Alexander Maclaren, could write about this passage: "To obey will be joy; to serve, the natural expression of the heart." Obedience that is worship rather than fear. Malachi ends the whole Old Testament promising God will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and children to their fathers. This is that promise arriving in a house in Colossae.

LINDA BROWN: The room, then. The one you opened with. The reader says "Wives" and her head comes up. Then "Husbands," and the man at the front hears that his temper is now God's business. Then "Children," and the ones along the wall realise the letter knows they are there. Then "Fathers," and he hears that the small person he owns has a spirit he could break. Every single person in that room just got told the same thing in a different direction. You belong to Christ. And so does the person standing next to you.

FRANK EDWARDS: You belong to Christ. And that is the one idea I would want you to keep, because it is the whole passage compressed. Not four rules for four kinds of people. One Lord, reaching into the smallest rooms of a life, the bedroom, the table, the hallway where the correction happens, and saying: this is mine too. And he does not ask of anyone in that house a love he has not already poured out first. The husband is asked to love as one who has been loved at a cross. The father is asked to be gentle by a God who handles the fragile with care. Hold that next to your week. The gospel does not stay in the sanctuary. It has a key to your front door.

LINDA BROWN: [quietly] So one question, and it is not for me to answer for you. Who in your house, right now, has the slackest spirit? The most discouraged one under your roof. Not who deserves what, just who is worn thin. Say their name to God tonight before you say anything else to them.

FRANK EDWARDS: Dig Deeper is free, and you can find it at dig deeper dot A I.

LINDA BROWN: Thanks for listening, and be gentle at home tonight. We will see you next time.