At Church today, St Paul’s letter to the Ephesians was the second reading. At first, it was rather a shock to my modern mentality listening to words of St Paul, but as I sat there listening to the rest of the reading, I found myself warming to the idea. I thought that it could actually be a good prescription to a happy and fulfilled marital life. If it is actually applied in its most literal sense, it could really work. 😉
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Letter of St Paul to the Ephesians (5:21-32)
“Give way to one another in obedience to Christ. Wives should regard their husbands as they regard the Lord, since as Christ is head of the Church and saves the whole body, so is a husband the head of his wife; and as the Church submits to Christ, so should wives to their husbands, in everything.
Husbands should love their wives just as Christ loved the Church and sacrificed himself for her to make her holy.
He made her clean by washing her in water with a form of words so that when he took her to himself she would be glorious, with no speck or wrinkle or anything like that, but holy and faultless. In the same way, husbands must love their wives as they love their own bodies; for a man to love his wife is for him to love himself.
A man never hates his own body, but feeds it and looks after it, and that is the way Christ treats the Church because it is his body – and we are its living parts. For this reason, a man must leave his father and mother and be joined by his wife, and the two will become one body.
This mystery has many implications, but I am saying it applies to Christ and the Church.
This is probably what they meant about “A son is a son until he gets married.”