this post continues a series looking at various issues raised by the book of Esther. Today’s is one which is potentially controversial. Please feel free to weigh in with your comments.
Very few preachers make it through Esther chapter 1 without some kind of comment on the place of submission in the husband and wife relationship. Queen Vashti humiliates king Xerxes by her refusal to appear before him when he wants to display his beautiful wife to his guests. The occasion may even have been a “war council”, in which Xerxes sought to impress various military leaders. If this was indeed the case, then Vashti’s snub would have seriously dented Xerxes’ reputation as a leader.
The temptation for many expositors is to jump directly to quoting from Ephesians …
Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. Eph 5:22 (NIV)
… so there we have it, naughty Vashti for disobeying her husband – she deserved what was coming to her. Right? Except for us to try to identify who was in the right and wrong here would be foolish. We have no way of knowing Vashti’s reasons for declining to attend. In any case, Xerxes and Vashti hardly function as a paradigm for Christian marriage.
In any case, the type of submission called for in Eph 5:22 is one that flows out of love and respect. This is a submission that is not onerous, but joyful. And the type of loving respect that results in submission is not one that can be demanded or coerced. There are occasions when we may have to submit to those over us out of duty rather than respect (e.g. bosses at work, governments etc), but this can never be thought of as an ideal for Christian marriage.
In her commentary on Esther Karen Jobes offers an interesting quote from an unnamed Christian leader:
“I believe in a wife submitting to her husband, but I don’t believe the husband ever has the right to demand it. In fact, I know that when I am worthy of submission, my wife submits, and when I am not worthy of it, she does not. My responsibility as a husband is to be worthy.”
So neither Xerxes nor Vashti should be selected as the one who was in the “wrong”. They both contribute to the failure of the marriage, with the husband issuing orders to a wife he doesn’t genuinely love and who in turn has no respect for him. The challenge for those of us who are married, is to model a radically different type of relationship, that truly mirrors the sacrificial love and joyful submission seen in the relationship between Christ and his church.
I wonder if the last quote is dangerous, though. To say that, as a matter of fact, wives only do submit when their husbands deserve it and don’t when they don’t is to act as if wives never sin. I also don’t think it’s a good idea to set up a situation where you present submission as deserved when the husband acts in a way that promotes more respect. For one thing, submission is never deserved except by God. Also, consider I Peter 3, which is directed at wives with unbelieving husbands. They’re told to submit to husbands who have no recognition of the value of their faith and certainly will not act out of Christian love in response to such submission. Put this together with Jesus’ commands to offer more than asked for even by persecuting governments, the commands to prophets to preach even knowing the message will be rejected and the command in Deuteronomy 15 to loan to the needy even if it’s right before the year of Jubilee, since God will honor it even if there’s a clear financial loss due to showing godly attitudes to those who will abuse them.
It becomes extremely hard to connect submission with deservingness of respect. It in fact seems to be the other way around. I know you weren’t saying, and the person quoted wasn’t saying, that wives should submit only when the husband earns it. But the idea that wives’s submission should even be connected with that is extremely anti-Christian in its very basis.
hi Jeremy, yes I noticed that about the quote – the middle sentence attempts to clarify but is somewhat abiguous. It may depend on whether he is being “unworthy” by asking his wife to go against her conscience, or whether he is just being selfish.