The first verse (Eph 5:21), in which the commandment of each spouse subordinating and giving of him/herself to the other, is not a frivolous verse one can glance over, but is the essential sentence for correctly reading and comprehending these codes. Without the commandment for both man and woman to submit to subordination in reverence for Christ, the necessary equality within marriage and the household is not present in the reading and gender inequality characterizes the codes. The mutuality of subordination out of fear or reverence for Christ expresses “mutual giving way, mutual subordination, and mutual obedience are nothing other than totally availability and responsiveness to one another” (Lawler, 14). Mutual giving way to one another does not show an inequality between spouses, and instead expresses how through their union of marriage “they live only for the good of that one [other] person” …show more content…
By being connected to her husband as his body shows how the wife is equal to her husband, for “the term body…is a title of honor rather than of debasement” (15). By making the woman part of the husband’s body it gives her a place of respect and this ‘physical bond’ creates a unity between the two for how can man not love his body (woman) (15)? The wife becomes part of the man’s body, thus connecting the two in one body which, as announced in Genesis, “is only within the creative love of marriage” (15). In marriage each person completes the other because before their union man was without a body as a woman was without a head; they are equal gifts to each other