Love Gives Itself Instead of Consuming

“Followers” is mimetai, imitators, the root of mimic. Paul often tells churches to imitate him (1 Corinthians 11:1); this is the only verse in the New Testament that tells people to imitate God himself. “As dear children” explains how: children copy their parents, and 4:32 has just shown what the Father does.

“Sweetsmelling savour” is the Greek Old Testament phrase for a sacrifice God accepts, first used of Noah’s offering after the flood (Genesis 8:21) and repeated through Leviticus. Paul uses the same words in Philippians 4:18 for a gift of money sent to him in prison.

“Covetousness” is the pleonexia of 4:19 again, set here among sexual sins, which has led some to read it as sexual greed, the grasping after what belongs to another. “Let it not be once named” sets the standard at reputation: nothing that would let the words be spoken of them.

“Jesting” is eutrapelia, which Aristotle had praised as a virtue, the ready wit between buffoonery and boorishness. Here the word has slid to its coarser sense. “Not convenient” is 1611 English for not fitting. There is also a sound-play: eutrapelia is answered by eucharistia, giving of thanks.

Colossians 3:5 also calls covetousness idolatry: whatever a person cannot stop wanting has become a god. “The kingdom of Christ and of God” is a pairing found nowhere else, with one article covering both names in Greek, a construction some have read as naming Christ as God.

“Vain” is kenos, empty, as a jar with nothing in it: words with a sound but no content. “Cometh” is present in tense. The “children of disobedience” are the same group named in 2:2, where the readers themselves once walked.

“Partakers” is symmetochoi, a word used only twice in the New Testament, both times in Ephesians. In 3:6 the Gentiles were made partakers of the promise in Christ; here they are told not to become partakers with the disobedient. The same word marks both memberships.

The Greek does not say they were in darkness but that they were darkness, and now are light. “Children of light” is a Semitic idiom that also names the faithful in the Dead Sea Scrolls, whose War Scroll sets the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness.

The older manuscripts read “the fruit of the light”, which suits the image of verse 8; later copies changed it to “the fruit of the Spirit”, apparently under the influence of Galatians 5:22. The King James follows the later reading. The whole verse is a parenthesis.

“Proving” is dokimazo, to find out by testing. The same verb stands in Romans 12:2, “that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God”. “Acceptable” is euarestos, well-pleasing. What pleases the Lord is discovered in the walking, not settled in advance by a list.

“Unfruitful” sets darkness against the fruit of verse 9: its works produce nothing. “Reprove” is elencho, to expose or bring into the open, the verb of John 3:20, where the evildoer avoids the light “lest his deeds should be reproved”. Exposure here is what light does by shining.

“In secret” is krypha, hidden things, set against the phanera, the things made manifest, in the next verse. Paul does not name what is done; the refusal to describe it is part of the instruction, since naming such things was the kind of talk verse 3 has already ruled out.

The second clause is better read “everything that is made manifest is light”: what the light touches becomes light itself. The Greek participle can be read either way, and the King James chose the active sense. On the passive reading exposure does not just reveal; it transforms.

“He saith” normally introduces Scripture, but these three lines match no single verse, though they echo Isaiah 60:1, “Arise, shine; for thy light is come”. Their rhythm suggests an early Christian hymn, perhaps sung at baptism. Clement of Alexandria quotes a longer version with further lines about the sun of the resurrection.

“Circumspectly” is akribos, accurately or precisely. The English word, from the Latin for looking around, fits the picture of a walker picking a careful path. The Greek pairs “fools” and “wise” as two kinds of walkers on the same road.

“Redeeming” is exagorazo, buying up, as a trader snaps up goods while they are on offer. “Time” is kairos, the right moment, not chronos, the passage of hours. Colossians 4:5 uses the same phrase for conduct toward outsiders. The reason given is the evil of the days.

“Unwise” is aphrones, senseless, the word God speaks to the rich man in Luke 12:20: “Thou fool”. “Understanding” is syniemi, to put things together. The will of the Lord is presented as something that can be understood, not only obeyed.

“Excess” is asotia, dissolute living, from the same root as the prodigal son’s “riotous living” in Luke 15:13. In the cult of Dionysus wine was a way to be filled with a god. At Pentecost the crowd mistook the Spirit’s filling for drink: “These men are full of new wine” (Acts 2:13).

“Making melody” is psallo, first meaning to pluck a string, and a psalm was originally a song to a stringed instrument. Colossians 3:16 lists the same three kinds of song. Around 112 the Roman governor Pliny reported that Christians met before dawn to sing a hymn “to Christ, as to a god”.

“For all things” can also be “for all people”; the Greek word has the same form in both genders. “God and the Father” shares one article, the God who is Father, as in 1:3. “In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” marks thanksgiving as offered through him.

“Submitting” is the last of a run of participles hanging on “be filled” in verse 18. In place of “the fear of God”, the earliest witnesses have “the fear of Christ”, a phrase found nowhere else in the New Testament. Verse 22 has no verb of its own in the best texts and borrows this one.

Greek writing on household management, from Aristotle onward, addressed only the head of the house, telling him how to rule wife, children and slaves. Ephesians speaks to wives directly, as members of the congregation responsible for their own conduct, and addresses them before their husbands.

“He is the saviour of the body” begins with an emphatic autos, he himself, and applies to Christ alone. Saviour, soter, was a title on inscriptions to the emperors across Asia. This is the only time Ephesians uses the noun, and it is not transferred to the husband.

“Therefore” translates alla, which is normally “but”: though the husband is not the saviour, still the pattern of the church’s relation to Christ holds. The phrase “in every thing” is broad, and it stands inside the frame of verse 21 and of the verses about the husband that follow.

Household codes of the period told husbands to rule their wives; a command to love them is scarcely found in them. “Gave himself” repeats the verb of 5:2, paradidomi, to hand over, the word the Gospels use for Judas handing Jesus over. The husband is given a cross for his model.

“Washing” is loutron, a bath. Brides in both Greek and Jewish custom bathed before the wedding, and Ezekiel 16:9 pictures God washing Jerusalem as his bride: “Then washed I thee with water”. “The word” is rhema, a spoken word, perhaps the confession or name spoken at baptism.

At weddings a friend of the groom presented the bride; Paul casts himself in that role in 2 Corinthians 11:2. Here the groom presents her to himself. “Wrinkle” is rhutis, found only here in the New Testament. “Without blemish” is amomos, the word of 1:4, where God chose his people to be this.

“As their own bodies” can mean as being their own bodies, not merely as much as they love them. The second sentence folds the husband’s interest into the wife’s: “He that loveth his wife loveth himself”, a shape that anticipates the “as himself” of verse 33.

“Nourisheth” is ektrepho, to feed and rear, the verb used in 6:4 for bringing up children. “Cherisheth” is thalpo, to keep warm, the verb of 1 Thessalonians 2:7, where Paul was gentle “even as a nurse cherisheth her children”. Both words belong to a nursery.

The earliest copies stop at “members of his body” and lack “of his flesh, and of his bones”. Later copyists seem to have added it from Genesis 2:23, “bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh”, anticipating the quotation from the next verse of Genesis that follows.

Genesis 2:24 is quoted almost exactly as the Greek Old Testament has it, the verse Jesus also quotes about divorce (Mark 10:7–8). In Genesis “for this cause” points back to the woman taken from the man; here it follows verse 30 and points toward Christ and the church.

The Latin Vulgate rendered mysterion here as sacramentum, “this is a great sacrament”, and medieval theology used the verse to count marriage among the sacraments. “But I speak” has an emphatic “I”: whatever others make of Genesis, Paul for his part applies it to Christ.

“Reverence” is phobeo, literally fear, the same root as “the fear of Christ” in verse 21, so the section ends with the word it began with. “Every one of you in particular” is literally one by one: each husband, not husbands as a class, and his own wife.