Christ-Like Headship

Weighty Words on the Meaning of a Husband's Headship:
John Piper
August 5, 2009

[I have copied this article from the Gender Blog of The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. It was originally posted on the DesiringGod blog]

What follows is one of the greatest reasons for a man to get married and stay married: not the rapturous flame of eros, but the refining fires of holiness.

No relationship is more clearly commanded to model the death of Christ. No relationship is more costly-in both senses of that word (painful and precious).

This quote comes from one of C. S. Lewis's last books, published in 1960, The Four Loves. In it we hear the wise fruit of a lifetime.

"The husband is the head of the wife just in so far as he is to her what Christ is to the Church. He is to love her as Christ loved the church-read on-and gave his life for her (Ephesians 5:25).

This headship, then, is most fully embodied not in the husband we should all wish to be but in him whose marriage is most like a crucifixion; whose wife receives most and gives least, is most unworthy of him, is-in her own mere nature-least lovable. For the church has no beauty but what the bridegroom gives her; he does not find, but makes her, lovely.

The chrism [anointing, consecration] of this terrible coronation is to be seen not in the joys of any man's marriage but in its sorrows, in the sickness and sufferings of a good wife or the faults of the bad one, in his unwearying (never paraded) care or his inexhaustible forgiveness: forgiveness, not acquiescence.

As Christ sees in the flawed, proud, fanatical or lukewarm Church on earth that bride who will one day be without spot or wrinkle, and labors to produce the latter, so the husband whose headship is Christ-like (and he is allowed no other sort) never despairs. He is a King Cophetua who after twenty years still hopes that the beggar-girl will one day learn to speak the truth and wash behind her ears. (105-106)"