Charles Ellicott Commentary Ephesians 5:32

"This mystery is great: but I speak in regard of Christ and of the church." — Ephesians 5:32 (ASV)

This is a great mystery. Rather, This mystery is a great one. The words apply to the type, as well as to the Antitype.

It may be noted that from the translation here of the word “mystery” by sacramentum in the Latin versions, the application of the word “sacrament” to marriage arose.

1. The indissoluble and paramount sacredness of marriage, as all history shows, is “a mystery”—that is , a secret of God’s law, fully revealed in Christ alone.

   For in pagan thought, and, to some extent, even in Jewish thought, marriage was a contract far less sacred than the indissoluble tie of blood. Wherever Christian principle is renounced or obscured, that ancient idea recurs in modern times.

2. But the following words, But I speak concerning Christ and the Church (the word “I” being emphatic), show—what indeed the whole passage has already shown—that St. Paul’s chief thought has passed from the type to the Antitype.

   He has constantly focused on aspects that uniquely apply to Christ’s relation to the Church, and his thoughts have irresistibly gravitated back to that relation time and again.

3. Yet the two cannot be separate. The type brings out some features of the Antitype which no other comparison makes clear.

   History shows that the sacredness of the type in the Church has depended on this great passage—bearing, as it does, emphatic witness against the ascetic tendency to look on marriage as simply a concession to weakness and as leading to a life necessarily lower than the celibate life.