Ask a hundred people for a wedding passage from Ephesians and ninety-nine of them will hand you chapter 5. Husbands, love your wives. Wives, submit. The verses that have launched a thousand arguments and get read aloud at more ceremonies than nearly anything outside of Corinthians.
Almost nobody reads chapter 3.
I think that's backwards, and I'd like to tell you why.
Paul gets down on his knees
“For this reason I bow my knees before the Father…”
It's a small detail and easy to skim past. But Jews in Paul's day prayed standing up. Kneeling wasn't the ordinary posture — it was what you did when something had hold of you.
So the first thing in this passage isn't a doctrine. It's a man's body language. Before Paul tells anybody how to be married, he goes down on his knees and asks God for help. Hold onto that. It turns out to be the whole argument.
Your marriage is not the original
“…from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named.” (v. 15)
There's a play on words here that English can't quite carry. The Greek word for Father is patēr. The word for family is patria. Family is a word built out of the word for father. Paul isn't being decorative. We tend to assume we understand God by starting with what we already know — we've had fathers, we've been in families, so we take those experiences and scale them up until they're large enough to be God.
Paul says it runs the other direction. Fatherhood didn't begin with your father. Family didn't begin with families. The thing you're building on Saturday afternoon isn't the original — it's a copy of something that existed before there was anyone around to copy it.
That ought to come as a relief. If marriage were a human invention, it would only be as durable as human inventions are. It isn't. You didn't design it, you can't be blamed for its terms, and it does not depend on your generation being good at it.
Rooted and grounded
“…that you, being rooted and grounded in love…” (v. 17)
Two metaphors, and they don't match. That's deliberate.
Rooted is agricultural. It's a root system — a living thing that goes down slowly and cannot be hurried. Grounded is architectural. It's the word for a foundation: laid once, level, load-bearing, and then left alone.
Paul mixes them because a marriage needs both, and they are genuinely different jobs. There is the part you lay down and do not renegotiate — the vow, the commitment, the thing that is simply settled and not up for discussion when the weather turns. And there is the part that has to grow, that should look different in year twelve than it did in year two, that can't be installed and can't be rushed.
Most of the trouble I've watched couples get into comes from confusing the two. Treat your foundation like a garden and you'll find yourself renegotiating your commitment every time things get hard. Treat your garden like a foundation and you'll wonder why nothing between you has grown in six years.
Lay the one. Tend the other. Don't swap them.
The measurement he never finishes
Verse 18 is strange, and most translations quietly smooth it over. Paul prays that you'd have strength to comprehend “the breadth and length and height and depth” — and then he never says of what. Four dimensions and no object. Grammatically, something is missing from the sentence.
Most readers supply it from the following verse: the love of Christ. That's almost certainly right. But I've come to think the gap is doing work on its own. Paul reaches for the largest measurement he can think of, gets four dimensions into it, and simply stops. He runs out of sentence before he runs out of subject.
Then verse 19 tells you plainly why:
“…to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge.”
Know the thing that can't be known. That's a contradiction, and Paul leaves it standing right there in the middle of his prayer without apologizing for it.
Anyone who has been married a long time recognizes that sentence. You never finish knowing the person you married. You live inside something you cannot get to the bottom of. Paul says that's not a failure of the marriage — it's a small copy of what it's like to be loved by God.
Why this is the marriage passage
Here's why I'd rather have chapter 3 read at your wedding than chapter 5.
Chapter 5 is instructions. Love your wife. Give yourself up for her. Respect your husband. Those instructions are good ones, and they are also completely beyond you — not difficult, beyond. Anyone who has been married ten years will tell you the problem was never that they didn't know what they were supposed to do.
Ephesians 3 is Paul on his knees asking God to supply what the instructions are going to require. And it comes first in the letter. That ordering is the argument. Paul prays for power before he issues commands, because he knows perfectly well that commands don't arrive with their own fuel.
Notice, too, what he actually asks for. Not better circumstances. Not an easier spouse. He asks that you would be “strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being.” The inner person. Because that's what runs out first. Not money, not time, not even affection — what runs out is the interior capacity to go on being generous toward somebody who is, at this particular moment, being difficult. Marriages rarely fail from the outside in.
If you're choosing this passage
It reads beautifully aloud, and it will be a genuine departure from whatever your guests are bracing for.
It's also a prayer, which means it doesn't have to be read at all — it can be prayed. Over you, by me or by somebody you love, while the two of you stand or kneel. That is a different thing to sit through than a reading, and your grandmother will notice the difference immediately.
I've officiated thousands of ceremonies, and I have never once had a couple tell me afterward that they regretted being prayed for.
That's finally what this passage is. Not advice about marriage. A prayer for two people who are about to need one.