This principle of subordination (Ephesians 5:21) involves in the case of wives subordination to their own husbands. The husband is to the wife as Christ is to the Church head and saviour of the body. As the Church obeys, so should the wife; but the husband's love, in turn, must be as the self-devotion of Christ, who to hallow the Church, gave Himself for her, purified her with washing of water and pronunciation of formula, and Himself presented her to Himself (as Bridegroom), glorious and free from all disfigurement or wrinkle to be His holy and unblemished (Bride). Husbands then should love their wives as their own bodies; in loving their wives they are loving a part of themselves, and a man does not hate his own flesh but nourishes it and keeps it warm. That is what Christ does to the Church; we are limbs of His Body (one with His bones and flesh). That is what I (Paul) take to be the meaning of Genesis 2:24. The truth of revelation in the passage is an important one, and for my own part I interpret it with reference to Christ and to the Church; but in any case, whatever your several views of it, each of you is to love his own wife as himself, and the wife to fear her husband.
Ephesians 5:26. Marriage in the Greek world was preceded by a nuptial bath, and the ritual doubtless included also the repetition of a solemn formula. The writer here intends his readers to think of the analogous ceremonial of Christian Baptism. Throughout this passage there is perhaps an implicit reference to the sacred marriage of certain of the Greek Mysteries, in which the deity was wedded on behalf of the community of worshippers by a maiden priestess, or in which the nuptials of god and goddess were ceremonially represented by a human priestess and priest. A Hebrew antecedent of the main idea is to be found in the conception of Israel as the betrothed of Yahweh (Hosea 2:19).
Ephesians 5:30. There is good MS authority for the addition of the words, of his flesh and of his bones, though the sense is easier without them.
Ephesians 5:32. this mystery: the hidden truth of which these words are a spiritual revelation.