Every home has spoken and unspoken rules. Explicit or implicit they affect everything that happens within a home: relationships, finances, discipline, behaviour even where you go and what you do when you are on holiday. In first century Roman culture household codes regulated family and societal life.

The household was headed by the paterfamilias (head of the household). Our passage this morning can be described as one of Paul’s attempts to synthesise the concept of household codes into the early church context and therefore subvert the existing system of paterfamilias.