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The liturgy of the Church of England describes marriage as ‘a means of [God’s] grace’.³⁹ It is not a sacrament in the way that baptism and the Eucharist are, but it is sacramental nonetheless. It is a form or state of life, ‘instituted of God’⁴⁰ in which God promises to be found, a way in which God acts, and a place in which God is present in the ordinary, physical, tangible and sometimes messy conditions of human life. In the midst of humanity, divinity is made known to us, to make us more fully alive in God’s life.⁴¹

There are three particular places in the New Testament that point to the way that marriage is associated with the presence and action of God in Jesus Christ – from whom ‘we have all received, grace upon grace’ (John 1.16).

The first is the story of a wedding in Cana, a small town in Galilee, that is told by John very near the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. In the words of the Prayer Book, it was a wedding that Jesus ‘adorned and beautified with his presence and first miracle that he wrought’.⁴² Water is turned into wine, lavishly. Divine glory transforms ordinary human possibilities, the supernatural suffuses the natural, and Jesus, in John’s carefully chosen word, provides a sign of who he is and what he does (John 2.11).

The second is in the Letter to the Ephesians. There, marriage is described as ‘a great mystery’ (Ephesians 5.32) – mysterion in Greek, translated sacramentum in Latin – ‘signifying unto us’, as the Prayer Book puts it, ‘the mystical union that is betwixt Christ and his church’.⁴³ We find this reference in a profound passage that relates marital love to the love of Christ. It calls on husbands to love their wives ‘just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her’ (Ephesians 5.25). By patterning their love on the love of Christ, a love given over for the good of the other person, they grow in Christlikeness and bring good to the world. Leaving parents and others behind, and cleaving to each other, husband and wife become ‘one flesh’,⁴⁴ as Christ is one with his Church, the body that he cares for and nourishes as his own.

In the Eastern Church the service of marriage culminates in a crowning of the couple. This anticipates the ‘crown of life’ given to Jesus’ followers who, as witnesses to Christ – signs, living sacraments of his ennobling love – have been ‘faithful until death’ (Revelation 2.10). With similar imagery, the Common Worship marriage service describes the couple’s ‘love for each other’ as ‘a crown upon their heads’.⁴⁵ Marriage enables two people, through their covenant of love, to mirror the steadfast covenant love of God described by the Hebrew prophets in vivid nuptial imagery. In Jeremiah’s prophecies, for instance, God is bound to Israel as a husband to a bride. (See, for example, Jeremiah 2.1,2,31,32; 31.31-34.) For Malachi, marriage reflects the ‘covenant of life and well-being’ (Malachi 2.5) made with God’s people through which God’s desire for ‘godly offspring’ (Malachi 2.15) is fulfilled.

The third place where the New Testament especially associates the work of God with the imagery of marriage is towards the close of the Book of Revelation, the last book of the Bible, echoing some of Jesus’ own imagery of the coming of the Messiah and the kingdom of God (for example, Matthew 9.15; 22.1-14; John 3.29). God’s people, the bride, and Christ, the bridegroom, are brought together in the vision of ‘the marriage supper of the Lamb’ (Revelation 19.9). In anticipation of that time when all God’s people are gathered ‘from every tribe and language and people and nation’ (Revelation 5.9) in one communion of love with God, some couples choose to celebrate their marriage in the setting of the Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper – a foretaste of that greater marriage feast.

In the age to come, said Jesus, we ‘neither marry nor are given in marriage’ for we will be ‘children of the resurrection’ (Luke 20.35,36) and death will be no more. The creative work of God in which marriage gives us a share will be done. The new creation which does not fade will have come and the covenant of which marriage is a sign will be fulfilled. Fulness of life will flow eternally from ‘the spring of the water of life’ (Revelation 21.6). The mutuality of man and woman in marriage will be consummated in the new heaven and new earth where God dwells with us and we – all the peoples together – dwell with God.

In these references to abundance and transformation, the imaging of Christ’s union with the Church, and the final consummation of God’s purpose for humanity, Scripture speaks of the ways in which the marriage of husband and wife signifies God’s relation with the world.