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Christian life in all its forms is called to witness to the faithfulness of God. Marriage is a particular form of witness resonant in many distinctive ways of the steadfast love of God. But it is not the only one. We looked in the last chapter at monastic life with its own particular form of vowed togetherness that speaks of God’s fidelity. Other relationships witness in their own way to the faithfulness of God – relationships of responsible loving and caring, serving and supporting; commitments of family and friendship; and other conditions of life lived truly and faithfully. Paul’s encouragement to the married and the unmarried can be applied to many of our relationships in life: ‘each has a particular gift from God, one having one kind and another a different kind’ (1 Corinthians 7.7).

All forms of human witness to God’s faithfulness, however, are only as strong as their share in the perfect obedience and fidelity of Christ. For most of us, most of the time, our share in Christ’s strength is thin, and we remain weak. Marriages miss their mark in many ways every day. They do not always bring life and give life. At times they corrode and corrupt life. Sometimes spouses drain life from each other and suppress life in others, even damaging the children they have received into their lives. That is why in the liturgies of marriage, after the vows and blessing come the prayers, with the Lord’s Prayer as their summation:

Forgive us our sins

as we forgive those who sin against us.

Lead us not into temptation

but deliver us from evil.52

When Jesus challenged the ease with which husbands could divorce their wives in his culture, the disciples were disgruntled. ‘It is better not to marry’ (Matthew 19.10), they responded. Divorce was a dangerous thing for women in Jesus’ day, often leaving them destitute, victims of the arbitrary decisions of men. It was right for the disciples to be faced with the intentions of God ‘in the beginning’ (Matthew 19.4,8). It is also right for us today, in our very different culture, to acknowledge that divorce carries heavy consequences for those involved, and that children in particular can pay a high cost. So we too can be overwhelmed by the serious commitments expected of two people in marriage, especially when we set them against the fragility of human loving and the longevity and complexity of modern life. We know that marriages run into trouble, regularly. We may accept that marriage is ‘an honourable estate instituted at the time of man’s innocency’⁵³ but we may wonder with Jesus’ first disciples whether the loss of that innocency makes the Christian understanding of marriage an impossible ideal.

For most of us that sort of questioning is far from theoretical but is born of our own experience of life or our involvement in the life of others. The Bishops’ 1999 Teaching Document on Marriage speaks wisely and is worth quoting quite fully:

God often meets us when we come to the edge of our own capacities and stand on the brink of unknown possibilities and dangers. He meets us as free and generous mercy, and as demanding holiness; these two characteristics are not in tension or contradiction, but complementary. The scope of God’s holiness is the scope of his mercy, and the more we are ready to open ourselves to the demand, the more we will know of his generosity, forgiving us where we have failed and granting us success where we thought we were bound to fail. The reason that the church continues to insist on the highest expectations of married couples, when so many of our contemporaries are content to treat the matter lightly, is that much more than marriage is lost if we let the scope of the demand and generosity of God slip from our sight. But if we respond to them seriously, we are changed by them; and our lives acquire hopefulness and patience in the knowledge of his love.54

That is why the prayers for the newly married couple in the Common Worship service ask God to:

Give them patience with their failures

and persistence with their hopes.

In gentleness let them be tender with each other’s dreams

and healing of each other’s wounds.55

It is also why the family and friends of the couple are asked in the service whether they will:

Support and uphold them in their marriage

now and in the years to come.

What happens, though, where there is such betrayal in a marriage (such as the ‘unchastity’ (Matthew 19.9) that Jesus describes) or desertion (such that Paul describes when one partner is abandoned by another (1 Corinthians 7.15)) or breakdown (such that the marriage has reached a point where it is deemed beyond repair) or some other causes of damage (such as those that are so serious they are abusive)? Although with all Christians, the Church of England believes that the marriage ‘promises are made unconditionally for life’,⁵⁶ it accepts that marriages that have been made can also be broken, sometimes by one partner and sometimes by both. It respects the view of couples who believe that their marriage has come to its own end and that the marital gift of love and commitment has been lost. It recognizes circumstances where fuller life may come only when that is formally acknowledged, and the possibility of a new beginning is opened up.

The Church of England – where the conditions are right – allows clergy – where their consciences allow them – to solemnize the marriage of those who choose, with due regard to the past and full responsibility to the future, to marry again and for their bishops to support them, praying to the God who is ‘rich in mercy’ (Ephesians 2.4):

Pour out your blessings upon [them]

that may be joined in mutual love and companionship,

in holiness and commitment to each other.57

In this way, the church seeks to witness to the biblical call for marriage to reflect God’s ‘covenant of life and well-being’ (Malachi 2.5), to the challenges of human life known so well to the biblical writers, and to the God who, ‘rich in mercy’, is always ready to redeem and make new.

Christian faith, realistic as it is about the reality of sin in human life and our tendency to turn in on ourselves, believes in the greater power of divine love at work in our relationships, including ‘this man and this woman’ about to be joined together in ‘holy Matrimony’.⁵⁸ The church rejoices that it is an ‘honourable estate instituted of God’⁵⁹ and ‘a means of his grace’:⁶⁰ a form of human living and loving in which God dwells and where two people, their family and their society receive ‘grace upon grace’ (John 1.16). When received well and cherished, nourished and nurtured, supported by others and sustained by God’s other means of grace in the life of the church, the gift of marriage brings life with fulness and gives life with abundance.