Congratulations to Fred and Olive Hodges, Britain's longest-married couple, who've celebrated 77 years of being together. And in a few hours time, along with Cardinal Murphy O'Connor and others, I'll be helping to launch National Marriage Week. Whatever we feel about today's argument about arranged marriages, once in a while marriage itself deserves a moment of celebration.

What makes it one of the greatest of all human institutions is that it brings together what contemporary life seems so often to split apart - sex, love, companionship, fidelity - and makes of them something greater than the sum of their parts. And far from being outmoded, it seems to me to be made for the 21st century.

Why? Because our world is changing almost faster than we can bear. The things that once gave our ancestors a sense of stability - a job for life, a place where we belonged, a set of values that seemed engraved in stone - are all gone. Where then will we find the love that lasts, the knowledge that we matter unconditionally to someone else, something that endures? Not, surely, in relationships that come and go, that we change as often as our car or our television set. They are not the solution; they're the problem.

Elaine and I were married 31 years ago, when she was 21 and I was 22. In those days we didn't have a clue what life would bring. I hadn't thought of becoming a rabbi, and those early years were full of twists and turns, blind alleys and unexpected avenues. What made the difference for both of us was knowing that the other would be there, that when things were tough neither of us would walk away, that whatever we faced we would not face alone.

Biblical Hebrew has a word for that kind of commitment. It calls it emunah, wrongly translated as faith, because what it really means is faithfulness, pledging yourself to someone else in the love that is loyalty and the loyalty that's love. That's what marriage is, and I find it moving that the great prophets like Hosea and Isaiah saw it as the closest metaphor of God's love for us and ours for God.

That's why today I'll add my thanks for the gift of love given and received, the love that grows stronger every year because it's renewed every day, the thing called marriage that weaves two lives together and makes of them a grace none of us can ever make alone.

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