When Marriages Rise from the Dead

The power of forgiveness can bring even the most broken marriage back to life 

Good Friday confronts us with something as remarkable: an innocent man, nailed to a cross, gasping out words that should have been rage or despair – but weren’t. “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” (Lk 23:34) 

We’ve sat with those words many times over the years. And every time, we find ourselves thinking about marriage. 

Not because marriage is like a crucifixion – though there are moments when it can feel that way – but because the act of forgiveness Jesus modelled on the cross is exactly the act that can bring a dying marriage back to life. 

The marriage that looked finished 

A few years ago, we ran a marriage seminar for a parish whose priest had been watching couple after couple walk through his door to tell him they were separating. He’d had three such visits in two weeks. In desperation he asked us to run one of our SmartLoving programs in his parish. 

One of the couples participating, fifteen years married, had spent the last three in a cold war – civil enough in front of the kids but emotionally estranged – and feeling like it was hopeless. 

She had carried a deep wound from something he had said during an argument years earlier. She’d never told him how much it had hurt. He, for his part, had retreated, convinced she no longer wanted him around. They had both stopped trying. 

The turning point came during an activity on forgiveness. Through that process she found the courage to name her wound and share it. He didn’t realise how much damage he’d done, nor did she realise how much she had hurt him in other ways.  

They left that weekend with renewed hope. They forgave each other, reconciled and committed to a new way to relating. 

What forgiveness actually is 

One of the most common misunderstandings we encounter is that forgiving means excusing what happened, or pretending it didn’t hurt, or rushing back to trust someone who hasn’t yet earned it. None of that is true. 

Forgiveness is a choice – a decision of the will – to lay down our case against the other person. To stop letting the wound run the show through festering resentment.  

Resentment doesn’t protect us – it primes us for further hurt. It keeps us scanning for evidence that we were right to be wounded, and sure enough, we find it everywhere. 

Forgiveness interrupts that cycle. It doesn’t mean trust is automatically restored, or that difficult conversations don’t still need to happen. But it creates the conditions, the open door, in which a marriage can begin to breathe again. 

Resurrecting marriage 

Easter is not just about one death and one resurrection. It’s about a pattern written into the fabric of creation: that death is not the final word. That what looks finished can, with God, become a beginning. 

We’ve seen this in marriages that by any human reckoning should have been over. Sure, not every story ends in full restoration, and the Church walks with people through that too. But far more marriages than we might expect are capable of resurrection. 

And here’s the remarkable thing: that first step doesn’t require both to move at once. Like the women who went to the tomb that first Easter morning not knowing what they would find of it would make any difference; one spouse willing to take the first step is sometimes enough.  

One person’s willingness to forgive can be enough to change the whole dynamic of the marriage. 

This Easter, if your marriage has felt more like a tomb than a garden, sit with the words of Christ on the cross. The call to forgive is not burden, but as an invitation to new life.