When
talking about Bible, use Library metaphor.
History,
poetry, biography, letters:
Today
we’ve arrived in the Mills and Boon section!
If
there’s a more touching romance in Bible, yet to find it.
Not
just a love story – faith, hope and love story played out among the four central
characters – Ruth, Naomi and Boaz… and
of course, God, who all the while is taking the circumstances of their Lower
stories, and weaving them into the fabric of his Upper Story. Bringing good,
even out of the bad things that happen.
Make
no mistake, Ruth’s story has a bad beginning. Three untimely deaths leave three
widows, two of them just young women, and there are difficult decisions to be
made.
Everyone’s
trying to be kind and to think of the others, but there are so many different
forces at work.
Naomi
feels the pull of home. She, her husband and her two sons came to Moab ten
years earlier to escape a famine, but that crisis is long past. There’s nothing
to keep her here anymore. With her menfolk gone, she needs her kinsfolk around
her more than ever.
And
although she still has her daughters-in-law, Orpah and Ruth, they are Moabite
women. This is their home. They’re young enough to re-marry, but if they come
back to Israel with her who’d give them a second glance? Moabite widows? It’s
not that long since Moab was a bitter enemy of Israel, and people have long
memories. Those girls wouldn’t stand a chance, she thought. They’d be better
off staying here.
And
I don’t doubt that those same thoughts were in the minds of Ruth and Orpah too.
To stay with Naomi would mean an entire change of life for them. Different
culture, different place, different Gods and maybe – at the end of it – no one
to love them or take care of them. It’s small wonder they wept. It was a no-win
situation.
And
Naomi makes that clear – there’s no future for you with me, she tells them. And
that’s enough to tip the scales for Orpah, who returns to her people with tears
and a heavy heart. And who could blame her?
But
Ruth won’t take no for an answer – and her little speech to Naomi must go down
as one of the most selfless ever made:
“Don't urge me to leave
you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will
stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will
die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord deal with me, be it ever so
severely, if anything but death separates you and me.”
So
that was things settled.
And you’ve heard how things play out – how
they return home, and Ruth sets about trying to eke out a living for the two of
them. In ancient Israel, God had ruled that when the harvest was being cut,
whatever fell and was not gathered in should be left for the widow and the
orphans.
And
when Boaz hears who this young woman gathering the leavings is, he treats her
well – not just because Naomi is related to him, but because he’s heard of
Ruth’s kindness to her and appreciates what she’s done. “May the Lord repay you for what you have done. May you be richly
rewarded by the Lord, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come to
take refuge”.
Little
does Boaz know that he himself is going to be the answer to that prayer,
because it isn’t long before Naomi sends Ruth off in her finest to curl up at
Boaz’s feet and let him know that if he wants her, she can be his.
“I am your servant,
Ruth”
she says by the light of the stars. “Spread
the corner of your garment over me, since you are a guardian-redeemer of our
family”.
And
in English we lose something wonderful in that exchange, because in Hebrew the
word for ‘garment’ and the word for ‘wing’ have exactly the same root.
Boaz
prayed that Ruth would be blessed by God and taken under his wing. And here he
is, living that out, as he spreads his cloak over her to draw her close, keep
her warm and secure her future.
But
there’s one last hurdle to clear before the happy ending. In Israel’s legal
system, care was taken that childless widows shouldn’t be left on their own and
the responsibility of marrying them and hopefully giving them children would
fall on the nearest male relative: the
guardian-redeemer.
Boaz
was willing to do this for Ruth and Naomi, even though it could complicate
things in terms of his own estate, but he wasn’t the closest male relative.
Fortunately when that individual discovered that with the land came Ruth’s hand
in marriage, his enthusiasm for the transaction waned, and Boaz was able to
step in and marry her himself.
And
so this episode in the story which began with widowhood, displacement, sorrow
and childlessness ends with marriage, home, happiness, and a new baby whose
significance we’ll speak of right at the end.
But
what can you and I take from Ruth’s story today?
Well
let me offer a few reflections on that, in closing.
First
about faithfulness – and it’s the observation that faithfulness is costly.
Part
of the reason we celebrate Ruth’s story is that when push came to shove, she
stayed with Naomi even though that seemed to be the less attractive option.
That’s why we’re talking about Ruth today, and not Orpah.
And
we need to give Boaz some credit for taking Ruth on; marrying a Moabite widow
and complicating his own family affairs mightn’t have seemed the best choice
when there were probably other women who would have been thought of as more
suitable matches.
But
he was faithful to his obligations to Naomi and to Ruth, and glad to fulfil
them. And because he loved Ruth, he thought little of the cost to his
reputation.
And
yet there was a cost. By definition, faithfulness is costly because it involves
us giving up some of the choices we might make, and keeping faith with those
whom we’ve committed ourselves to.
Staying
faithful in body mind and soul is one of the biggest challenges of our lives –
whether that’s to a spouse, or our children, our parents, our friends, our
faith or our God.
And
it’s difficult because all of us, like Orpah, are caught between the desire to
do our own thing and go our own way, or to do what we know is right, even if –
in the moment – it might seem less attractive.
In
our time, it feels a wee bit like fidelity’s a dying art. My wife was speaking
to someone the other day who was saying that they’re soon to be 15 years
married, but among their friends they feel like the last couple standing. It
takes work and self-sacrifice to make a marriage work, or indeed, any
relationship. Is the divorce rate a symptom of our culture’s inability to
commit and stay committed?
How’s
your fidelty this morning? Are you being faithful to those you’re connected to,
be they friends or family? Are they getting enough of your time and presence and
attention or are you thinking mostly of yourself and your needs?
It’s
not easy to be faithful – we need all the help we can get. And that’s why our
faithfulness to God matters even more, because it’s as we put deep roots down
into him that we find the wisdom and the will to make good choices about how to
live.
The
fruit of the Spirit, Paul tells us; the fruit that grows in us as we abide in
him, is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness,
FAITHFULNESS and self control. Against these things – he says – there is no
law. More than that, we might add, when we see them in action, as we do today
in the life of Ruth, how lovely they really are
Faithfulness
is beautiful to behold. But it’s also costly.
Secondly
– with God, there’s always more going on.
Upper
story and Lower story – as events play themselves out in the Lower story, God
is weaving them into his Upper Story – even the dark and difficult times. See
that most in Naomi’s journey this week.
As she tries to persuade Orpah and Ruth to
leave her, she says “it is more bitter
for me than for you, because the Lord’s hand has turned against me”. And
later when she returns to Bethlehem, she says to the people “ Call me Mara – which means bitter –
because the Lord Almighty has made my life very bitter. Why call me Naomi? The
Lord has afflicted me; the Almighty has brought misfortune upon me.”
And
here’s the question – is that who God is, or is that who Naomi, in her
struggles thinks God is?
It’s
a live question. Does God send car crashes, and cancer and typhoons? In the
ancient world, they had a view of God which saw him pulling all the strings all
the time so everything was directly attributable to him. I’m not so sure that we’d
see things in quite the same light today, though some may choose to.
It’s
one thing to say that God causes these things; it’s another to say that
unfortunately these are the kinds of things that do happen in God’s world,
because at present it’s not the world he wanted it to be. He may permit them,
but that’s not the same as saying that he causes them.
And
yet, even within Naomi’s worldview, things are afoot. At the very moment when
she feels that God’s hand has turned against her, God’s hand is turning towards
her in the person of Ruth, who stays.
And
though Naomi feels herself cut off and abandoned, the kindness of Boaz to Ruth
brings the first glimmer of hope that things might actually work out for them.
Listen
to what she says when Ruth returns from her successful day in the fields, and
tells Naomi that she’s met Boaz:
“The Lord Bless him. He has not stopped showing his kindness
to the living and the dead”.
Who
is ‘he’? She could be talking about Boaz – who’s remembered them in their plight.
But she might equally be talking about God. “I
thought you’d abandoned me, God, but I can see now that you still care and you
still provide”.
“Call
me Mara” she’d said in bitterness of spirit on returning home. But no-one did. We
don’t hear that name again. They called her Naomi because that’s who she still
was, despite everything that had happened. Her worst moments and darkest days
weren’t the last word on her life. God had other plans in the Upper Story that –
as yet - she knew nothing about. Plans that would end with her having not only
Ruth, but a new son in Boaz, and a grandson – Obed – to bounce on her knee.
With
God there is always more going on than meets the eye. Don’t despair too soon.
And
then lastly two very quick points about the overarching narrative of the story.
Over
the past few weeks we’ve seen Israel slipping into what we’ve called the sin
cycle. They’re no sooner out of Egypt than they’re grumbling and making idols.
They conquer the land with God’s help, and then end up taking on board the
practices of their pagan neighbours.
They’re
painfully slow to learn that they can’t play fast and loose with the covenant
and still expect God’s blessing under that covenant.
It’s
already pretty clear that God’s plan to reveal himself through this supposedly
holy nation is going to be fraught with difficulties. Maybe God knew that all
along. Maybe it was we who had to realise that, so we’d be ready to look
elsewhere for a solution.
But
in today’s story we get a glimmer of a new and wider truth that takes us right
back to Abraham, and forward to Christ.
The
promise to Abraham was that through his seed, all nations would be blessed.
Today, in Ruth, we are discovering that when anyone, from any nation, takes
shelter under God’s wing, they will find a welcome. As Israel will discover in
the years ahead, belonging to that nation is no guarantee of God’s favour where
faith is lacking. It’s faith - an active
trust in God – that really counts.
And
lastly, I said we’d say a word about the significance of Naomi’s new grandson –
Ruth’s boy - Obed.
If
you look at Jesus’ family tree as it’s recorded in Matthew you read these
lines:
Boaz, the father of Obed, whose mother
was Ruth,
Unusually, in the
genealogy, two women are mentioned at this point. We discover that Boaz’s
mother was Rahab, who you might remember from chapter 7. She was the prostitute
who helped Israelite spies scope out the city of Jericho.
So with that in his
background, maybe Boaz had a particular eye for those on the fringes of
society.
And alongside Boaz, Ruth is named. Ruth whose
people were from Moab, and who – by rights – should have been an enemy of
Israel.
How fantastic that
both women should be singled out, not for exclusion but inclusion in this way.
Making a point, perhaps, that God responds to faith, wherever he finds it.
And how wonderful
that this little story in Israel’s history should lead, in two generations, to
their greatest King- King David, and in another fourteen, to the Christ
himself, born of David’s line in David’s town – the town of Bethlehem where
almost all of Ruth’s story is played out.
Once again, here in
the depths of the Old Testament, we’re anticipating the New – and the coming of
the one who will be the guardian-redeemer for the whole of the human race.
Jesus the Christ, saving us when we were powerless to save ourselves.
No comments:
Post a Comment