Saturday of the Twentieth Week in Ordinary Time
Imagine, if you will, the scene that opens chapter one of Deuteronomy. (Note: I am aware that our readings for today do not come to us from Deuteronomy. But to understand the reading from Ruth, which I want to focus on today, we need to know something about Deuteronomy too.) Returning to that opening scene: After forty years of living in exile as slaves in Egypt, not to mention a long and arduous journey out of and beyond Egypt, the Israelites finally and miraculously found themselves standing across the river Jordan from the land God promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—the land of milk and honey. There, the Israelites would not only enjoy their freedom amidst great prosperity but would also once again take their place as a great nation among nations.
They had finally arrived. They needed only to cross the river to reach God’s promised land and to enjoy God’s favor along with all the blessings that would follow from it.
Or so they thought. Indeed, they would quickly learn, thanks to God’s messenger, Moses, that God had other ideas. Not so fast, Moses basically said. God needed still more from His people before they could make their crossing.
Yes, God knew well what the Israelites had endured for decades. God also knew that from time to time they had rebelled against Him. So, for God, what the Israelites had suffered was crucial but not sufficient. It was, after all, in the past. And God had to think about the Israelites and the future. How would the Israelites be in that future as they fully enjoyed all the benefits of God’s promise? Would they become overly confident, perhaps even arrogant? Would they forget who they were and who God is? Would they once again find cause to rebel against God?
And so, God gave Moses another task: to report His instructions for living as His people in the promised land. The stakes were high for the Israelites. If they followed God’s commandments, they would remain in God’s favor. If not, all bets were off. And their past would not save them.
We likely remember the first ten commandments, the Ten Commandments. But there were so many more, too many for this reader to count and certainly too many for me to remember.
Importantly, given our first reading for today, one of those commandments pertained to Ruth and her people, the Moabites. For a variety of reasons having to do with past wars and more recent slights, the Moabites were considered by God to be offensive and a threat to the Israelites. And so God commanded that the Moabites would never gain admittance “to the assembly of the Lord” and that the Israelites should never “promote their welfare or their prosperity as long as you [Israelites] live” (Deut. 23:3).
This was the God-given commandment that was in place when Ruth, the Moabite and, thus, the stranger, the foreigner, the presumed threat entered a community of Israelites in the course of her travels with Naomi. Her arrival was made all the more challenging by the fact that she was a widow, she was not a woman of means, and she was traveling with another woman (Naomi) who, though Naomi was a woman of some social standing among this Israelite community, also lacked financial resources. What were these two tired and hungry women to do?
While Ruth was clearly even more vulnerable than Naomi in this context, Ruth showed herself not to be without significant resources. On the contrary. She was clever, smart, and (by many accounts) quite attractive. Keenly aware that she and Naomi were in desperate need of food, she made a proposal to Naomi. Ruth would make her way into the fields nearby to “glean” or retrieve from the fields grain that had been left behind by workers during the harvest. Naomi gladly gave her assent to Ruth’s plan, and Ruth headed off to the fields.
Whether she knew it or not (that remains unclear), Ruth found herself gleaning in a field owned by Boaz, a man of means and some relation (which also remains unclear) to Naomi. It turns out that Boaz knew something of Ruth’s story and, in particular, the sacrifices she had made to help Naomi make this journey.
He was, scholars say, rather taken aback and impressed by Ruth’s willingness to put herself at great risk to help Naomi—a woman who was not of Ruth’s people and, indeed, belonged to a people hostile to Ruth’s own.
Long story short, Boaz made a series of arrangements with especially men of his community to protect this surprisingly impressive widow from sexual and other forms of assault. And then, to top it all off, he married her and, in so doing, gave her legitimacy and social standing among a people commanded by God to not “promote.”
Why did Boaz do all that for this stranger, this foreigner, this supposed threat of a woman? Why would he put God’s favor in jeopardy for some poor Moabite widow? Why not just kick her off his land and be rid of her? Presumably, God would have smiled on that course of action.
Maybe he had another commandment in mind. This one we also find in Deuteronomy (chapter 10:17-19). It reads: “For the Lord your God is . . . mighty and awesome, who is not partial and takes no bribe, who executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and who loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing. You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”
I want to be a good Christian. I think Boaz similarly wanted to be a good Israelite. And sometimes that can seem pretty straight forward—follow God’s rules. Do what God says. Don’t do what God says not to do. And then I open my Bible to a story like this one, and I can’t help but notice that doing the right thing is often so much more complicated than I thought.
What may seem like a simple and God-given rule (here—reject that foreigner, that stranger, that presumed threat) isn’t so simple. And that’s because it bumps up against that other (bigger?) rule that goes something like this: Never forget who you are and who you have been: A foreigner, a stranger, a presumed threat. In other words, love that other that is/was also you.
And who knows what may come of such love. After all, Boaz “broke” one of God’s commandments but instead of being forsaken by God, was chosen by God to help bring into the world descendants who would include a line from Obed to Jesse to David to our savior, Jesus.
This all makes me wonder if sometimes to be a truly good Christian I am called to be a “bad” one. I’ll have to pray on that.
—Sue Trollinger