Blessings Begin

March 3, 2024

The Season of Lent

Pastor Mike

Ruth 2

As we pick up this story in its second chapter, two characters move to center stage.

Ruth, the Moabite daughter-in-law of Naomi, is one of them. Ruth married Naomi’s son in Moab and then, after his death, vowed to return with Noami – herself husbandless and sonless – to land of Judah and care for her: “Where you go, I will go. Where you stay, I will stay. Your people will be my people, and your God my God.” Ruth was both sacrificing her future for Naomi’s sake and going against the grain of the standard animosity between Moabites and Israelites.

The other character who steps to center stage is Boaz. He is a local of Bethlehem, a “prominent rich man,” a “kinsman” of Naomi’s. As the chapter unfolds, we learn that Boaz is a landowning farmer, with chief servants and field hands under him. By the way that he greets Ruth in the fields as “my daughter,” we know that she must be rather young and he, if not old, is certainly old enough that their generational difference is noticeable.

The actions and interactions of these two characters, the young foreign widow and the rich local man, occupy the rest of book. But let’s not forget that this story begins and ends with Naomi, her bitterness and, at the end, through the son of Ruth and Boaz, her redemption. So, we’ll want to keep an eye on her, too, as she moves through and eventually out of her bitterness.

Torah is a Hebrew word that means teaching, instruction, law. It can be used to refer to the whole Hebrew Bible or just to the Pentateuch, but when it’s used within the Hebrew Bible it often specifically refers to the divine commandments revealed to Moses by God on Mt. Sinai, God’s instructions for the Israelites about how to live and grow as God’s people.

The failure to keep Torah resulted in the tumultuous, violent, moral depravity of the days of the judges. But here in Bethlehem, the Torah is observed to the ‘t’, and it’s important for us as readers to brush up on two elements of Torah if we’re to understand what’s happening in Ruth chapter 2.

The first element of Torah concerns gleaning. When someone gleans in a field it means that they are following the harvesters and taking whatever fruit or grain the harvesters overlooked. Here is the section from Deuteronomy where God teaches the people to allow gleaning:

When you are harvesting in your field and you overlook a sheaf, do not go back to get it. Leave it for the foreigner, the fatherless and the widow, so that the Lord your God may bless you in all the work of your hands. When you beat the olives from your trees, do not go over the branches a second time. Leave what remains for the foreigner, the fatherless and the widow. When you harvest the grapes in your vineyard, do not go over the vines again. Leave what remains for the foreigner, the fatherless and the widow. Remember that you were slaves in Egypt. That is why I command you to do this. (24:19-22)

It’s not often that God gives a rationale for a command, but here God tells the people that they should leave food behind for the poor out of gratitude for being freed from slavery themselves. By remembering their own reversal of fortunes and God’s mercy towards them, they too are to practice mercy toward those “bound” by difficult circumstances in their own community.

In her effort to provide for Naomi despite their material poverty, Ruth takes advantage of this teaching and goes gleaning. As a widow and a foreigner, she certainly qualifies as a gleaner.

It’s beautiful, but did you catch Boaz’s words to Ruth about staying in his field because of the danger of going to glean in other fields? This is because women gleaning in the fields were easy targets for sexual violence. Gleaning, though commanded by Torah, was often not safe. That fits right in with what we know about the “days of the judges.” Only, not here in Bethlehem – at least not in Boaz’s fields. Here, Ruth and the other women shall glean in safety. The hired hands are instructed specifically against touching or reproaching her. They’re even told to make the gleaning easier and more profitable for her by pulling out whole stalks and leaving them in her path.

The second element of Torah that we need to know about is something called Levirate marriage. It explains why Boaz being a kinsman of Naomi is so significant, and why Naomi is thrilled to learn that Boaz’s field is where Ruth ended up that day. Again, here’s the relevant section of Deuteronomy:

If brothers are living together and one of them dies without a son, his widow must not marry outside the family. Her husband’s brother shall take her and marry her and fulfill the duty of a brother-in-law to her. The first son she bears shall carry on the name of the dead brother so that his name will not be blotted out from Israel. (25:5-6).

In other words, the first son of a Levirate marriage will legally be the dead man’s son for purposes of inheritance. When a brother wasn’t available, the option was extended to the next-closest male family member. In ancient Israel, families were patriarchal, ruled by men; they were patrilineal, passing inheritance and family name from fathers to sons; and they were endogamous, which means it was socially preferable that people from the same tribe or the same extended family get married. In a context like that, the Levirate custom makes sense as a way of protecting both widows and family legacies and assets.

So, if you know all that, then you’ll get the “wink” that the writer gives us in the very first verse of this chapter when Boaz is introduced as Naomi’s rich kinsman. Here’s a person eligible to fulfil the Levirate custom and act as a kinsman redeemer for the family. So, we’re already primed to want to know what this guy is like. How convenient that Ruth ends up in Boaz’s field!

It turns out that Boaz’s actions – from blessing his servants in the fields to welcoming Ruth to eat from his own table – reveal him to be a kind and righteous man. When Ruth returns to Naomi at the end of the day with an unlikely bounty, and Naomi learns that it was Boaz who helped Ruth to prosper, we glimpse the first sign of Naomi’s new life. She cries out, “Blessed be he of the Lord, who has not failed in His kindness to the living or to the dead!” After all the bitterness, Naomi names this first kindness from the Lord, which was revealed in the material kindness of Boaz. Blessings begin. There will be more.  

The point I want to stress today is the dynamic between individual action and community faithfulness. Ruth and Naomi are simply trying to survive. They need to get back on their feet after returning to Bethlehem. They don’t have husbands or sons to provide for them, and the future of Naomi’s assets are in jeopardy. Going to glean as a young foreigner was a vulnerable thing for Ruth to do. It was fraught with risk, for she could not control how she would be treated by the fieldhands. She did not know how Israelites would respond to seeing a Moabite taking advantage of their harvest. But she did it anyway, for Naomi.

Yet, as she goes, she experiences a community that is practicing faithfulness to Torah. The gleaning is not just permitted but encouraged. Ruth joins a company of gleaners. Boaz follows the law of Moses, the instructions that came from God’s very mouth. By doing so, he provides food for the most vulnerable members of his community. It may not have been happening anywhere else in Israel in the days of the judges, but it was happening here.

As for the Levirate custom, more to come on that. That’s where the real juice of the story is, and we’ll get there next week. Needless to say, we’ve been primed for it.

But also, the blessings – all the blessings. The blessings exchanged between Boaz and his servants: “The Lord be with you.” “The Lord bless you.” The blessing that Boaz speaks over Ruth: “May the Lord, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come to take refuge, reward you fully” (NLT). The Lord’s name is honored and spoken in love. It’s in everyone’s mouth. People know God and God’s ways and they’re speaking God’s name over one another.

Ruth has come to take refuge under the wings of the Lord, the God of Israel. But the way those wings are made known, the way that she as an individual in a fragile situation can actually feel the protective embrace and guardian shadow of God is through the community’s practice of gleaning and blessing, through the people’s faithfulness to God’s instructions. Ruth is a story of people taking risks for one another, of individual commitment and love and courageous action but it’s the foundation of the community and its adherence to Torah that holds up those individual acts and makes them prosper. If Boaz and his men had been scoundrels, if they had neglected their obligation to care for widows and foreigners, if blessings had been traded out for curses or silence or banal speech, then Ruth and Naomi, no matter how tenacious, would have been lost to the underbelly of history.

There’s a lesson in here for us as a church. And the lesson is very simply that the invisible God must be made visible, and that hearers of the Word must also be doers. This is what the Apostle Paul has in mind in Ephesians when he says: “And God placed all things under [Christ’s] feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.”

We as the church are the body of Christ, the incarnation and extension of his love in history, in our local time and place. It is by our faithfulness and mercy and love, our vigilance in keeping his commandments, that the foreigner, the widow, and the fatherless, the hungry, the poor, and the needy are covered by God’s wings.

Do you consider your participation here among this people to be a participation in the life of Jesus? Do you consider your hands to be his hands? Your mind to be his mind? Your words to be his words? Those are heavy and good questions to ponder during this season of Lent. The union of Christ with his church is both a deep mystical bond and a nitty-gritty reality manifest in daily life. If we are just here superficially or half-heartedly or by habit, then we have lost both the deep mystical joy and the prophetic urgency.

This story also teaches us how to properly see one another. All of us have a bit of Ruth in us. There is a reason we come here, into the fields. We are in need. We need the embrace of God, the love of the community, the provision of the harvest. There is great courage and great need at work in every person who steps through those doors, including you. How would you speak to one another if you believed that each of you was here, gathered around the table, because of great desperations and great hope? How would you honor the person who comes to this table for the very first time, if you knew that in their coming there was both great risk and great courage?

Do you see? The personal and the communal dynamics are at work in each of us. We come to the Table in our need, and we offer the Table to those in need. We extend mercy because we have received mercy. We love because we are loved. We accept because we have been accepted.

Thanks be to God. Amen.