We left Naomi a
widow with no future, expressing on one hand hesed for Ruth and Orpah while on the other despair against God for
her own situation. She pushes Ruth and Orpah away from herself, attempting to
protect them from the desolation that is her life. And it is here that we see
the first glimpses of glory. Even though Naomi’s despair has overtaken her
ability to see God clearly and to love Ruth well, Ruth will not leave Naomi. Though a Moabite,
Ruth’s response to Naomi’s rejection indicates a deep and profound faith in the
God of Israel, for her she names him as her judge should she betray her word.
There is no “good reason” for Ruth to follow Naomi’s God, yet her faith
persists in spite of all evidence to the contrary. We may not understand how
this was possible, but we do know that Ruth’s response to Naomi echoes God’s
own covenant with Abraham as a binding relationship of faithfulness. She turns
toward the God of Israel, attaching herself to his faithfulness, and this
equips her to declare and embody that same faithfulness to another. Having
bound herself to the God of Israel, she binds herself to Naomi, even-- or
especially-- in a circumstance of utter suffering. In doing so, Ruth takes on a
new identity, aligning herself with Israel, with the bigger picture of God’s
relationship with his people, transcending the particular evidence of the
bitter, despairing woman before her. It is an utterly unequal commitment, for
Ruth insists on pledging her faithfulness to Naomi as a response to Naomi’s
rejection of her as daughter, person, and even soul, for Naomi, if you remember,
had told Ruth to return to her gods, to a life of faithless paganism. Not only
bold and profound, Ruth’s vow reveals the intentionality and beauty of hesed, for it frames her act of love
with artful beauty, a poem that reveals the purposeful nature of her
declaration. In response to rejection, Ruth declares to Naomi,
“Do not urge me to leave you or to return from following you.
For where you go I will go,
and where you lodge I will lodge.
Your people shall be my people,
and your God my God.
Where you die I will die,
there will I be buried.
May the Lord do so to me and more also
if anything but death parts me from you.”
Ruth binds herself to Naomi, to both her going and her lodging, and
ultimately, to death. There are no other facets of life; Ruth’s vow is all
encompassing, and, given Naomi’s situation, it is something binding herself to
death itself. Further, Ruth was “determined to go with her,” which carries a
sense of strength and throwing energy into something. Ruth beautifully and
intentionally throws herself towards death. This is hesed.
We who hear it are
perhaps overcome by the power of Ruth’s vow, but Naomi stood as the recipient
of this great vow and simply “said no more.” She yielded to the determined
assertiveness of Ruth’s love, but there was not yet any comfort or healing in
it. And so, the two women go on together, toward Israel, toward the God of
Naomi’s forefathers, toward Bethlehem, the “house of bread.” Imagine the buzz,
the whispers as these two widows enter the city gates. The women see Naomi,
their long-lost friend from ten years ago, but she’s different. Where is her
husband? Her sons? Where is her joy, for she looks worn and weary, and her step
is heavy. And who’s this woman with her? They murmur to each other, “Is this
Naomi?” We’ve already heard some about Naomi’s response, that she declares her
new identity to be “Mara, for the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me. I
went away full, and the Lord has brought me back empty.” But imagine, now, if
you will, what this must have been like for Ruth. Ruth has left her home, her
family, and everything she has ever known to knit herself in steadfast love to
Naomi, and Naomi’s response has been silence and now a declaration to Ruth’s
new community that Ruth is nothing, that with Ruth at her side, Naomi is still
empty. We know Ruth has courage, should she not have used it at this moment to
leave, recognizing that her love is considered worthless? We know Ruth has a
voice and the ability to speak with purpose and strength, shouldn’t she speak
up for herself and call Naomi out for her blindness, her unkindness in this
moment? Ruth has offered her life, and Naomi has called it nothing. How does hesed love respond in the face of being
ignored, devalued, and rejected?
Hesed persists in sowing even when there seems to be no sign or hope
of fruit. In the face of rejection, hesed
still turns toward the other and towards hope, seeking ways to bless, to bring
life and redemption. And so Ruth says to Naomi, “let me go to the field and
glean among the ears of grain after him in whose sight I shall find favor.” You
see, Ruth has been watching. She has figured out the customs and provisions of
her new home, and she has discerned a way that she can provide food for Naomi
and herself. Somehow, this Moabite foreigner knows more of Naomi’s God than Naomi
does. She looks at her experience, at the life given to her, and she sees it as
full of signs of his faithfulness rather than her own forsakenness. God had
commanded his people not to harvest to the edges of the fields nor to pick up
the gleanings, but to leave them for the needy and the stranger to gather once
the reapers had left the fields. Ruth turns toward this provision, knowing that
even this law is a path through which God shows his love, his concern for the
poor, the outcast, the widowed, the stranger, the forsaken. This work is no
shame, but a way in which the wings of the Lord stretch out over her, providing
refuge. And from this place of refuge, she can find a means to love Naomi.
Imagine, if you will, all of the other ways this
could have gone. This is Naomi’s home, she knew of the gleaning laws and could
have turned toward this legal provision. She could have asked around for safe
fields for them to glean in, could have at least offered to come along. But
Naomi is still silent in her despair. Without guidance or care from Naomi, Ruth
seeks a way to care for Naomi’s life. This is how Ruth responds to Naomi’s
rejection: she puts hesed into
action. Ruth does not vent or nurse
self-pity or silently resent Naomi, but she continues to move towards her in
love-- love that issues in practical, fruitful action.
So Ruth goes to glean in the fields of Boaz. Her
only friend in the world sits at home, despairing, silent, and unhelpful, but
Ruth sets out to work. Surely, she was afraid. A foreigner, she would be an
object of speculation, and as a single woman, she would have been vulnerable.
Other gleaners might push her away from their territory; men harvesting might
have harassed or even raped her. Even with these great risks, there’s no
guarantee she’ll be successful. Although God had clearly established the
gleaning laws, a stingy overseer could push these guidelines, leaving very
little behind, so that a woman like Ruth might spend the whole day hard at
work, but still go home with barely enough to eat. You’d think her goal would
be to keep her head down, stay as little noticed as possible, and try to
scrounge up at least enough to keep herself and Naomi alive for another day.
But that low aim is not sufficient for a doer of
hesed. Ruth refuses to accept the boundaries. She
boldly approaches the man in charge because she wants to not just glean from
what’s left over, but “gather among the sheaves behind the reapers.”
Courageously, and almost brashly, Ruth asks far more than was customarily permitted
to gleaners, determined to gather enough food. All that long day, a stranger in
the land, she worked with only a short rest, and her persistence was such that
the workers themselves, professional harvesters, noticed her labor.
We’re told that Ruth had “happened to come” to
this particular field, but by now we know that all things are full of signs of
the faithfulness of the Lord, of his provision. This is, after all, the field
of a Boaz, a worthy man. When Boaz arrives to check in on the harvesters, he
doesn’t greet his workers as we might expect. Instead, he calls out to them,
“The Lord be with you!” and they answered, “The Lord bless you!” Even this
humble work is a gathering of God’s people, a place where his blessing might be
found. Ruth set out that morning to work in a field, but never did she imagine
that she was ultimately finding rest in a sanctuary. The Lord is here, and he
is working.
But just as Ruth may have feared, she has been
noticed as a stranger among those who belong. Her story has been quite the talk
of the town, and Boaz realizes that this woman in his field is the infamous
Moabitess. He tells her, “All that you have done for your mother-in-law since
the death of your husband has been fully told to me, and how you left your father
and mother and your native land and came to a people that you did not know
before.” Her hesed faithfulness to
Naomi has become her story, her identity, the reputation that precedes her.
Ruth’s radical, self-sacrificial behavior can only have one source, and Boaz
names it and blesses her, “The Lord repay you for what you have done, and a
full reward be given you by the Lord, the God of Israel, under whose wings you
have come to take refuge!” Like Ruth, Boaz is one who sees rightly. This
foreigner, this widow, this one who pours herself out for the good of another,
is one who is in the Lord, who rests in his faithfulness, who abides in his
steadfast love.
Surely Ruth was
grateful for the blessing, for the care Boaz extended to her, but her concern
is not repayment and reward for herself. Under the wings and care of the Lord,
she extends this gracious care to others. Her work, after all, has not been to
curry favor with Boaz, to seek advancement or blessing, but to feed her
mother-in-law, to whom she has bound herself in faithful love. Naomi has been
waiting at home all day, likely hungry and worried, perhaps wondering if
another hope would be dashed, that Ruth might not succeed, might barely bring
home enough, or might have been harmed. With what anticipation of Naomi’s
surprise must Ruth have hurried home that evening! She opens the door and
presents her gift to Naomi: 29 pounds of grain she had gleaned as well as the
leftovers of roasted grain from the lunch shared with Boaz. Old Babylonian
records suggest that a male worker’s wages for a day were 1 to 2 pounds of
grain; Ruth walks in with two weeks worth of wages and a cooked meal.
Stunned, Naomi stirs to life and begins
peppering Ruth with questions, “Where did you glean today? Where did you work?
May he who took notice of you be blessed!” As she always does, Naomi is looking
for a source-- just as she saw God as the source of her despair, in this too,
she looks deeper and knows that someone must be responsible. Things, whether
evil or good, do not simply happen. And, having learned that the man was Boaz,
Naomi continues to dig. After all, why would a man like Boaz- prosperous,
ostensibly powerful, and with a great work of the harvest to do-- take time out
of his schedule to ask after the wellbeing of his gleaners? Not only does he
take the time, at potential financial risk to himself, but Boaz has risked
humiliation and shame-- what might his workers have thought of a man who would
take the time to talk to a poor, dirty, sweaty, widowed foreigner? How can he
eat with those who are less than him? You can almost hear what they might have
grumbled to each other, “What will Boaz be doing next-- dining with tax collectors?”
As Ruth tells her of Boaz’s care and blessing,
Naomi, surrounded by a story of God’s love and provision for her and evidence
of his desire to feed her, speaks words of life and blessing, “May he be
blessed by the Lord, whose kindness-- whose hesed--
has not forsaken the living or the dead!” Though silent before Ruth’s earlier
vow of hesed love, Naomi is finally
moved to praise because of this tangible evidence of care for her physical
well-being. Ruth’s promises have become hours of labor, and her words of life
and relationship have become bread-- feeding Naomi’s body and soul. Naomi
voices a return to hope, to blessing, to resting on the promises of God because she has been surrounded by
people who have displayed his hesed
to her. She has seen the goodness of her God in the loving words and faithful
action of Ruth, in the integrity and hospitality of Boaz, and she can now see
how God himself is at work through these people, through his laws, and through
the fruitfulness of the land itself. Naomi, the woman who had been left
without, who sought to be called Mara, who had come back empty, begins to see
again the hesed of the Lord through
the hesed of those who are rooted in
him.
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