“Ruth and Remembrance Day”

Twenty-second Sunday of Pentecost

Remembrance Sunday

Ruth 3:1-5; 4:13-17

 Psalm 127

 Hebrews 9:24-28

The Book of Ruth is a remarkable text.  It recounts the experiences of a Moabite woman – named Ruth – who marries an Israelite man, but who is then widowed at a young age.  Rather than return to her own people in Moab, Ruth decides to continue to care for her widowed Israelite mother-in-law, Naomi.  She decides to return to Israel, and to embrace the life, the culture, and the religious faith of her mother-in-law. 

Facing the vulnerability of being a widow in a foreign land with neither a husband, nor a father nor a father-in-law to advocate for her, Ruth sets out to provide food for herself and her mother-in-law.  When she does so, she meets and falls in love with an honourable man named Boaz.  The two are eventually married and have a child and, as today’s text ends, we read that they named the child “Obed; he became the father of Jesse, the father of David.”  Today’s text serves as some of the closing verses of this short but lovely story.

But the Book of Ruth is more than simply a nice story.  Although we may not realize it at first, the Book of Ruth is also an incredibly provocative and potentially explosive text that continues to have the power to challenge social, cultural, political and religious prejudices, even to the modern day.

So how do we discover this challenging dimension to this seemingly simple love story?  And what might this text have to say to us as we once again pause to remember the terrible reality of war? 

In order to realize the powerful dimension of this story, it is important for us to take note of both its historical and its literary context.  Clearly, the historical setting for Ruth was before the rise of the kings of Israel; that is, well before 1000 BC.  But there is good reason to believe, for a number of thematic and linguistic reasons, that the story itself may have been compiled into the form that we have it in the period of time after the Babylonian captivity; that is, sometime after 537 BC.  Just as we might write a story, today, which is set in the fifteenth century, but which addresses contemporary concerns, the story of Ruth may have been told long after the events that it recounts.

So what was happening in that later period in which this story may have been told?  After the exile, as the Jewish people returned from Babylon, they were confronted with the challenge of restoring and rebuilding the Temple in Jerusalem, the city of Jerusalem, and perhaps most importantly, their own self-identity as a community.  Under the leadership of individuals such as Ezra and Nehemiah, the people wrestled with the question of why they had gone into exile; they asked themselves what they might have done to deserve such a terrible punishment; they pondered whether they had somehow broken covenant with God, and whether the exile was a form of punishment for those sins. 

One of the answers that Ezra and Nehemiah suggested in response to those soul-searching questions was that the exile happened because Israel had been guilty of allowing the worship of other gods. So often, thoughout their history, the prophets had warned the people to remain wholeheartedly devoted to God and to God alone; and, so often, the historical books of the Bible suggest that the people’s faithfulness wavered, their loyalties swayed, and their allegiance to the God of Abraham and Sarah was diluted with a casual acceptance of the worship of other deities. 

If this was the case, the people reflected, then the best way to avoid another devastating punishment like the exile was to seek to ensure that the worship of other deities would be eradicated from their community. Such recommitment to God would, it was hoped, guarantee a future that would be far brighter than the past that had so nearly destroyed them as a people.

A question therefore confronted them.  Who was to blame for introducing those foreign religious practices into the life of their community?  Who brought those other gods?

And the answer that they came up with? 

It was the foreign women, the wives who had intermarried into the people of Israel.  And the proposed solution was that the people of Israel should draw a clear line of demarcation between ‘us’ and ‘them’ -- and then kick ‘them’ out.

As a result, the later chapters of Ezra and Nehemiah recount a horrific purge of the foreign women who had married the sons of Israel, and their children.  In Ezra chapter 9, Ezra writes,

the officials approached me and said, ‘The people of Israel, the priests, and the Levites have not separated themselves from the peoples of the lands with their abominations, from the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Jebusites, the Ammonites, the Moabites, the Egyptians, and the Amorites. ²For they have taken some of their daughters as wives for themselves and for their sons. Thus the holy seed has mixed itself with the peoples of the lands, and in this faithlessness the officials and leaders have led the way.’ ³When I heard this, I tore my garment and my mantle, and pulled hair from my head and beard, and sat appalled.

In both Ezra and Nehemiah, we have accounts of a decision to expel all of the foreign women and children from Israel.  In Nehemiah chapter 13, Nehemiah writes,

In those days also I saw Jews who had married women of Ashdod, Ammon, and Moab…And I contended with them and cursed them and beat some of them and pulled out their hair; and I made them take an oath in the name of God, saying, ‘You shall not give your daughters to their sons, or take their daughters for your sons or for yourselves. ²⁶Did not King Solomon of Israel sin on account of such women? Among the many nations there was no king like him, and he was beloved by his God, and God made him king over all Israel; nevertheless, foreign women made even him to sin.

So what does all of this have to do with Ruth and with Remembrance Day?

It is when we read the story of Ruth against the backdrop of the purges of foreign women in Ezra and Nehemiah that we begin to realize the politically explosive claim at the heart of the story of Ruth.  And that claim is this – Ruth was one of ‘those’ women; Ruth was one of ‘those’ foreigners; Ruth was a Moabite woman who had intermarried with an Israelite man; as such, Ruth would clearly have been included in that group of objectionable outsiders who were deemed to be responsible for the problems that Israel was experiencing. If Ruth had been alive in the time of Ezra and Nehemiah’s purges, there would have been no doubt that she would have been forcibly expelled from the people of Israel.  After all, the lines had been drawn quite clearly between ‘us’ and ‘them’ – and Ruth was one of ‘them’.

But, as today’s text reveals, Ruth was something else as well – and it is not until the final verses of the Book of Ruth that we learn that one other fact.  The twist – that the author cleverly manages to refrain from sharing until the very closing verses of the story was this -- Ruth was David’s grandma.

And David was the greatest Israelite in the entire history of their people. David was the shepherd king, chosen and anointed by God, whose dynasty would last forever.  David was the ancestor of the promised Messiah.  David was the great Psalm writer, the valiant warrior, the greatly flawed and greatly forgiven man who, according to the Bible, was a man after God’s own heart. 

And Ruth was his grandma.

Suddenly, we begin to realize that the Book of Ruth may, in fact, be a rather explosive little story, serving as a powerful and daring critique of the clear lines of demarcation that the people of Ezra and Nehemiah’s time were trying to draw. Go ahead, blame the foreigners; go ahead, lament that the holy seed has been mixed with unholy Moabite women; go ahead, try to purify yourselves by making a clear distinction between us and them; go ahead, blame others for the problems of your community; but as you do, do not forget Ruth.  Do not forget that were it not for one of those ‘others’, those ‘foreigners’, those Moabite women, the greatest Israelite who ever lived would never have been born and the kingdom of David would never have been established.  Draw your lines of division, but don’t forget that Ruth, one of those ‘others’, was the living origin of the greatest and most glorious king of Israel that ever lived.

So what might all of this have to do with Remembrance Day? 

Like the people of Israel, contemplating their world in the aftermath of the exile, we often ponder the reasons or the causes for the suffering that we find in the world.  And, like the people of Israel, we are often quick to ascribe the blame for the challenges that confront us to some ‘other’ group.  It is the fault of the CEOs or the politicians; it is the fault of the greedy rich, or it is the fault of lazy poor; it is the fault of oppressive men, or it is the fault of liberated women; it is the fault of new immigrants, or it is the fault of established cliques; it is the fault of organized religion or it is the fault of secular humanism; it is the fault of the militant fundamentalists or of the bleeding heart liberals; it is the fault of the Jews or the Nazis, the communists or the capitalists, the Tutzis or the Hutus; it is the fault of the immoral West or it is the fault of the extremist Taliban.  In these, and in countless other situations, we draw clear lines between ‘us’ and ‘them’ and then conclude that the blame, the fault and the cause of problems rests at the feet of that ‘other’ group.

And, in its most extreme case, this human tendency to draw clear lines between us and them – and then to blame them – leads us to war.  And when war begins, it requires that we use all of the tools and weapons at our disposal to destroy those who we have deemed to be the ‘other’.  We may establish complex philosophical analyses which seek to clarify when wars can be considered just – but regardless of the relative morality, the simple fact is that war is the most extreme consequence of drawing a line between us and them.

In the context of war, it is good to read the Book of Ruth, if for no other reason than to remind ourselves that the lines that we draw sometimes betray us.  It invites us to ask ourselves whether one of those ‘others’ who we have blamed for our problems might in fact be,  as Ruth was, the source of great goodness and great blessing in our own community?  What if that ‘other’ who we are determined to destroy has the power to help our world to rise to new levels of greatness?  And what if that desire to blur the line between us and them actually led us to love our enemy?

Throughout the Bible, and perhaps most powerfully in the Gospel texts, we are constantly and repeatedly challenged to see the ‘other’ through new eyes.  Consider, for example, how often Jesus challenged his disciples to see some individual or group of ‘others’ in a new light.  He used the parable of a despised Samaritan to teach his disciples what neighbourly love meant.  He used the sight of a poor widow to teach them the true nature of a generous spirit.  He used the violence that was about to be unleashed on an adulterous woman to teach them not to judge others until they, themselves, were free from sin.  He touched suffering lepers to reveal the true power of healing and wholeness; he restored sight to blind beggars to teach his followers what true vision means.

And, in the end, he became the ultimate ‘other’ in order to reveal to us the very power of God.  After all, the Gospel texts all suggest that the religious and political authorities of his day drew a line between the good and the bad, the righteous and the unrighteous, the acceptable and the unacceptable; and on the other side of the line that those authorities drew was a young man, humiliated and outcast, beaten, whipped, and brutalized.  They drew a line between ‘us’ and ‘them’ and then crucified ‘them’.

But it was that outcast other in whom we have seen the face of God. 

As a people who are called to follow that crucified Messiah, we do well to constantly challenge our own assumptions about the lines that we draw between ‘us’ and ‘them’.  There is an old saying that whenever we draw a line between ourselves and another, it is good to ponder whether God might be on the other side of the line that we have drawn.

And, in the world today, as we not only remember the terrible cost of wars of the past, but as we also remember that young Canadians are fighting and dying on distant battlefields, this call to challenge the lines that we draw, and this call to examine our assumptions about those who we consider to be the ‘other’ – and to struggle to love our enemies -- is needed, now more than ever.