The Book of Ruth

"The book of Ruth is associated with the festival of Shavuot, or what Christians know as the feast of Pentecost . . .the story of the giving of the Law to Moses on Mount Sinai . . . The festival liturgy connects the struggles of human individuals with the great mountain-shaking events of Sinai It thus preserves the significance of the common experience of a human person in the face of great world-making events and dares us to make personal what could otherwise be overwhelming . . . Thus, the regular coupling of the book of Ruth, with its familiar scale of narrative, and the monumental, even bombastic adventures at Mt Sinai train the ears of the participants for the thin voices of those who struggle to find their footing in troubled times" (5, 7, 9).

"But good liturgy, which is the kind of liturgy that emerges from the reality of human lives, does not shirk from standing right in the middle of the noise and tumult of our times and mediating the divine to us" (10).

"The Law--made present through liturgy--declares that it cannot fully heal the world, only kindness and generosity can do that" (11).

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"In a time of judging judges, someone has chosen to write a story where a woman's courage is the thing that returns a people to themselves . . . She, who is not one of them, turned to join Naomi as she returned home, and Ruth in her turn, turns a people to the best of themselves" (22).

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"The cyclical violence of the time period and the impact of famine means life is precarious and unpredictable" (25).

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"Indeed, it may even be that the whole purpose of the book is to unpick the ancient stereotypes of Moabites so deeply woven into the fabric of history, tradition and experience of the people of Judah. Such a self-examination preserved in sacred text is a wondrous

call . . . " (30).

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"It is easier to say that all Moabites lack generosity, or all British people want to dominate Irish people, or all Mexicans want to take advantage of American prosperity, rather than deal with the complexity of the individual standing before us. . . . Negative stereotyping leads us into prejudice and assumptions about intention; we have suffered and they intended it to happen, therefore it is their fault (32).

"When we get caught up in the negative circle of blame it becomes too easy to separate into in-groups and out-groups and to believe that everything that benefits them harms us and vice versa . . . Violence against them becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; their perceived antipathy towards us makes hostility towards them permissible and sometimes even desirable in order to maintain or establish the status quo" (32-3).

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"The book of Ruth is so much more than consolation after the book of Judges, and not simply a quaint love story. It is in fact a sophisticated work of inter-cultural awareness" (34).

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"The book of Ruth . . . recognizes that the national stereotype of Moabites is overcome by a new story; indeed it is an acknowledgement that new stories are always possible" (34).

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"Change brings grief because the past--complicated as it was --has ended, and something new is emerging" (38).

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"Being the first is both trying and tiring" (39).

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"The question of touch is one that holds the story of Ruth and Boaz throughout the

narrative . . ." (42)

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"In both a personal and political sense, a person needs to be seen. Ruth seeks to be seen. She does not come with threat to the people of the new borderland. She comes with love, but also honesty; she is honest about the truth that she sees herself as belonging, even if others do not" (45).

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When fear and anxiety govern a community's actions in the civic square, there is often a scapegoat created to carry away the community's worst anxieties. And that scapegoat is frequently the stranger.

We should not blithely pass over the Ezra and Nehemiah accounts of growing antagonism towards outsiders when things were tough for indigenous populations, nor the fact that communal fears were stoked into violent actions through the mechanism of mass gatherings. Human nature hasn't changed that substantially . . . (53).

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It appears that the bible itself has preserved texts that are in constant dialogue, sometimes even in conflict, with one another. We do well to try to manage this tension rather than try to resolve it by flattening it out into a monotone truth of a single consistent story. Managing it requires wisdom though, the ability to wrestle with the complexity of ancient and different texts in the context of our own time and history. The book of Ruth comes to us as a counter-narrative to the other louder and more strategically coherent messages, whether written at the time or in retrospect (56).

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Stories have a way of opening up conversation and dialogue by making space for the imagination . . . Stories can puncture the airtight containers into which we place our truths, bringing both light and oxygen into the space to enliven dialogue and to spark new and previously unimaginable possibilities (56).

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The theologian Walter Brueggemann speaks of texts that linger in the heritage, perhaps for decades or centuries, only to explode suddenly with new meaning in a new time (57).

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The Hebrew Bible narratives, while being profoundly moral, do not create a false equivalency betwen the abstract pure and the embodied complicated (58).

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The stories of God we receive through sacred text are often of those who dared stretch the meaning of God into the terrible circumstances they are surviving (60).

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Not only this, Ruth the Moabite from Moab is seen as an image of god, seeking cover from a people not her own, and bringing them int the shelter of her kindness, while she trusts that they will bring her into the shelter of theirs (67).

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And so [Boaz] persuades the residents of Bethlehem to extend the full protection of the Law to this outsider. In effect Ruth becomes a member of the people of God, she becomes kin, on the basis of her kindnesses rather than her ethnicity. It raises the prospect for us, therefore, that belonging can come in a variety of ways, and that our call as Christians is towards kindness as the fullest possible completion of the law and tradition (69)

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In biblical narratives it is often the case that those who leave home to find food return home as changed people (70). [Abram Gen 12 & 13, sons of Jacob, etc].

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One of the real surprises of the story is that the people of Bethlehem are enriched not by plundering their enemies but by finding space to welcome the stranger into their midst and to be changed-- in practice and policy-- by that stranger (70).

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Ruth consistently takes the emptinesses of the story and transforms them into plenty, and in so doing she draws similar acts of kindness and generosity from those around her (71).

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There was a time when belonging could only be determined by blood: those considered as kin were people who looked exactly like us, and spoke and behaved exactly like us. But times change, and with that the application of the Law. And those changes are always in the direction of kindness and grace (77).

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Kindness is courage lived out. Maya Angeou said, 'Have enough courage to trust love one more time and always one more time.' (79).

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In the end, another law is changed as a result of Ruth the Moabite coming to Israel from Moab. Her kindness was a political force, her particularity changed the way a people considered border-crossers, inter-cultural marriage and provisions, and her association with Boaz meant that she was written into the David story-line, and Boaz--not her dead husband--is named as the father. Laws and names and legacy and families are redefined by lovingkindness. Blood may spill, but love lasts forever (89-90).

(Quotations from Borders and Belonging. The Book of Ruth: A Story for Our Times by Padraig O Tuama & Glenn Jordan.)