Judges, Ruth, Kingdoms pp. 41-88
“No Foreigners”
September 30, 2018 – Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost
I get cold so I turn up the thermostat. A little while later my wife Beth turns it down. I get chilled again and turn it back up. Then Beth opens a window. Then I make remarks about wasting money warming up the outdoors. Beth tells me to put on a sweater. I say I don’t like wearing sweaters. Round and round we go, in a regular little cycle that happens in our house throughout the winter.
Most relationships have these cycles. As a pastor I’ve heard couples tell me about much worse patterns of interaction that go around in circles. He fails to put clothes away and she complains. Then he points out how she always forgets to lock the car. Then she brings up some more serious infraction from years ago, like when he flirted with another woman. Then he tells her she’s getting fat. Then she begins to cry and shouts something that starts “You never…” and he gets angry and yells back words that begin, “You always…” And they are off, round and round, louder and louder, more and more painful, that same cycle of hurt and conflict happening over and over in that home.
Our reading from Kingdoms this past week started with a vicious cycle of hurt and conflict among God’s people Israel. It’s described right there on pages 45 and 46 in Judges. The people would sin and worship other gods and so God would allow them to be defeated by their enemies, the Canaanites still left in the land around them. Then the people would be sorry and cry out to God in their distress. Then He would listen and send them a judge, someone to lead them in successful fights against their enemies. So then they would be saved and have peace for a while. But then that judge would die and they would forget and start sinning and worshipping other gods again and the cycle would start all over.
What looks like a cycle is often actually a downward spiral. Marriages locked in ugly cycles of conflict can sink down until there is almost no way to climb out. The same thing happened to Israel. Just skim through looking at the lengths of those times of peace which came after a judge saved Israel. It starts out with Othniel bringing forty years of peace, then eighty years of peace with Ehud, then forty with Deborah, then forty while Gideon was still alive. But then on page 61 we read that Tola judged Israel for twenty-three years and then Jair led them for twenty-two years.
It keeps going down and the judges keep getting worse. On page 65 we read that Jepthah had just six years. Then Ibzan lasted seven years and Elon made it to ten, while Elon only got to eight. The last great judge was Samson, definitely a piece of work, the “Sylvester Stallone” of the judges. Despite his might, he only lasted twenty years. Then the last part of Judges has no heroes at all, just stories of idolatry and sin and civil war within Israel itself. By the end they have pretty much hit bottom.
Both for Israel during the time of judges and for our own relationships, what’s needed is something to break the cycle. Something needs to change direction, reverse the course, transform hearts and minds so that peace can return to human lives once again.
The last chapters of Judges tell us what the answer is not going to be. We read it first in the middle of page 72, Judges 17:6, “In those days Israel had no king; all the people did whatever seemed right in their own eyes.” That translation is a little deceptive. It might sound as though the people together determined what was right. But the original is singular. “Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” In other words, each individual determined his own morality, decided her own course of action. There was no king to bring them together under the rule of God’s law or to act for the common good.
That first part of that slogan about there being no king is repeated at the beginning of the next two chapters, at the bottom of page 72 and page 74. The whole thing including the part about everyone doing individually whatever he or she felt was right is the very last sentence in the book on page 80. It doesn’t solve anything. It’s part of the problem and it’s what happens at the bottom of the spiral. Doing what each sees fit, Israel is not just fighting external enemies, but fighting internally, at war with each other.
The strange thing is that what the author of Judges clearly takes to be a problem, this individual self-determination of every person for his or herself, is taken as the norm and even the best order of things by people in our own time. Christian philosopher Stephen Davis recently wrote an article entitled, “Nobody Has the Right to Tell Me What to Believe or Do.” He writes that over the years as a college professor he has heard students express feelings along the lines that “anybody who does try to tell me what to do is interfering with my personal rights.”[1]
It’s not just students. It seems to be very much the spirit of our time as much as of the time of the Judges. Even Christians get caught up in it. “No one can tell me whether or not to have an abortion.” “No one tell me I can’t own any sort of gun I want to buy.” “No one can tell me I can’t kill myself.” “No one can tell me whom I can have sex with.” “No one tell me I can’t smoke marijuana if I feel like it.” Even if we don’t like some behaviors around us we may still support that “personal right” of each individual to decide.
Yet seeking your individual rights to guide your own life solves nothing. It did not solve it for Israel, it does not solve it for fighting couples, and it has not solved anything for our nation. Respect for human rights is vital, but when it dissolves into each person doing whatever is right in his or her own eyes, the cycles of conflict continue to spiral downward.
Something very different from individual autonomy was needed for Israel and it is needed for us today as well. Fortunately, the first sign of that something different appears in the very next book we read this past week, the short, sweet, beautiful story of a foreign woman named Ruth.
On page 83, at the very beginning of Ruth’s story, we learn that it took place, “In the days when the judges ruled in Israel…” What immediately follows is what you might expect from what we just finished in Judges, the bad news that, “a severe famine came upon the land.” There is more sadness to follow, an Israelite woman named Naomi who went to live as a refugee with her husband and two sons in the land of Moab, only to have both her husband and her sons die there and leave her almost alone with just her two, foreign to her, Moabite daughters-in-law. If this were still the book of Judges itself, we could expect some sordid tale of oppression or abuse to follow.
But this is where the Judges cycle begins to change, to alter course, and maybe even be turned back. Naomi starts home for Israel. Orpah and Ruth, her daughters-in-law begin to go with her. We read there on page 83 how Naomi dissuades them. There is nothing for them where she is going. She’s not going to give birth to anymore sons for them to marry. They should go home to Moab and she should go on back to her little town of Bethlehem in Judah.
Naomi’s concern for her daughters-in-law is where the pattern of Judges first starts to turn around. Those Moabite women were ready to go with her. They would have been a huge help to the older woman who should not be traveling alone on a long journey in foreign territory. But Naomi did not think about her own welfare. She put the younger women’s interests ahead of her own and tried to send them home.
It worked with one of them. After Naomi’s second plea, Orpah did the sensible thing and turned back. But Ruth stuck with her and said these words which may be familiar to you, “Wherever you go, I will go. Wherever you live, I will live. Your people will be my people, and your God will be my God. Wherever you die, I will die, and there I will be buried.”
In the church, we most often hear those words of Ruth words at a wedding. We think of them as the kind of commitment brides and bridegrooms make to each other, like Alison and Johnny will this afternoon. And so they should. The Bible teaches that men and women are to leave behind other ties and cling to each other in faithfulness and love, remaining with each other for the rest of their days on earth.
However, we see here that Ruth’s words were first spoken in expression of a commitment that is only partially based on marriage. Ruth’s husband was gone. Her family tie to Naomi was broken. Naomi had released her. Yet she chose to embrace not only Naomi, but all she represented. Ruth committed herself to her mother-in-law’s people and to her God.
The cycle of Judges is starting to unravel here. Ruth does not seek her own individual self-interest. She does not do just what is right in her own eyes and what is best for her. She puts Naomi’s will ahead of her own will. She lets Naomi decide where she will go, and even lets Naomi decide what she will believe. This humble foreign woman becomes the catalyst by which God will heal His people and bring them back together.
When Ruth came to Bethlehem, that commitment to Naomi’s God changed her into something other than a foreigner. If you read it last week, you know how the story turns out. When they arrive, everyone recognizes Naomi in amazement. She had been gone ten years. The two set up a household and Ruth the foreign woman, a refugee now herself in Israel, goes out to provide for Naomi in the only way possible, as a beggar. With other poor people she gleans barley behind the men who are harvesting. There she is noticed by the Israelite man who owns the field, Boaz.
In Boaz we find the third character in the story who refuses to act like the Israelites in Judges did. Boaz was totally unlike that Levite on pages 74 to 76 in Judges, who treated his concubine, another woman from Bethlehem, like a piece of property and threw her out the door to appease an angry mob of rapists. Instead, Boaz treated this woman Ruth, this foreign woman, with the utmost respect and honor.
The rest of the story is a beautiful tale of love and grace. Boaz is smitten with Ruth and tells his men to leave extra barley on the ground for her and to protect her. So for the rest of the season she goes only to his field. Finally, through Naomi’s advice and some ancient symbolism and custom that no one today really quite understands, Ruth announces her own affection for Boaz by lying down at his feet one night on the threshing floor.
What’s exactly going on there with Ruth and Boaz that night on page 86 is confusing, but one thing is clear. Unlike Samson, that Levite, and many other men in the time of the judges and in our own time, Boaz is a man who does not take physical advantage of women. It was dark. No one else knew that Ruth was there near him. When he woke up and found her there, he could easily have had sex with her whether she wanted it or not. Instead, Boaz acted as what Naomi first called him on page 85, a redeemer.
As we learn in what unfolds, Boaz’s role as a redeemer has something to do with kinship and keeping land in the family. It’s part of God’s law given in Leviticus 25, calling on Israelites to come to the aid of poor relatives so that land is not lost. Instead it is to be redeemed. Here it is also connected in some way with a responsibility to care for widows in one’s own family, even to the point of marriage and siring children in the name of a dead sibling or other relative.
We’ve already seen that Boaz is clearly attracted to Ruth and thus not at all adverse to marrying her, but he puts his own interest to one side and deals with her according to honor and law. He wants to marry her, but there is a legal difficulty because of a nearer relative’s claim on her dead husband’s land. It’s a romance story. So of course there is some obstacle between the lovers. But it is all worked out on page 87. The other relative who might have redeemed the land and also had to marry Ruth releases his claim.
So Boaz redeemed the land and redeemed the life of that Moabite refugee. Ruth the foreigner becomes Ruth the wife of Boaz. The elders pronounce an ancient Hebrew blessing on her in chapter 4, saying to Boaz: “May the Lord make this woman who is coming into your home like Rachel and Leah, from whom all the nations of Israel descended!” It’s a sign of her acceptance not just into Boaz’s home but into the nation itself. They welcome her as one of their own, as a citizen. Jewish people still use a blessing like that for their daughters on the evening of the Sabbath, “May God make you like Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah.”
Ruth’s story continues as you might expect. She became a wife, and then a mother. Ruth and Boaz had a little boy. They gave him a name that sounds strange to our ears: “Obed.” When they were young, my daughters used to laugh when they heard the story of little Obed. But there is more to the story than just a sweet baby and a happy ending. Obed was a very important little boy in God’s plan. The book of Ruth ends with a little genealogy on page 88. At the end of it we read:
Boaz was the father of Obed.
Obed was the father of Jesse.
Jesse was the father of David.
Obed became the grandfather of a king, the second and greatest king of Israel. It was king David who finally and wonderfully broke that cycle of misery handed down from the time of the judges and gave Israel 80 more years of peace between him and his son Solomon. David redeemed Israel out of its misery because Boaz redeemed a foreign woman and a little plot of ground.
We will read about David in the weeks to come, how Israel had a bad king first, and then was given David, “a man after God’s own heart.” Ruth’s part in David’s story is truly amazing when you look at what it says in Deuteronomy 23:3, “No Ammonite or Moabite or any of their descendants shall enter the assembly of the Lord,” because the Moabites refused passage and food and water to Israel as they came to Canaan. But in the mercy and grace of God even that conflict and exclusion changes and a Moabite became the ancestor of the kings of Israel.
In a beautiful triptych, a cycle of three paintings by Thomas Matthews Rooke, you can see the story of Ruth unfold as she first clings to Naomi, and then is noticed and blessed by Boaz as she gleans in the field, and then as she stands by Naomi while the old woman lovingly cradles baby Obed in her arms. For some reason the sequence is right to left, like Hebrew is written, but almost as if the painter was expressing the fact that Ruth had reversed the order of things, undone that cycle of sin and despair that started in the time of the judges.
Ruth the foreigner became Ruth the wife because of her commitment to God. Common faith overcame the division of race and nationality. Because she chose to trust in the Lord of Israel, she was no longer a foreigner in that land. It’s a story of God’s redemption even of those who seem most distant from Him and His people.
Common faith in the one true God is still the only real redemption of unity in our world. Only faith in God can truly transform foreigners into friends and undo the hurtful cycles of our relationships. You know belonging to a political party will not unify people. Common citizenship or race or even marriage does not bring lasting peace. The only thing which brings different people together in enduring unity is God’s redeeming love. So, as they used to say in television ads, there is more
A thousand years later, descended from David, descended from Jesse, descended from Obed, and yes, descended from faithful Ruth, the refugee who came as a foreigner from Moab, there was another baby born in Bethlehem. His mother, who was also a refugee for a while, named Him Jesus. He is the Redeemer of us all. He is the one who came to purchase us for God with His blood and His love. He is the Redeemer who can completely and totally break and undo all the sinful cycles of our lives and bring us peace with each other.
You may feel caught in an ugly cycle with someone. You may feel foreign or even be foreign to others around you. Even if you do not know it, you are waiting for your Redeemer, the one who wants to break the cycle and bring you in or restore you to the family of God. Jesus is the one. He is your Redeemer. He is your good King who has come to change it all, to turn things around, to turn you around. There are no foreigners in His kingdom. And the only thing which comes round and round again is His love and grace.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2018 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
[1] Philosophia Christi, Vol. 20, No. 1, 2018, p. 171.