“Whether You Serve Like Judas or John”

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Ruth 3

I did not preach this Sunday. My oldest son, Alexander, graduated from the College of William and Mary (he won an award for public history!). Here is a recent homily on Sunday’s text by my friend Ken Jones. It was preached at the chapel at Grand View University in Des Moines, Iowa.

As we go further into the story of Ruth today, we’re at a point where something’s gotta give in order for our heroine to find some security and for God’s good providence to come to fruition, so that an heir will appear and one of Ruth’s descendants will become the king of the Israelites and a still later one will become the messiah himself. But that outcome isn’t going to happen unless someone jumpstarts things.

We know that all things work together for good, for those who love the Lord, who are called according to his purpose. Yet it seems that in this story God is willing to sit back and let Ruth and Naomi work their romantic wiles, while in his divine way God takes even unseemly scheming and makes things come round right.

At this point Ruth has been working with Boaz’s female servants collecting unharvested grain from his fields. In chaptertwo we saw that Boaz has noticed this young widow. A coy little game of wink-wink nudge-nudge has been going on. But neither part is ready to declare any interest in the other person. No invitations for a cup of coffee and certainly no explicit “I love you.”

There’s not even a heart emoji. All we have are Ruth and Boaz and a few gazes that linger a little longer than normal. Naomi isn’t willing to let things take their uncertain course, even if God does.

She’s got a plan.

Boaz is the kind of farmer who doesn’t just let his hired hands do all the work. He’ll be in the barns where the harvesters have deposited the sheaves of wheat. He’ll be there to help with the threshing. The bundles of wheat will be opened and spread across the floor, and the stalks and heads of wheat will be beaten to break open the heads, so the actual edible wheat berries will fall out. Then then it’ll all be tossed in the air, preferably with a good stiff wind, so the chaff gets blown away and the wheat falls to the ground. Little does Boaz know, but Naomi’s plan is for him to bump up against her daughter-in-law and have his heart broken open.

That’s exactly what happens when Ruth executes the plan.

There’s a lot of innuendo going on in the story that apparently makes it too dangerous to be read in Sunday worship. We don’t know exactly what happened between Ruth and Boaz beyond the fact that his antennae were finally turned to pick up Ruth’s signals. A lot of guys would have taken the situation as permission to make a move on a vulnerable woman and attempt to “Netflix and chill.” But Boaz wants to do this right. He tells Ruth she’s safe with him for the night, but in the morning she needs to do things properly rather than just sneaking and playing around with the boss.

Before anything else, Boaz tells Ruth she needs to first talk to her husband’s closer relative about whether he wants to take her as his wife. That’s what was supposed to happen for a widowed woman. The closest male relative was to marry her, and when they had a child it would be the dead husband’s heir rather than the new husband’s. Boaz has no right to marry Ruth, even if she’s interested in him. Fortunately, the other relative doesn’t want her as his wife, even though a parcel of land would have come with the deal. So finally Boaz and Ruth are free to marry, they have a child, and before you can say “Shema Israel,” they’ll be the great-grandparents of King David.

What are we to make of this strange little story?

I’d argue that it points us to a God who is relentless in working to bring about his kingdom. Our God is a God who can easily turn the Nile River to blood or send manna for the wandering Israelites to eat in the wilderness. But this is also a God who more often deals with unseen and unsung human action, the schemes and plans, the little decisions and long bouts of inertia, the winks and nudges of even a couple widows, one of them a foreign Moabite.

C.S. Lewis once wrote,

“You will certainly carry out God’s purpose, however you act, but it makes a difference to you whether you serve like Judas or like John” (The Problem of Pain, ch. 7).

God’s purpose of knowing humanity and, more important, being known by them, will happen whether or not Ruth and Boaz finally hook up. But how they act and what they decide to do makes a difference for them. That’s why Boaz is so intent on playing by the rules. If he’s going to have a relationship with Ruth, it can’t be based on cutting corners or merely satisfying their urges under cover of night.

The same thing is true for you. It’s not possible for you to mess up God’s plan. If not even Judas the betrayer or the devil can do that, how possible would it be for little old you to throw a wrench into the orderly resolution of time and creation? That means your future is secure. You’ve rested in the bosom of God’s mercy from the very beginning. It’s what’s declared to you in baptism. And it’s a promise that will stand true all the way to the Last Day, so you can give thanks to God that you’re too weak to destroy what God is building.On the other hand, though, your actions do matter to you, just as they mattered to Ruth and Boaz. That’s why we pray the first three petitions of the Lord’s Prayer where we ask God to hallow his name not ours, bring in his kingdom not ours, and make his will happen not ours. That means in these years when you’re making lots of decisions about your future you should think about what’s good and right and healthy for you. Think about what makes for relationships that matter, about what kind of person you want to be, and what difference you can make in the world, rather than about how much money you can make or how much fun or freedom you’ll have or how you can secure your deepest desires.

You have a God who makes it possible for you to both be a part of his plan and be the kind of person that makes their grandma proud. Who knows? Maybe three generations from now those little decisions will bear big fruit. But even if they only result in simply decent descendants, we know it’ll all be just as God intended. It’ll be within the eternal scope of what Jesus came to show us about God: his mercy, forbearance, hope, joy, and everlasting delight. Amen.

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