“UNSWERVING LOVE”
“ ‘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. 17 Where you die I will die, and there will I be buried. May the LORD do so to me and more also if anything but death parts me from you.’ 18 And when Naomi saw that she was determined to go with her, she said no more.” (Ruth 1:16-18)
These words frequently used to be spoken in weddings—and rightly so! They represent the best mindset for beginning and continuing a good, loving, committed relationship. The fact that such solemn words often prove to be a hollow promise does not indicate their hollowness, but our own hollowness.
Of course, the words were not originally written for a wedding. They were spoken by a daughter-in-law to her mother-in-law. And they were spoken by the daughter-in-law after her husband was dead!
This makes the words even more striking. After her husband is dead, and when Ruth’s mother-in-law, Naomi, is on her way back to her homeland, her foreign, Moabite daughter-in-law, Ruth, utters these words of unswerving love.
Now, Ruth was a Moabitess, a fact that the narrator of this story hammers into our ears and brains. In the four short chapters of this book, we are told again and again that Ruth was a Moabitess.
How’s come?
If you do even a brief study of the relationship between Moab and Israel/Judah in the Old Testament, you will quickly discover that, as a general rule, these two neighboring countries did not get along with one another. That is an understatement. They hated one another would be closer to the truth.
And yet, there is Ruth, and her unswerving love. As it turns out, she is a great grandmother of King David.
The words of Ruth are a wonderful expression of her unswerving love for Naomi. Ruth’s words were backed up by a wonderfully unswerving life. These words are a wonderful challenge and example for us all.
And yet, I heard something this morning in this ancient story, something that was not explicitly said. I heard God speaking, not only about one human’s unswerving love for another human being, but also about God’s unswerving love for us all.
You can read the long and haunting poem by Francis Thompson, “The Hound of Heaven” to know one man’s struggle to evade the unswerving love of God. Or you can read the Old Testament, concerning God’s unswerving love for the people of Israel.
Or you can read the New Testament concerning God’s unswerving love for all mankind. Apparently, even death by crucifixion cannot cause God’s love to swerve.
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