From The Editor: Redeeming Love
Our corps just completed a sermon series on the book of Ruth entitled “Redeeming Love.” I’ve always liked Ruth, but going through it now as an adult, everything has been so much richer and more meaningful than I remembered from growing up.
If you haven’t read Ruth, I highly recommend looking it up. It’s such a beautiful story of love, grief, hope, and redemption. And the most beautiful part about it is that God set it all up as an allegory of His love for us even before sending Jesus to redeem us, choosing to make Ruth part of Jesus’ earthly lineage as King David’s great-grandmother.
This time through, I find that some of the most relatable moments are from Naomi’s perspective. Early in the first chapter, we see her dealing with a deep depression upon returning to her homeland. She’s going through grief at having lost her husband years before, losing both her sons recently, and now returning to her home, practically destitute. She’s grieving the life she felt should have been, the life she dreamed of, perhaps. She goes so far as to ask people to call her Mara, or “bitter” in Hebrew, instead of Naomi, which means “pleasant.”
For most of the story, Naomi sits at home. She invests in Ruth and what’s happening in her story, but we don’t see her do anything but sit at home until the very end of the story. When Ruth has her son Obed, it says in Ruth 4:16-17a, “Then Naomi took the child in her arms and cared for him. The women living there said, ‘Naomi has a son!’”
I read this as Naomi being so stuck in her grief that she was basically paralyzed in her life. But when she holds the evidence of God’s redeeming love in her arms, she becomes a brand-new woman, so full of life that everyone notices her being as active in Obed’s life as Ruth, the boy’s actual mother.
The bulk of the story is of course about Ruth, who works through losing a spouse, culture shock, and sudden poverty with absolute grace, strength, and humility. And God blesses her with an incredible love story and a second chance at family because of her faithfulness. But this additional narrative, Naomi’s journey through loss, which opens and closes the book of Ruth, may be even more beautiful in a way. Naomi works through grief and depression, remaining faithful to God and Ruth even in her deep sadness, and in the end is able to step into the light of a new life entirely, bearing witness to the goodness of God.
And this story leads us straight into Easter, where Ruth’s great-great-great (and so on) grandson dies on a cross to redeem all of us, so we can live anew in the light of our Eternal Father forever.