Daily Lesson for February 26, 2019

Today’s Daily Lesson comes from Ruth chapter 1 verses 15 through 18:

15 So [Naomi] said, ‘See, your sister-in-law has gone back to her people and to her gods; return after your sister-in-law.’ 16But Ruth said,

‘Do not press me to leave you

   or to turn back from following you!

Where you go, I will go;

   where you lodge, I will lodge;

your people shall be my people,

   and your God my God. 

17 Where you die, I will die—

   there will I be buried.

May the Lord do thus and so to me,

   and more as well,

if even death parts me from you!’ 

18When Naomi saw that she was determined to go with her, she said no more to her.

Today’s Lesson is a dissenting opinion. 

Prominent Biblical scholars now agree the book of Ruth was written sometime amidst the Israelites’ return from Babylon to the Promised Land, where in an effort to cleanse the nation from all impurity the Governor Nehemiah with the priestly blessing of Ezra built a wall around the City of Jerusalem and forced all the men of Israel who had intermarried with other nations to dismiss their wives and abandon their children.

And how many times have we heard Nehemiah preached as a great hero for such patriotic rule?

But Ruth brings a dissenting opinion. 

Ruth tells the story of Israelite Naomi and her Moabite daughter-in-Law Ruth, who after Naomi’s son and Ruth’s husband die, return from Moab to Israel, where Ruth is protected by and later marries Boaz, Naomi’s distant cousin. Boaz and Ruth then have a Son named Obed who has a son named Jesse who has a son named David — yes, THAT David. 

And because this story was apparently written during the time of Nehemiah’s purging, it’s as if the writer of Ruth is saying, “You say dismissing these people is the patriotic and Godly thing to do; but let us not forget that the greatest king this nation ever had was himself a product of a mixed-marriage. Let us not be too set on building the wall of exclusion, lest the ones we exclude be our very own.”

‘Do not press me to leave you or to turn back from following you!” the Moabite Naomi says in today’s Lesson. “Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God.”

These a words we sometimes hear read at a wedding, and we all nod our heads. But more than a sentimental word, it was actually a subversive one when it was written. And it’s meaning was indeed a dissenting opinion, a minority report, reminding the people that though what the Governor and Priest were doing was very popular, it could also undermine the nation’s own history.