Read Ruth 4:11–12
TINSEL MOMENTS
At Christmastime, it’s easy for our attention to be grabbed by moments of
Christmas ‘glory’: presents, parties, holidays. But as a result, we can
sometimes rush past serving God in the mundane and everyday.
How might the book of Ruth speak into this? As the whole community
gathers around Boaz, Ruth and Naomi, they respond with three
extraordinary prayers to God (vv. 11–12)!
JOINING THE LEGENDS
Firstly, they pray for Ruth: ‘May the Lord make the woman who is coming
into your home like Rachel and Leah, who together built up the family of
Israel’ (v. 11).
Rachel and Leah together bore eight of the founding fathers of the tribes of
Israel (Genesis 29–30). But to mention Ruth in the same breath seems
remarkable. This is a Moabite, who had previously been married for ten
years without conceiving (1:4–5)!
A MAN OF RENOWN
Next, they pray for Boaz: ‘May you have standing in Ephrathah and be
famous in Bethlehem’ (4:11).
The elders had just witnessed a remarkable display of Boaz’s character.
Whilst Boaz was already a ‘man of standing’ (2:1), they pray Boaz’s ‘standing’
increases across his wider family clan, Ephrathah, based in Bethlehem.
As we’ll see, Boaz’s name would indeed never be forgotten under
Bethlehem skies.
FROM AUDACIOUS ACORNS...
Lastly, they pray for the fruit of Boaz and Ruth’s marriage: ‘Through the
offspring the Lord gives you by this young woman, may your family be like
that of Perez, whom Tamar bore to Judah’ (v. 12).
Perez was from the royal tribe of Judah, but his birth was surrounded in
controversy. His mother, Tamar, had been abandoned by her dead husband’s
family. It was actually Tamar’s father-in-law, Judah, who unknowingly
fathered Perez, after Tamar boldly disguised herself as a prostitute and Judah
slept with her (Genesis 38:8–30).
But as Paul Miller puts it, ‘If God can use Tamar’s feistiness to make her
the mother of the tribe of Judah, what will God do with Ruth’s hesed?’
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GLORY OF THE ORDINARY
Ruth is a much-loved book, but there’s something very ordinary about it.
Ruth was a nobody and her only Israelite relative, Naomi, was a bereft and
broken widow.
But that ‘ordinariness’ is actually why this story is so precious. As our three
characters get caught up in the Lord’s covenant kindness, we find
significance and glory in their ‘ordinariness’. At the same time, today’s three
prayers highlight how their trust in God and their remarkable kindness
make them worthy of comparison with the greats of Israel’s history.
Fast-forward a thousand years and we find another very ordinary girl in
Bethlehem: a pregnant teenager, engaged to a carpenter, miles from home.
Yet as she and her fiancé submit their lives to the Lord, they are also swept
up in a glory far beyond anything they imagined.
REFLECTION
Frederick Buechner writes,
If holiness and the awful power and majesty of God were present in this least
auspicious of all events, this birth of a peasant’s child, then there is no place or
time so lowly and earthbound that holiness cannot be present there too.
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Rejoice that our ordinary lives have been graciously caught up in the Lord’s
story of redemption. Pray that we’d delight to submit our ‘ordinary’ lives to God
and display his kindness in the everyday.
Listen to ‘Under Bethlehem Skies’ by Paul Bell
10. Paul Miller, A Loving Life, p. 148.
Frederick Buechner, ‘A Face in the Sky – Christmas Day’ in Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons
(HarperCollins, 2006)
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