Scripture Daily

Context No. 779 of 4322 · Ruth

Context · Reflection

Ruth 2:11-16: in context

11Boaz answered her, “I have been told all about what you have done for your mother-in-law since the death of your husband, and how you have left your father, your mother, and the land of your birth, and have come to a people that you didn’t know before. 12May the LORD repay your work, and a full reward be given to you from the LORD, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come to take refuge.” 13Then she said, “Let me find favor in your sight, my lord, because you have comforted me, and because you have spoken kindly to your servant, though I am not as one of your servants.” 14At meal time Boaz said to her, “Come here, and eat some bread, and dip your morsel in the vinegar.” She sat beside the reapers, and they passed her parched grain. She ate, was satisfied, and left some of it. 15When she had risen up to glean, Boaz commanded his young men, saying, “Let her glean even among the sheaves, and don’t reproach her. 16Also pull out some for her from the bundles, and leave it. Let her glean, and don’t rebuke her.”

Ruth is a foreign widow, a Moabite, gleaning at the edges of a stranger's field to keep herself and her mother-in-law alive, and Boaz, the owner, notices her and speaks. He has heard her story, how after her husband died she left her own parents and homeland to come to a people she did not know, for the sake of Naomi. May the LORD repay your work, he says, and give you a full reward, under whose wings you have come to take refuge. It is a lovely blessing, a prayer that God would shelter her like a bird covering its young.

And then Boaz quietly becomes the answer to his own prayer. He does not simply allow the gleaning the law required; he goes far past it. He calls her to eat with the reapers, hands her roasted grain until she is full and has some left over, and tells his young men to let her glean among the sheaves and not to shame her, and even, when she is not looking, to pull stalks out of the bundles and drop them for her to find. He prays that God would shelter her under his wings, and then he spreads those wings himself, in a shared meal, in protection from harassment, in an abundance arranged so she would never feel it as charity. He wished mercy on her, and then he was it.

Boaz prayed that God would shelter Ruth, and then made himself the shelter. Whom have I wished well from a distance, when I could actually become the means of the good I am asking God to send them?

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