REV: Hugh Perry
Readings
Ruth 3: 1-5, 4 13-17
Both Ruth the Moabite and her Jewish mother-in-law Naomi are widows and have returned to Naomi’s homeland from Moab. However, without a direct male relative they are destitute and have survived by Ruth gleaning in a field belonging to their nearest living relative Boaz. But now the harvest time is coming to an end, so Naomi thinks of a cunning plan for their ongoing survival. It might be Naomi’s plan but it is Ruth who has to implement it, but she understands their situation so agrees. It is after all a cunning plan that has been carried out time and time again in cultures where women are completely dependent on men for their survival.
Maurice Andrew notes that ‘On the one hand, these are ‘woman’s wiles’; on the other hand, they were what women were able to do in order to survive in a time of deprivation.’ [1]
When Boaz, tired from work, partying and maybe even a little too much to drink Ruth slips into bed with him and when he wakes up Ruth explains that he will now have to marry her. Boaz seems open to that suggestion but first makes sure that he will get access to her property before he agrees. When the wheeling and dealing at the town gate is complete Ruth and Boaz are married and in due course Ruth has a son, Obed who became the father of Jesse, who was the father of David.
On the birth of the son Ruth becomes redundant and Obed is known as the son of Naomi. The foreign woman Ruth appears to only be valued for her ability to bear children, but the reality is that she is still the mother of kings.
Mark 12: 38- 44
We now move to the fate of widows in Jesus’ time, which was not much of an improvement on the times of Ruth and Naomi. Jesus says ‘Beware of the Scribes’. The Scribes were the experts in the law and Jesus points out how they like to make a big show of their piety but one of their revenue streams was exploiting widows. As experts in the law, they would manage widow’s estates, because women without a husband or son could not manage their inheritance but the scribes would use up all the inheritance in fees. That is a practice not unheard of in twenty-first century Aotearoa New Zealand although we could add fund managers, finance companies and con-artists to lawyers in that same context.
The first section about lawyers and fund managers puts the second section about the widow in the temple in context. Jesus is criticising the temple’s flat tax system which for the widow is everything she has, but for the wealthy in the society, for instance the scribes who put on a great show of piety, the temple tax is inconsequential.
Sermon
The book of Ruth is another of the books of the Hebrew Scripture that give so much more meaning if they are read right through like a novel rather than just the short passages the lectionary gives us.
However, if you read last week’s reading from the opening verses of Ruth you would have learned about the vulnerability of widows in biblical times. Then todays reading gives us two extracts from the conclusion of the book.
We miss out the classic ‘gleaning’ episode which highlights the do-it-yourself social security system of the time. Law proscribed that landless widows were entitled to take the grain that was missed during the harvest. That reminds me of Inge Woolf’s description of her family arriving in England as refugees from Nazi Germany. They were undesirable aliens without work permits, and at one time Inge’s mother collected offcuts from clothing factories and made them into children’s duffle coats. The factory gleanings were then sold at a street stall to provide income for the family.[2]
Returning to Ruth and Naomi, Maurice Andrew points out that, although they were able to redeem their situation through ‘woman’s wiles’, we need to remember just how desperate the situation was.[3]
Certainly they were not living in the middle of the London Blitz with the patriarch of the family serving in the Czech Unit of the British Army.
But, there is a definite hint of the patriarchal system that controls women’s lives in these closing passages we read this morning.
The son of Boaz and Ruth is regarded as a son for Naomi even though the child has no biological connection to Naomi, she is simply Ruth’s mother-in-law.
The human constructed custom of levirate marriage, where a brother is obliged to marry the widow of his dead brother, seems to have been extended to the cousin Boaz. The first son of levirate marriage is considered the son of the deceased brother, not the biological father. Therefore, Obed is understood as Naomi’s grandchild and both Boaz and Ruth are simply surrogate parents.
The benefits for the women are that Naomi has security in the community through her grandson and Ruth has security through her husband.
The spiritual context that challenges human law is added to the story by the biblical writer’s irony. The writer provides a forward running genealogy that notes that Obed became the father of Jesse, who was the father of David.
So, despite the strange human constructed levirate rules designed to keep control of patriarchal property, the non-Jewish Moabite woman becomes the great grandmother of Israel’s idealized king. That is a message to all peoples who seek racial purity and is worth remembering as population growth, changing economics and global warming moves people around the globe.
Despite human laws, customs and practices that are designed to manipulate people’s lives, God’s will prevails. We are all the family of all humanity. Today’s reading from Ruth reinforces the Exodus call to freedom that continually perverts even the most structured of rule-based slavery, giving liberation to desperate widows and adding DNA from a despised race to the most powerful of patriarchal families in Israel’s history.
That divine indifference to human racial sensibility is later reinforced as David’s successor, Solomon, is the son of Bathsheba, the widow of Uriah the Hittite. Furthermore. Bathsheba used ‘womanly wiles’ to first become queen and then queen mother.
It is this hint of divine oversight and concern for widows as marginalised people that features in our Gospel reading. Jesus first criticizes the scribes for exploiting widows and then contrasts the donation of those who contribute out of their wealth to the widow who is forced to give all that she has.
The scribes were experts in the law and, just like the legal profession of our time, were capable of administrating inheritances. In a society where women were expected to deal through a male, they often administered estates for widows without sons like Ruth and Naomi.
With widows from poor families the scribe’s fees could easily use up all the inheritance which is not beyond the realms of possibility in our society. The cost of running a law office is significant and is not related to the size of someone’s estate, which is why we have the Public Trust and Community Law.
However. as we move further towards user pays the poor of both sexes get marginalised and even a free school lunch is seen as a threat to the market economy.
However, Jesus’ accusation was much sharper than simple criticism of the free market. ‘They devour widows’ houses. (Mark 12:40)
For those of us who live in the digital age that sounds very like computer scams, elder abuse and dubious investment schemes. Deliberate deception that can even involve care givers and family members.
When I lived in the Waikato there was a major fraud that targeted vulnerable people. That group remortgaged old people’s inherited freehold homes, kept the money. When the victims failed to repay the loan they lost their homes. Continue reading Sunday 10th November →