Certainly, loyalty is a major theme in the Old Testament Book of Ruth. Ruth showed amazing loyalty to Naomi and to God when she risked starvation to stay with her Jewish family. Even though Naomi urged her to protect herself by returning to her family, Ruth responded:
“Do not press me to go back and abandon you! Wherever you go I will go, wherever you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people and your God, my God. Where you die I will die, and there be buried. May the Lord do thus to me, and more, if even death separates me from you!” (Ruth 1:16,17)
Time and again in the Bible we see God reward acts of loyalty such as this, and usually with some kind of grand gesture. Jesus and the Apostles regularly rewarded the loyalty of His followers. In the Book of Ruth, it is a bit more subtle, and I think the subtlety of God’s actions in Ruth’s life might be the best news of all for us.
Ruth loyally followed Naomi to Bethlehem. Once there, she just happened to meet Boaz, who just happened to be a close family relative of her late husband and who just happened to be loyal to Jewish tradition and his responsibility to Ruth. Well I don’t know. What do you think? Did those things “just happen” by accident?
I really believe that the largest influence God has in our lives comes in the form of the average everyday occurrences. We won’t all have the Sacred Heart of Jesus appear to us, like St. Margaret Mary did. We won’t all have the Lord appear to us on a train ride to tell us what he wants us to do next, like he did to Mother Teresa. Certainly, we can’t all be the first person to witness the risen Christ, like St. Mary Magdalene was.
But we can learn to appreciate how He walks beside us every day and through every moment of our lives. Ruth and Naomi just kept going after the deaths of their husbands. The went to Bethlehem together, and they did their best to survive. But ultimately, they were rewarded with the blessing of Ruth’s marriage to Boaz and the birth of their son.
There were no lightning bolts coming down from the sky to get their attention. No bushes burned with the spirit of the Lord. The Red Sea didn’t part on their journey. But Ruth was rewarded for her loyalty by becoming an important part of the lineage of our Lord, Jesus Christ. In fact, Ruth is one of only four women mentioned by name in Matthew’s Gospel when he describes the genealogy of Jesus:
“Boaz became the father of Obed,
whose mother was Ruth.
Obed became the father of Jesse,
Jesse the father of David the king” (Matthew 1:5,6)
Ultimately, I think that is the good news for all of us. We don’t spend a lot of time in the desert or on a mountain receiving direct instructions from God. But who can say what abundant blessings we might not even notice every single day? Who knows where this path is taking us, exactly, but if we learn to trust in God, we can have faith that it will be a blessing.
Lord, we know that You have great plans for each of us that will ultimately lead us to eternal joy. Help us to appreciate Your presence in our everyday lives. Guide us to follow You, loyally, throughout our lives.