She Told Her to Go Back Three Times

The most famous loyalty speech in the Bible was given by a woman who had just been told to leave, three separate times, by the person she was refusing to leave.

Naomi had lost her husband and both of her sons in a foreign country. She was going home with nothing, and she had two young widows walking with her, and on that road she stopped and turned around and told them to go back to their mothers' houses.

They wept and said no. So she said it again, and she made an argument this time: I am too old to have more sons for you, and even if I did, would you wait for them to grow up? She was thinking about their lives.

One of them kissed her and turned around and went home, and Scripture does not criticize her for one second.

And then Naomi tried a third time. She said: your sister in law has gone back, go after her.

And Ruth said the words that have been read at funerals and weddings for three thousand years.

Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go.

She said it to somebody who had just asked her to go, for the third time.

Naomi was not being cruel

Read what she said, because the reasoning in it is love and not rejection.

And Naomi said unto her two daughters in law, Go, return each to her mother's house: the LORD deal kindly with you, as ye have dealt with the dead, and with me. (Ruth 1:8, King James Version)

The Lord deal kindly with you.

She is blessing them while she sends them away. Everything she says in that passage is aimed at their good: they are young, they have a chance at a life, and she has nothing to offer them and knows it.

That is what makes this useful for a reader today. The person telling you to go is very often not rejecting you. They are doing arithmetic about what they think they are worth to you, and the answer they have come up with is not much.

You are not being pushed away for the reason you think, and their refusal has never once been the same as not wanting you. That is not a generous reading of a hard scene. Ruth 1:8 has a blessing in the middle of the dismissal, and it is the Holy Spirit who lets a person hear what is actually being said underneath a go away.

She was bitter and she said so

I want to be honest about who Ruth chose to stay with, because it was not easy company.

When they get to Bethlehem the whole town comes out, and the women say, is this Naomi? And she tells them not to call her Naomi anymore. Call me Mara, she says, which means bitter, because the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me.

I went out full, she says, and the Lord has brought me home again empty.

That is the woman Ruth attached her whole life to. Not a sweet old lady dispensing wisdom. A grieving woman who said out loud, in public, that God had emptied her, and who does not appear to have noticed in that moment that a daughter in law who left her entire country was standing right beside her.

And Ruth stayed anyway, through that.

You are able to stay with somebody in their bitterness, and their grief has never once meant they do not need you there. Ruth 1:20 has her rename herself in public, and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps a person present through a season where they are barely acknowledged.

What staying actually looked like

The next thing that happens is not a speech.

Chapter two opens with Ruth saying, let me now go to the field and glean. And Naomi says go, my daughter. And Ruth goes out and works all day in somebody else's harvest picking up leftovers, and comes home in the evening, and beats out what she gathered, and gives it to her mother in law.

That is the loyalty. It is not the sentence at the border. It is a young widow doing manual labor in the sun and bringing food to a woman who had told her three times to leave.

Everybody quotes chapter one. Chapter two is what chapter one meant.

You have something practical to bring, and words have never once been the part that proves anything. Ruth 2:2 has her go out to work the morning after the famous speech, and the Holy Spirit is the one who turns a person's commitment into an ordinary Tuesday of doing something useful.

And Naomi came back

Here is what I want somebody to hold onto, because this story does not stay in the bitter place.

By the end of that book, the woman who wanted to be called Mara is holding a baby on her lap, and the women of the town say to her: thy daughter in law, which loveth thee, which is better to thee than seven sons.

Better than seven sons. In that culture there was no higher thing anybody could say.

The one who kept telling her to go is the one who ends up being told, in public, exactly what she had.

It took a whole book. It did not happen on the road, and it did not happen in the first hard month in Bethlehem, and nobody in chapter one had any way of knowing it was coming.

You are not going to see the end of this from where you are standing, and the middle has never once been the whole account. Ruth 4:15 has the town name what Ruth was worth after four chapters of nobody saying it, and the Spirit of God is the one who sustains somebody through the part where nothing is acknowledged.