Widows and Orphans

Proper 27, Year B

November 8, 2009

I hope that as you listened to the reading from the Book of Ruth, you were filled with questions and puzzlement. There’s a whole lot there in those few verses that doesn’t seem to make sense from a contemporary perspective, and it seems like we’re missing a whole lot of the story. Well, we are missing much of the story. Had we not been celebrating All Saints’ last Sunday, we would have heard the first few verses of the book of Ruth, which might have helped to put today’s reading in context.

The book of Ruth is a fascinating and compelling piece of literature, and to give it its due, we should have read the whole thing. It is set in the period of the Judges, before the formation of the monarchy, and one of its purposes is to provide a small bit of King David’s genealogy. Ruth and Boaz are the grandparents of David’s father Jesse. But it’s much more than that. It is a story about love and loss, about friendship and commitment, and about humans’ responsibility to provide for the weak and defenseless.

A man and his wife move from Bethlehem to the neighboring country of Moab during a time of famine. They have two sons, and the sons marry Moabite women—one is named Ruth, the other Orpah. The man dies, leaving his wife, Naomi, a widow. Ten years later, the two sons die, leaving their wives childless. Naomi decides to return to Bethlehem since the famine is over, in hopes of finding refuge with relatives. She tells her daughters-in-law to remain behind, but one of them, Ruth refuses. The words she says are among the most familiar in all of biblical literature: “Wherever you go, I will go, wherever you lodge, I will lodge, your people shall be my people, and your God my God.”

The drama of the book of Ruth gains urgency because of the extremely vulnerable position in which childless widows were placed in ancient patriarchal societies. The Torah stipulated that if a married man died without an heir, his brother was responsible for marrying the childless widow and ensuring the dead man’s name would live on. It is, from the twenty-first century perspective, a frighteningly patriarchal rule, dependent on the notion of wife as property and her value only in giving birth to male heirs.

There’s another side to the story, however. As vulnerable, weak, without any connection to family, a widow’s plight was dire. This is obvious in that, when left widowed, Naomi chooses to return to an uncertain home and urges her daughters-in-law to return to their families, where they might be welcomed back. When they come to Bethlehem, Ruth forages for food. Torah explicitly commanded that when farmers harvested grain, they were to leave some for the destitute, so that they might glean it.

Ruth gleans in Boaz’s fields, comes to his attention, and he ensures that she gathers enough for both her and Naomi. He is a kinsman of Naomi, and the text suggests that he comes to see the two widows as his responsibility, that the responsibility of levirate marriage extends beyond brothers, to all male relatives. In the text we heard today, Ruth and Boaz are married, and become the grandparents of King David.

It’s remarkable that such a story is in the Bible; perhaps it was told and preserved because of the connection to King David, but to have so much space in an ancient text focused on the lives of women, especially widows is worth pointing out. As I said, widows in ancient culture were the most marginal of people, Ruth, because she was an alien, was even more marginal. Yet Hebrew scripture took note of her, and Israelite law, Torah, cared for her and all those like her. Again and again in scripture, a law setting a preference for the widow, orphan, or alien, is based on the Hebrews’ experience as foreigners in Egypt: “When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest… you shall leave them for the poor and the alien. I am the Lord your God.”

It is a concern the prophets come back to again and again, Amos and Isaiah, for example repeatedly criticize the Israelites of their day for oppressing the poor, for neglecting the obligations of the law for the aliens and the outcast. But that such laws were continually ignored is shown by Jesus’ very similar teachings.

In today’s gospel, we see another widow, one who didn’t benefit from all the legal requirements on behalf of widows and orphans. It is a dramatic scene from the closing days of Jesus’ public ministry. In the gospel of Mark, Jesus enters Jerusalem (the triumphal entry) on Sunday, goes to the temple to look around, then goes back out of the city to spend the night. Each following day, he returns to the temple where he engages in teaching and disputation with opponents. In fact this is one of those moments of confrontation.

Jesus threw out the money-changers the day before. Today he has had a series of encounters with leading religious figures—Pharisees, scribes, Sadducees. And then comes this little incident with the widow. Jesus sits down, opposite the treasury, and watches everyone coming in to give donations. Note that he does not criticize their actions; he doesn’t rail against the wealth and opulence of the treasury and all that it represent. Instead, he draws his disciples’ attention to this woman who gives two almost worthless coins, everything she had.

There’s a powerful irony here; perhaps you noticed it. Jesus has just criticized the scribes “who devour widows’ houses and say long prayers.” Now, moments later, no doubt in the presence of such scribes and others who are making their ostentatious donations to the temple treasury, comes one of these widows to make her tiny, but all-significant donation.

It’s an act that challenges us and our faithfulness to Jesus Christ to the very core. We might be tempted to read it, as Christians have so often done over the centuries, as Jesus’ simple and straightforward commendation of a widow’s actions. And so it is. But it is also, clearly, a continuation of Jesus’ condemnation of the scribes. He has just mentioned that the scribes destroy widows’ houses, was hers one of those? And note that in fact Jesus does not here condemn those others who give out of their abundance—that’s all well and good, but the widow, she gives all.

We, too, most of us, give out of our abundance and there’s more than a slight chance that we receive a pang of guilt when we hear the story of the widow who gives all. In fact, studies reveal that in contemporary America, the poor give a much larger percentage of their income to charity than do the wealthy. The same is true of giving to churches.

But there’s another question confronting us in this text. Our focus is naturally drawn to the widows’ actions; but what about Jesus’ condemnation of the scribes, for destroying widows’ houses? What actions, what aspects of our lives and lifestyles are dependent on the abject poverty of people in much of the world? What is our responsibility to them? What is our complicity in their oppression?

Once again, the gospel leaves us, not with warm, fuzzy feelings, but with challenges, in a very hard place. For us who would be faithful disciples of Jesus Christ, we have to ask not only what is he calling us to do, but what is our responsibility to those who are less fortunate than ourselves. Is it simply to give a little something from our abundance? Or should we, like Jesus, challenge those in authority to create a society that is more just, that takes care of the widow and orphan, the weak, the oppressed, the alien.