A Son for Naomi

An old woman sits in a doorway in Bethlehem. The neighbours are crowding round. Someone gently lays a newborn baby in her arms, and the woman who once said, call me bitter, begins to smile.

Not long before, Naomi had come home to Bethlehem empty. She had left years earlier with a husband and two sons, running from famine. She came back a widow with no sons, and only a foreign daughter-in-law beside her. When the women of the town saw her, they said, can this be Naomi? Naomi means pleasant. Don't call me Naomi, she told them. Call me Mara, which means bitter. I went out full, and the Lord has brought me home empty. But Ruth stayed. Ruth gleaned in the fields. And Boaz, a kinsman, redeemed the family land and married Ruth. Now the story comes to its last scene.

The book says it very simply. Boaz took Ruth, and she became his wife, and the Lord gave her conception, and she bore a son. Notice who gets the credit. The Lord gave. Ruth had been married for years in Moab and had no child. Now, in Bethlehem, God gives her a son. And the first people to celebrate are the women of the town, the same women who had heard Naomi say she was empty. Blessed be the Lord, they say, who has not left you this day without a redeemer. May his name be famous in Israel.

Then they say something beautiful about the baby. He will be a restorer of your life, they tell Naomi, and he will look after you in your old age. And they say something even more beautiful about Ruth. “Thy daughter in law, which loveth thee, which is better to thee than seven sons, hath born him.” Seven sons was the picture of a perfect family. Ruth, the outsider from Moab, was worth more than that. Naomi takes the child and lays him in her lap and becomes his nurse, caring for him like her own. The women even give him his name. A son is born to Naomi, they say. And they call him Obed, which means servant, or one who serves.

Then the book adds one line that changes everything. Obed was the father of Jesse, and Jesse was the father of David. Suddenly this quiet story about two widows and a field of barley is part of something enormous. The great-grandmother of Israel's greatest king was a Moabite widow who chose Naomi's God. The book ends with a list of names, from Perez, the son of Tamar, down through Boaz to Obed, Jesse and David. Bethlehem, the little town where Naomi came home empty, would become known as the city of David. And centuries later, the prophet Micah would say that from Bethlehem would come a ruler for Israel.

The name Bethlehem comes from two Hebrew words, beit, meaning house, and lechem, meaning bread. House of bread. The book of Ruth begins with a famine there, when the house of bread had no bread, and it ends with harvest, a wedding and a baby. Bethlehem sat in farming country south of Jerusalem, surrounded by fields of grain and hillsides for sheep. It was the same place where Jesus, who called himself the bread of life, would be born.

You'll find this ending in Ruth chapter four, verses thirteen to twenty-two, and Matthew names Ruth and Obed in the family line of Jesus. Naomi thought her story was over, and God was writing a new chapter. So here is a question to carry with you. When life feels empty, how could Naomi's story help you trust that God is still at work?