The Prayer That Came Back to Him

A young widow walked out to a farmyard at night, lay down at the feet of a sleeping man, and waited for him to wake up.

It was not a romance. It was a legal request that would cost him money.

The story is in the book of Ruth, in the Old Testament — the older part of the Bible, written long before Jesus was born. It opens with a famine. A man from Bethlehem takes his wife Naomi and their two sons to Moab, the country next door. Israel and Moab had a long bad history. The man dies. The sons marry Moabite women, then die too.

Naomi is left with no husband and no sons. In that world that meant no income and no protection. She sets out for Bethlehem and tells her two widowed daughters-in-law to stay in Moab. One does. Ruth refuses: "Your people shall be my people, and your God my God" (Ruth 1:16). She gives up country and family for a mother-in-law so worn down she asks people to call her Mara, which means bitter (Ruth 1:20-21).

They arrive as the barley harvest starts, and Ruth goes out to glean. Israel's law told farmers to leave whatever they dropped or missed at the edge of a field for the poor, widows and foreigners (Deuteronomy 24:19). She ends up in a field belonging to Boaz, a relative of Naomi's dead husband, and asks why he is kind to a foreigner (Ruth 2:10).

1. Boaz prayed for her, then she asked him to be the answer

He answers with a blessing — a prayer said out loud over somebody.

The LORD repay you for what you have done, and a full reward be given you by the LORD, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come to take refuge.

Ruth 2:12

He is asking God to look after her. The picture is a bird spreading its wings over its young in a storm. It is a good prayer, and it costs him nothing.

Weeks pass. Both harvests end (Ruth 2:23) and nothing has changed for Ruth. So Naomi sends her to the threshing floor, the open yard where grain was beaten loose from the stalks, and where Boaz is sleeping. She waits until he lies down, then asks.

I am Ruth, your servant. Spread your wings over your servant, for you are a redeemer.

Ruth 3:9

Put the two lines together. Boaz said God would shelter her under his wings. Ruth says: spread your wings over me. In Hebrew it is the same word both times, kanaph — a wing, and also the corner or edge of a robe. Covering someone with your robe was how you said: this person is mine to look after. She is asking two things at once: cover me with your coat, and be the answer to your own prayer.

God describes doing exactly that. Through the prophet Ezekiel he calls his people an abandoned baby he found and kept alive.

I spread the corner of my garment over you and covered your nakedness… and you became mine.

Ezekiel 16:8

The Hebrew there uses the same two words Ruth uses: spread, and kanaph. She is asking a man to do what God does.

But nobody is covered against their will. Centuries later Jesus used the same picture about Jerusalem.

How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing.

Matthew 23:37

He said it days before he was killed in that city. The shelter was offered and turned down. Ruth walked toward the wing; the city walked away.

2. Redeemer was a job with a bill attached

Look at Ruth's last five words: "for you are a redeemer." That sounds like a compliment. It was a job title, and Naomi had used it about Boaz already (Ruth 2:20). The Hebrew word is go'el: the nearest male relative, with a legal duty to step in when a family collapsed.

If your brother becomes poor and sells part of his property, then his nearest redeemer shall come and redeem what his brother has sold.

Leviticus 25:25

Land was meant to stay in the family. When poverty forced a sale, the nearest relative bought it back with his own money and handed it over. He paid; somebody else kept the field. Redeeming meant buying a person out of a real hole, with real money. Ruth is handing Boaz an invoice.

That word became one of the Bible's names for God. In the middle of losing his children, his health and his property, Job says "I know that my Redeemer lives" (Job 19:25) — the same Hebrew word. He is not saying he feels better. He wants a relative who will turn up and settle his case.

Much later the price got named. Peter, one of Jesus' first followers, wrote to Christians across the Roman empire:

You were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ.

1 Peter 1:18-19

Ransomed means bought out. Notice what they were bought out of: "futile ways," an empty way of living handed down from their parents. You can be stuck in something that is not your fault and still need someone to pay to get you out.

3. The first redeemer said no, and his reason made sense

Boaz says yes, then tells Ruth there is a problem: another man is a closer relative with the first claim (Ruth 3:12).

Next morning Boaz goes to the town gate — courthouse, market and meeting hall in one. He gathers ten elders as witnesses and calls the other man over with a word the storyteller leaves blank, something like "so-and-so" (Ruth 4:1). This relative is never named. Hold on to that.

Boaz offers him the field. He says yes at once. Then Boaz adds the rest: the field comes with Ruth, and her first son will legally count as the dead man's son and inherit that field.

I cannot redeem it for myself, lest I impair my own inheritance. Take my right of redemption yourself, for I cannot redeem it.

Ruth 4:6

Read what he actually says. Not "I would rather not." Redeeming her would damage what he leaves his own children, and he is right: he would buy a field his family would never keep. The arithmetic is the only thing he consults. He works out the cost and walks away. He breaks no law. The book never writes his name down.

Jesus once met a rich man who did the same sum. Told to sell what he owned and give it to the poor, he went away sad because he had a great deal to lose (Mark 10:22). He is not a villain. He is sad, which means he wanted it. He just wanted what he already had more. Quietly declining a price usually looks like good sense.

Now set that beside the man Christians call the Redeemer.

Though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich.

2 Corinthians 8:9

Paul is writing to a church about giving money away, and reaches for Jesus as the example. The nameless man would not risk his inheritance. Jesus spent his.

4. He bought her in public, and her name ended up in Jesus' family tree

Boaz takes the deal, out loud, in front of the whole gate.

Also Ruth the Moabite, the widow of Mahlon, I have bought to be my wife, to perpetuate the name of the dead in his inheritance.

Ruth 4:9-10

Notice the word "bought," and what he is buying her for: to keep a dead man's name alive. The dead man cannot thank him. That is what makes it redemption, not a trade. Notice too that he calls her "Ruth the Moabite" in a legal statement, when he had every reason to leave it out.

No Ammonite or Moabite may enter the assembly of the LORD.

Deuteronomy 23:3

That is the same law book that gave Ruth the right to glean. The assembly of the LORD meant Israel gathered to worship, and Moab was shut out. People have argued for a long time about how far that rule reached. Ruth's book does not join the argument. It keeps calling her the Moabite, then tells you what became of her family: a son named Obed, the father of Jesse, the father of David (Ruth 4:17) — Israel's greatest king. The foreign widow picking up dropped grain is his great-grandmother.

Boaz the father of Obed by Ruth, and Obed the father of Jesse.

Matthew 1:5

Matthew opens his account of Jesus' life with a family list of fathers and sons. He names Ruth anyway, in the same line as Rahab, another woman from outside Israel.

The same happens to everyone who starts outside. Paul tells one church they were once strangers to the promises God made to Israel. Now, he says, they "who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ" (Ephesians 2:13). Not by moving. Not by the rules relaxing. By a death that paid for them (Galatians 3:13). Ruth got a coat over her shoulders and a name in the register. The same offer is open, and it cost more.

What to do this week

Check whether you are the one holding the coat. If you prayed for somebody this week — that they would find work, stay safe, get better — ask whether you could be the answer. Then do the smallest piece of it: send the money, make the call, drive them there.

Count the cost before you say yes. The nameless man's mistake was not doing the sums. It was that the sums were all he did. Work out what helping will cost you, then let something other than that number decide.

If you are the foreigner here, ask anyway. Ruth had the wrong nationality, no money and no claim on anybody. She asked, and the redeemer paid. If you are out at the edge of the field picking up what others dropped, this book is about you.

A woman lay down at a man's feet and asked him to cover her. He could have prayed for her again and gone back to sleep. Instead he got up, walked to the gate, and paid.