Vivian Bearing is the main character of Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer Prize winning play Wit. She is a renowned English professor and expert on the poetry of the English priest and writer John Donne. She is also suffering from Stage IV metastatic ovarian cancer and is in the last hours of her life.
As Vivian lies in bed at the end of her life, extremely weak from her ordeal and groggy from morphine, her mentor, 80-year-old Evelyn M. Ashford, unexpectedly enters the room. Evelyn, in town for her great-grandson’s fifth birthday, had gone to the university to see Vivian, only to discover she was in the hospital. Upon seeing her mentor, Vivian begins to cry.
Evelyn, wanting to comfort her, casts a quick glance into the hall, and, seeing no one, slips off her shoes and climbs into the hospital bed, putting an arm around the younger, weeping woman. “There, there. There, there Vivian….Hmm, let’s see. Shall I recite to you? Would you like that? I’ll recite something by Donne.” But Vivian moans, “Nooooo.”
All is quiet for a moment, but then an idea comes to Evelyn. She reaches into her bag a pulls out a children’s book. “Let’s see,” she says. “The Runaway Bunny. By Margaret Wise Brown…” Vivian nestles in, listening, but barely staying awake.
“Once,” reads Evelyn, “there was a little bunny who wanted to run away. So he said to his mother, “I am running away.” “If you run away,” said his mother, “I will run after you. For you are my little bunny.”
“If you run after me,” said the little bunny, “I will become a fish in a trout stream and I will swim away from you.” “If you become a fish in a trout stream,” said his mother, “I will become a fisherman and I will fish for you.”
Evelyn pauses, “Hmm. Look at that. A little allegory of the soul. No matter where it hides, God will find it. See, Vivian?” Vivian moans and Evelyn continues with the story. The little bunny runs through a succession of ways to run away from his mother:
“If you become a fisherman,” said the little bunny, “I will become a rock on the mountain, high above you.”
“If you become a rock on the mountain high above me,” said his mother, “I will become a mountain climber, and I will climb to where you are….”
“I will be a bird and fly away from you.”[said the little bunny]
“If you become a bird and fly away from me,” said his mother, “I will be a tree that you come home to.”
Finally, the little bunny makes one last attempt, one last proposal as to how he can escape his mother: “I will become a little boy and run into a house.”
“If you become a little boy and run into a house,” said the mother bunny, “I will become your mother and catch you in my arms and hug you.”
“Shucks,” said the bunny, “I might just as well stay where I am and be your little bunny.”
And so he did.
“Have a carrot,” said the mother bunny.
And Evelyn closes the book, quietly declaring, “How wonderful.” Seeing that Vivian is sound asleep, she slips off the bed and gathers up her things. But before she leaves, she bends down to her former student, her colleague, her friend and kisses her. “It’s time to go,” she says softly. “And may flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.” [Edson, Wit, 1993, 78-80 with additions from Brown, The Runaway Bunny]
If you run away, I will run after you. God is like a mother who declares, “If you walk away, I will follow.”[1] These words are indeed a wonderful little allegory of our souls and God’s faithful, persistent love for us. Such too are the words of Ruth in today’s scripture.
The scripture begins with the tragic backstory of a Hebrew family. Seeking to escape famine in Bethlehem, they flee to Moab, the land of Israel’s enemies. There the refugees find food and both sons find wives. But disaster continues to stalk them. First, the husband dies and then both of the sons, leaving behind three widows in a time and a society where women had no property, no rights and little hope of survival without a father or husband to provide for them.
And so Naomi decides to return to her homeland. She thinks that she, like Vivian Bearing, has reached the end. She is as vulnerable and as destitute as a person could be. She can see no future for herself. She is grieving and she has lost almost all hope. What little hope she has left is focused on her daughters-in-law who are accompanying her. They are still young. They still might remarry and have a future. And so she turns to them and tells them they should go no farther. It would be better for them to return to their mother’s houses. She prays that the Lord will repay their kindness, their faithfulness to her and her family, by granting each of them husbands. At first the young women, Orpah and Ruth, refuse. But Naomi is insistent, again urging them to go back home.
This time, Orpah obeys her mother-in-law. She does the common-sense thing. She does as Naomi tell her, and goes home. They part with tears and kisses.
However, Ruth does not leave. Instead, she clings to Naomi. And so begins one of the most extraordinary conversations in scripture. Patricia Tull points out that this “is the only conversation [in Scripture] between two women that concerns not a man—a father, husband, or son—but each other’s welfare.” It is conversation that models friendship, true piety and concern for the other. Naomi begins by trying once again to convince Ruth to go back for her own good.
But Ruth will have none of it: “Do not press me to leave you or to turn back from following you! Where you go, I will go; Where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. 17Where you die, I will die— there will I be buried. May the Lord do thus and so to me, and more as well, if even death parts me from you!”
It is a remarkable statement. Carolyn Pressler calls it is one of the “most radical statements of commitment in the Bible….a covenant that goes against all social expectations.” [Joshua, Judges and Ruth, WBC, 271] Ruth is a Moabite. She is a foreigner from an enemy land, an immigrant from a despised people. How will she be received in Bethlehem? She could have gone home and likely married again, but what chance will she, a Moabite, have of finding a husband in Bethlehem? And how then will she survive, having cast her lot with a desperate, elderly widow?
She even pledges that Naomi’s God will be her God. People didn’t change their religion in the ancient world. I would not be surprise if Ruth had continued to honor her family’s traditional household gods even during her marriage to a Hebrew. Yet now she was willing to abandon all that—the traditions she had known since childhood, the faith that she held dear—and embrace a new God. And just as radical, she pledged to die and be buried where Naomi dies. Though Naomi is at least a generation older and Ruth would likely outlive her, she pledges not to return home but to stay and be buried with Naomi.
Ruth’s love and faithfulness are remarkable. Knowing she is the only family Naomi has left, she chooses fidelity, she chooses the good of a childless widow over her own interests. As Pressler observes, “Ruth will not abandon Naomi to the hopelessness that Naomi envisions for herself.” [Ibid, 272]
There is a Hebrew word for such love: hesed. It is usually translated into English as “steadfast love” or “loving kindness.” [It is the same word Naomi uses when she blesses Orpah and Ruth, praying God will “deal kindly” with them as they have dealt kindly with her.]
Katherine Doob Sakenfeld defines hesed as “kindness or mercy that (a) takes place within the context of an ongoing positive relationship; (b) responds to genuine need on the part of the recipient; and (c) goes above and beyond what is required of the one showing kindness. [summarized by Pressler, 269] Hesed is not a feeling but something one does. It is a loyal, unshakable love enacted in kindness and embodied in a merciful, gracious, generous way of living and being. It is a characteristic of God: one of the Psalmists’ favorite refrains is to declare that “God is gracious and merciful, abounding in hesed.” God abounds in steadfast love. God overflows with loving kindness.
Such is the love Ruth shows for Naomi, clinging to her in the midst of her despair, refusing to leave her in her time of need, displaying extravagant grace. In showing hesed, steadfast love, Ruth imitates God whose steadfast love endures forever. Ruth becomes an instrument of God’s unshakable love that will not let us go, even when walk through the valley of the shadow of death or descend to the depths of despair. As Patricia Tull puts it, “Grace is walking right beside Naomi, unseen, refusing to leave her.” [Ibid., 440] In her despair, in her wrestling with God, Naomi does not yet recognize that grace and loving kindness are embodied in the unshakable devotion of her daughter-in-law, but they are. Ruth chooses not to let Naomi go, but to cling to the ties that bind them—not to walk away, but to follow down an uncertain road wherever it may lead—and this choice, this act of love is the first inbreaking of hope into the Naomi’s despair, the first rays of light shining into her darkness. Naomi cannot yet see it, but God is beginning to work out her salvation through the faithful love of Ruth.
Ruth boldly declares that love: “I will not leave you. If you walk away, I will follow. If you run away, I will find you. Where ever you go, I will go and where you die, there I will die.” And in her words, we hear the words of God. This is the hesed of God; this is precisely how God acts. Throughout the whole Biblical drama, God has pursued humanity, refusing to abandon us to sin and death. God calls a people, makes covenant with them, sends the prophets. And then God comes to where we are. God comes in Christ, who enters fully into our human experience, who goes where we go and lodges where we lodge, who lodges as it were in human flesh and experiences “the heartbreak and the thousand natural shocks” to which the flesh is heir; [Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1] Christ who shows us how to fulfill God’s will and imitate God’s love by keeping the Great Commandments by loving God and neighbor; Christ, who at the end, out of a great love for us, dies where we die and rises victorious so that we might have life abundant and eternal.
Hesed, steadfast love, is the very nature of God and we who have received this loving kindness are called to imitate God and offer such love to others. This is the meaning of the Great Commandments: we love because God has first loved us. [1 John 4.19] Our love is a response to God’s overflowing loving kindness. How better can we respond? How better can we show our love for God than by loving one another, by seeing them as God sees them: as beings of infinite value and inestimable worth?
So let us cling to God like Ruth clung to Naomi, for God’s love will never let us go. Let us cling to God, whose loving kindness is so great, so steadfast, that God will follow us with maternal care and determination wherever we go and die rather than stop loving us.
Knowing God’s hesed, let us be like Evelyn, who embraced Vivian in her hour of need to bring comfort and speak words of hope. Let us embrace one another with a kindness and mercy that exceeds expectations, that crosses social boundaries and transgresses self-interest to create relationships and communities of faithful care and unshakable love.
And let us rejoice and give thanks to God, who lifts up those who are bowed down and gives life to the dead, for God’s love is stronger than death and despair, and God’s love is more fierce than the grave. Amen.