Daily Bible Reading: Ruth 4 and Mark 5:21-43

Ruth 4 – Boaz consults with the man and with ten elders.  He puts the matter to the man as if Naomi were selling land that belonged to her husband, and asks the next of kin if he is interested.  The man says he is, but when he learns that with the land comes Ruth, he yields his “rights” to Boaz. The deal here is that if the man were to take Ruth and she were to have a son by him, the son would legally be Elimelech’s heir—Ruth’s husband’s father’s, and the land would then go to him.  The next of kin does not want to risk loss of the land to a potential child, so he gives up his right. Boaz will go along with this.  They marry, and Ruth does have a son whom they name Obed—the legal heir not only of Elimelech but of Naomi too.  Naomi nurses him.  Obed will be the father of Jesse, and Jesse will be the father of David.  Boaz also was descended from Perez, the son of Judah and Tamar, who had to play prostitute to get Judah to give her and her deceased husband an heir—see Gen.38.

Mark 5:21-43 - Jesus crosses the sea again and meets a synagogue leader named Jairus.  Jairus’ little girl is “at the point of death” (5:23). He begs Jesus to come to her.  On the way, the woman with the hemorrhage makes her way through the throng and touches his clothes. She is immediately healed and Jesus turns to her - he had felt “power” going out of him at her touch. 

After this people from the man’s house come to them and say that the little girl has died.  Going with Peter, James and John (of Zebedee), he goes to the house where he tells the crowd that she is not dead, only sleeping.  They laugh.  He goes in with the parents and his three disciples and raises her (5:42).  Again he orders that no one speak of what he has done (5:43). 

Leviticus 15 and 21 describe the strict rules governing ritual purity of priests in particular.  Jesus here has had contact with the dead and with a woman with a bodily discharge—both of which would render a person or priest ritually polluted under the Mosaic Law.  Jesus’ ministry of healing and love supersede these rules.

Daily Bible Reading: Ruth 3 and Mark 5:1-20

Ruth 3 – Naomi wishes to find some better situation for Ruth.  She instructs her to go down to Boaz when he is done eating and drinking, “uncover his feet and lie down” there. What she is doing is offering herself for the purpose of giving Boaz the opportunity of providing his close relative—the deceased Elimelech—with a lawful heir. He is “next of kin” or “one with the right to redeem.” He wakes in the middle of the night, finds her there and is duly impressed with her virtue. He must go and first give an even closer male relative “the right of first refusal.”

Mark 5:1-20 – Immediately upon reaching shore a “man from the tombs with an unclean spirit met him” (5:2). He is clearly mentally disturbed and perhaps represents the condition of the people Jesus ministers to. The fact that his name is “Legion” might infer that there are many souls represented by him, or that his soul is many-layered, confused.  The spirit he has is the spirit of unholiness, of uncleanness before the things of God—all that is associated with the swine into whom Jesus banishes the evil spirit.  When word gets around that Jesus has exorcised the demoniac, people “beg Jesus to leave their neighborhood” (5:17).  The healed man begs Jesus to permit him to go with him, but Jesus only tells him to go and tell his friends.  This is the first time Jesus does say this—previously he asked to remain unmentioned.

Daily Bible Reading: Ruth 2 and Mark 4:20-35

Ruth 2 – Boaz is a relative of Elimelech and a rich man as well. Ruth goes to glean in his fields behind the reapers. Women with no man to whom they were attached had to glean like the poor, taking the remnants of the harvested grain. Boaz inquires about her and learns she has been gleaning for long hours. He talks to her, tells her to stay in his fields, that he has instructed his people not to bother her.  Ruth prostrates herself before him and asks why he is being kind.  He tells her he has heard her story, of her loyalty and good treatment of Naomi: “May the Lord reward you for your deeds, and may you have a full reward from the Lord, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come for refuge!” (2:12)

Mark 4:20-35 - The parable of the lamp.  People don’t use lamps or light to hide things. Light is meant to open things to people. So the wisdom Jesus’ is offering us is not meant to be a secret or hidden “lamp” but is meant to shine in the open (4:21-25).

And the standards we use to judge things, the “measure” we use will be used to measure us as well (4:24-25).

Then Jesus compares the “kingdom of God” to a man scattering seed on the ground.  He may scatter the seed, but as for how it grows, how it gives forth fruit, this is not something he can understand or control.  It all depends on the soil. It happens “of its own accord” (4:28). He comes in again only to harvest what has come of his labor.

Jesus used a lot of “seed” parables. He tells one about the mustard seed as a way of explaining what the kingdom of God is like. It is tiny when sown, but once it is in the ground, it sprouts in ways we cannot fathom (as in the previous parable) and becomes a large plant – sounds a little evolutionary to me. He tells the parable in a public way but explains it in private to his disciples.

Crossing the Sea of Galilee that evening, there is a storm that threatens the boat.  Jesus was asleep in the stern.  They awake him in a panic, and he calms the storm by his word.  “They were filled with great awe and said to one another, ‘Who then is this whom even wind and sea obey?’” (4:41)

The question of who exactly Jesus IS will form a central motif throughout the gospel accounts—it is this question that drives his disciples and ultimately us as well into the OT matrix, and it is only through that matrix, fully mined and integrated that we come to an answer to that question. A prominent motif of Mark’s gospel is the contrast between the huge, pressing crowds that follow Jesus wherever he goes (15 references to them so far) and the need he has to be alone, or anonymous.

Daily Bible Reading: Ruth 1 and Mark 4:1-19

Ruth (Background Information) – This book, one of only two in the Bible named for a woman character, has no known author. It was ascribed to Samuel and is set in the period of the judges – sometime between the 14^th to the 11^th century BC.

Ruth 1 – When the judges rules, there was a famine, Elimelech (a man from Bethlehem whose name meant “my god is king”) and his wife, Naomi (“my fair one”), went to Moab [east side of the Dead Sea] with sons Mahlon (“sickness”) and Chilion (“pining away”). Elimelech dies.  The sons take Moabite wives, Orpah (“she who runs away”) and Ruth (“the beloved”). After ten years, the sons are dead too.  The women are left together. 

Naomi wishes to return to her home in Bethlehem.  She tells her daughters-in-law that they can return to their families. One of them does, but Ruth, the wife of Mahlon, loves Naomi so much, she goes with her instead. She urges her not to—Naomi has no other sons for Ruth to marry. The rule was she could ONLY marry “a brother” of the husband per Dt. 25:5? Ruth says the famous lines to Naomi: “Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God.  Where 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” (1:16-17).

           

They arrive back in Bethlehem at the beginning of the barley harvest.  Naomi says, “the Lord has dealt bitterly with me.  I went away full, but the Lord has brought me back empty” (1:21).

Mark 4:1-19 – Another large crowd near the beach hears him talk about “the sower,” who went out to sow who dropped seed on all kinds of ground—on the path, on rocky ground, among thorns, and on rich soil (4:2-8). Those “outside” the kingdom hear of it in a veiled way—through such stories.

There is a little irony in Jesus’ words here for he says that “the mystery of the kingdom of God has been granted to those listening to him—the disciples, but they do not understand his parable any better than anyone else. Jesus’ use of parables also suggests to us that his message and indeed his entire being is only communicable through a kind of discourse that is not the same as everyday discourse.  It is imaginative and personal—in the sense that it is opened by a personal response to stories that bear only an indirect connection with the material realities we knock about in.

Here he explains the parable: Each type of ground represents a different set of realities—hearing the word of God and having Satan snatch the seed up before it has a chance to root; those who hear the word and snatch it up but who have no depth to their understanding and so fall away quickly in times of bad weather or tribulation; those who hear the word but wrestle with worldly concerns and get it entangled in complexity; and finally those who hear the word, give it soil to grow in and bear fruit.