Tis the season for weddings and that will continue on through the fall season. couples will be fretting over getting the right flowers, music, poetry and maybe even scripture texts for the readings.
It doesn’t get used so much these days but over the years when presented alternative texts, people used to choose the words of Ruth, “Where you go, I will go.”
Athalya Brenner in a recent Interpretation magazine wonders why this text has been romanticized. Not only was Ruth a female, she was also a foreigner and a migrant worker which put her in a precarious position. Brehner says, “There is nothing romantic about being a fugitive, or about seeking economic asylym. What Ruth needed is what aliens and immigrants need today - human rights. Unlike civil rights, human rights are primarily matters of physicalities like eating, sheltering, multiplying, speaking and breathing.”
We appropriate stories from other ages to our own uses, but taken in their original context, their message is far more challenging and provocative than a superficial reading would indicate.
Peter
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I've always thought Ruth was expressing her commitment to foregoing her old religions and staying with Naomi and following God instead. And since the relationship of husband and wife is compared with that of Christ and the Church, perhaps the analogy, and use in marriage ceremonies, is fitting as the husband and wife affirm a bond, not just of romance, but of commitment to living in the holy, ordained state of marriage, submitting to each other as the Church submits to Christ, and loving unconditionally, as Christ loves His Church. Perhaps this passage is appropriate to weddings, after all.
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