Read: Ruth 1:1-18

In today’s reading, Naomi has hit rock bottom in her life. Her feelings are of desolation, despair, emptiness and bitterness. She lacks hope for the future, and feels that even God has turned against her. Moreover, the weakness of her daughters-in-law underscores her own. Naomi does something that is a natural tendency for human beings in such circumstances – she decides to return to her past, to what she knew before.

Naomi is determined to go back to Bethlehem, but Ruth shows her the road to return to God. That’s what Ruth’s famous speech is really about - the matter of getting home to God. Going where Naomi goes, living where she lives, dying where she dies, even having Naomi’s people be her own – all these things are leading up to the main point. And the main point for Ruth is that Naomi’s God will be hers as well. Naomi’s faith is wavering, but Ruth starts a turn toward God. And then there is hope.

An interesting aspect of the story of Ruth is that we aren’t told that God called her. She certainly had hard times in her life, being a young widow with no means of support. Yet somewhere in the ten years that Naomi had lived in Moab, Ruth had begun to feel the Holy Spirit operating in her life. She understood what it was to love God and to love Naomi. To love God and to love one another – this is a message emphasized in both the Old and the New Testaments. We call it the Great Commandment. Ruth is an example of it being put in to practice, because Ruth understands that human beings need to have a feeling of belonging to God and to each other. And that requires that we love God and each other as much as they deserve to be loved.

That’s the challenge of the Great Commandment - to love God and each other not as much as we are willing to love them, but as much as they deserve to be loved. If we take that commandment seriously, then it will control everything that we do.