Can love be wrong

Let us pray – Creator and maker of us all – bless the words of my lips and the meditations of our hearts – grow thou in us and show us your ways and inspire us to live by your truth. Amen.

Can love be wrong?

In my humble opinion, the Book of Ruth is one of the most beautiful books in the Bible. To me it is a beautiful story; it is a story that contains in it so many different elements. It is a story about life and death, famine and feast, love and loss, and love regained.

I would encourage you to read the story for yourself sometime this week. It is a very good story, it is a good story, if you got a good translation, will give you and your family entertainment, and to top it up, it is just as good, if not better, than a good television show.

In my sermon of today, which incidentally, is a story sermon, I would like us all to look at the love between Ruth and Boaz and what it might mean to our faith – in other words, what it might mean to how we are going to love our neighbours and our God.

I want to start off by telling you the story of Jonathan, that mysterious person whom we have been hearing about in today’s Old Testament from the Book of Ezra.

To give you a bit of background to the story, I will like to remind you that what happened in the Book of Ezra actually took place over five hundred years after what happened in the book of Ruth.

Even before Jonathan got to the corner of the Old Inn he could already hear someone praying in the square right in front of the house of God.

He knew immediately that something special was happening. Within the city of Jerusalem there was an unusual quite (imagine Causeway Bay being quite during a business day), and apart from the quietness, he noticed that for the last hour he had seem groups of people drifting towards the direction of the temple.

What finally aroused Jonathan’s curiosity and caused him to put down his tools and headed towards the temple was due to the unusual quietness and the movement of the people.

However, he could hardly see anything when he finally got to the temple square as there was already a huge crowd gathered there. All he could see was people everywhere.

Jonathan was very persistent, and after a couple of minutes, having moving first this way, and then that, he finally came to a place where he could see between the adults who were in front of him and over the heads of the children who were also present. And when he finally could see, he saw Ezra, the priest, on his knees before the temple in the middle of an intense prayer.

Ezra had torn his clothes and his tunic. He was also weeping and rocking back and forth. He was rocking back and forth, as he prayed to the Lord God of Israel, and in his voice, a voice which carried clear and loud over the square, Jonathan heard in the voice of Ezra the sound of grief.

Jonathan listened with all the people in the square to the prayer, and heard Ezra confesses to the Lord that his people had sinned, he heard Ezra expressed his fear that God’s people would sin once again, and that they would once again break the commandments of God and become unfaithful to Him. Ezra expressed his fear that the people would once again make treaties with corrupt nations and marry people from countries that scorned and despised both the laws of God and His chosen people. Jonathan as well as all present at the square witnessed Ezra weeping. He heard the anguish in Ezra’s voice, as he prayed that the people of Israel will not be acting the same way that they had been acting in the past. He prayed that they will not again run the risk of total destruction by loving those whom they should not love, and as a result binding themselves to foreigners, to people who worshipped other gods.

Jonathan felt deeply moved upon seeing and hearing the prayers of Ezra.

He too grieved for the glory that Israel once had and now lost. He too mourned for the Israel’s loss of innocence, for the time when David was King, and not only the true faith, but the entire nation was strong.

Jonathan knew, as did all the people present at the square that day, that some kinds of love are simply wrong.

He knew, from the history of Israel that some kinds of love were very dangerous to the nation and to the true faith, and Jonathan felt greatly tempted to join in his voice to those of all the other people who began to weep bitterly with Ezra over the sins and plight of Israel.

He was also tempted to take the vow that they were taking, after Ezra had finished praying. The vow that Shecaniah proposed while everyone was weeping:

- the vow to divorce those whom they should have never married;
- the vow to divorce them and send them as well as their children to the lands to which they originally came from, back to the lands of corruption from which they first came.


As the people around him wept and lifted up their voices in agreement with Shecaniah, Jonathan was tempted to join in with them, but something inside him would not allow him to do so.

Something held Jonathan back from joining the people that day. He was not certain what it was that held him back from that day, but as he walked away from the square with the other people. With a heavy heart he thought about it, and what he was going to do when the people were going to be gathered again in three days time to take action on Erza’s words and to fulfill the vow that had been made.

Jonathan thought about how from the very beginning the people of God had been warned about intermarriage.

Moses had told Israel that it would surely lead to idolatry, and that foreign women would corrupt the faith of their husband, and teach their children to love and worship other gods, until finally the day would come when the nation would perish, because it no longer worshipped the Lord God of Israel.

As Jonathan continued on working in his shop during the next two days, he kept on recalling how Ezra had claimed that the destruction of Israel and of Jerusalem and of the temple happened because the people of Israel had ignored Moses’ warning and their God.

He kept on remembering how Ezra had explained to the people that the current poverty and weakness of Israel was due partly to the same problem, that the people were suffering because they were once again contaminating the nation by marrying foreign women; and that they had weakened themselves by loving the wrong people.

The more he thought about it, Ezra’s words seem to made sense to Jonathan. He was not sure as to hwy he had held back from taking the vow. After all, he did not have a foreign wife, and he nothing to lose personally by going alone with what to all appearances seem to made sense.

Different traditions often do not mix well.
Different faiths more often than not conflicted with each other, and in such a conflict, both faiths normally perish, for a faith that is changed is a faith that is lost.

There were other people besides Moses and Ezra who said that if one truly loved God with all of one’s heart and soul and mind and strength then they would not risk their faith by marrying foreigners, or by loving a person from a different culture and belief.

That kind of love could not help but be dangerous; it could not help but being wrong, and it could very much be like inviting a wolf to come and live inside a sheep pen, no matter how kind the wolf seems to be, and how loving the sheep are, nature would end up having her way.

Jonathan kept on thinking about these things, and he felt confused and disturbed by his reluctance to take the vow – a reluctance he continued to feel despite all the arguments that he had thought of regarding the taking of the vow. It was in this kind of a state of confusion raging in his mind when he went up to the temple square on the third day with all the men of Judah and Benjamin.

His state of mind was exactly the same as the weather of the day – as it was a miserable rainy day. He sat in the square with several thousand other men, trying in vain to stay warm and dry as Ezra mounted the temple steps to talk to them.

Jonathan suddenly felt a measure of desperation when Ezra began to speak.

He still did not know what she should do when Ezra called out for all the men of Israel to renounce their foreign wives. He did not know that if he could agree to the action that would be legislated that very day.

But then, just as Ezra spoke he suddenly what was bothering him.

As Ezra once again proclaimed to the people that the men of Israel had been unfaithful to God because they had married foreign wives, he suddenly understands what had been bothering him all this time. He realized why he had not taken the vow proposed by Shecaniah, son of Jehiel.

It was all because of Ruth.

He remembers that his mother had often told him the story of Ruth and Boaz, about how Ruth had followed Naomi from Moab to Bethlehem, after the death of her first husband. He remembers hearing of how she had worked in the fields gleaning the wheat left behind by the reapers so she could care for herself and for her mother-in-law, until one day Boaz had noticed her and shown her his favor by instructing the harvesters to leave some sheaves for her.

Jonathan remembers how his mother had always loved the story of Ruth, she delighted in telling of the cleverness of Naomi in arranging things so that Ruth would meet up with Boaz again, and how Boaz had won Ruth from the relative who should have married her as according to the law of Moses by getting him to renounce his claim in public.

Jonathan’s mother had dearly loved the story of Ruth and now he realized that it was the story or Ruth that had prevented him from taking the vow of Shecaniah.

Jonathan knew that some kind of love are dangerous, but he also knew as well that all kinds of love can be used by God, it can be used by God, and it can be blessed, even if it may seem to be wrong to have that love.

Jonathan realized that the reason for his hesitation in the square three days ago was because he had known somewhere in his inner being that although it can be a dangerous to love a sinner, however, that love does not necessary end in disaster.

Jonathan remembered what Ezra and Shecaniah seems to have forgotten.

He remembered that Ruth was a Moabitess, she was a foreigner, she came from a tribe who were famous for corruption and idolatry.

Despite Ruth’s switch of faith; despite her proven loyalty to Naomi, Ruth was a like an Irish Protestant marrying a Roman Catholic; Ruth was like a black person marrying a white person in the United States way back in the 1930’s; Ruth was like a prostitute marrying a church elder.

Ruth was the leopard that according what Ezra said about foreigners, could not change its spots; she was the one who led to the destruction of the first temple and the defeat of the nation.

According to Ezra, she was the one, who even now, was destroying the people of Israel.

Jonathan, as he sat huddled down in the square, with the rain pouring down on him, suddenly felt a thrill ran through his body as he remembered how the story of Ruth and Boaz ended, and he thought about what would have happened if Boaz hade to take the vow of Shecaniah.

You see, after Ruth and Boaz got married, she became the mother of Obed, and Obed was the father of Jesse, and Jesse was the father of David, who became the king of Israel, the very king out of whom was to come the Messiah, the very king who had made Israel a great nation and the God of Israel famous throughout the known world.

If Boaz had not loved Ruth, who was a foreign woman, and it was supposedly wrong to love, then all the right things would never have happened. There would have been no king David, no king Salomon, no temple, no glory, no kingdom, no power, no might…nothing!

As so as Jonathan sat in the rain and watched Ezra and the people of Jerusalem weep again for all their sins, and decide to send away all the foreign women that they had married. He praised god for the love that they called wrong, for the love that had given to Israel its greatest king and which would soon give to the whole world the Messiah that the world desperately needed.

He praised God, and he, along with three other men present in the square that day, refused to agree with what Ezra proposed. He refused to be in agreement that the love of Ruth and Boaz had been wrong.