Generosity
I’m writing out Ruth, and I just came to a verse, Ruth 2:12… and what I have seen from the onset of this book is that Ruth became Great great… grandmother of Jesus through her generosity toward this widow. In her youth she could have gone back and achieved a husband amount her own people… the Law talks about how the stranger and foreigners are to be treated.
But I wonder if you can trace the path that I have just now seen from Ruth 2:12 and the brother of the prodigal son in the parable Jesus told?
ChatGPT >
What’s showing up for you right now that you’d like to explore together?
Yes. I think there is a real line running from Ruth 2:12 to Jesus’ parable of the two sons, and the connection becomes especially striking when you notice the language of refuge, belonging, grace, and reward.
In Ruth 2:12, Boaz says:
“The LORD repay you for what you have done, and a full reward be given you by the LORD, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come to take refuge.”
Ruth has crossed over into grace
Ruth has done something remarkable. Naomi actually gave her permission to return to Moab:
“Go, return each of you to her mother’s house…” (Ruth 1:8)
Orpah does. Ruth doesn’t.
Ruth chooses Naomi when, humanly speaking, Naomi has almost nothing to offer her. No husband. No wealth. No obvious future. Ruth binds herself not merely to Naomi but to Naomi’s people and Naomi’s God:
“Your people shall be my people, and your God my God.” (1:16)
So when Boaz meets Ruth, he has already heard about what she has done—how she left her father, mother, homeland and came among a people she did not previously know (2:11).
And then comes 2:12:
You have come under God’s wings.
That’s bigger than Boaz saying, You’re a good woman and God will pay you back.
It’s almost a declaration of belonging.
And wonderfully, Boaz himself becomes part of God’s answer to his own prayer. In chapter 3 Ruth asks Boaz:
“Spread your wings over your servant, for you are a redeemer.” (3:9)
The same Hebrew word (kanaph, wing/garment-edge) is involved.
God’s wings → Boaz’s wings.
Ruth seeks refuge in Israel’s God, and God provides that refuge through the covenant faithfulness of Boaz.
Now put the older brother beside Ruth
This is where I think what you’ve noticed gets interesting.
The older brother in Luke 15 has everything Ruth doesn’t.
Ruth is the foreigner who comes in.
The older brother is the son who has always been in.
Ruth approaches Israel’s God with essentially empty hands. The older brother approaches his father with a ledger:
“Look, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command…”
And then:
“…yet you never gave me a young goat…”
That’s an entirely different understanding of reward.
Boaz says to Ruth, May the LORD reward you.
The older brother effectively says, Father, you owe me my reward.
That’s quite a contrast.
And notice what the father tells him:
“Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.”
The tragedy is that the older brother has been living inside abundance while thinking like a hired servant.
Meanwhile Ruth, the outsider, has come seeking refuge beneath wings that she has no ethnic claim upon.
And there’s another connection: generosity toward the undeserving
Ruth pours herself out for Naomi.
Boaz pours generosity upon Ruth.
The father pours generosity upon the prodigal.
But the older brother cannot rejoice when generosity reaches someone whom he believes doesn’t deserve it.
That may be one of the deepest threads between the stories.
Ruth could have said:
Naomi made her choices. Her husband took her to Moab. Her sons died. She’s old. I have my own life to live.
Instead:
“Where you go I will go.”
The older brother looks at his ruined brother and says, essentially:
His problems are his own doing. Why should your wealth be spent on him?
Ruth moves toward another person’s emptiness.
The older brother recoils when the father moves toward another person’s emptiness.
And Jesus leaves him standing outside the celebration.
Then there’s Jesus
Your genealogical observation makes the whole thing even richer, with one small correction: Ruth is an ancestor of Jesus through David—Ruth → Obed → Jesse → David—so many generations separate her from Jesus (Matthew 1:5–6), rather than her being literally his great-great-grandmother.
But the theological connection you’re seeing remains powerful.
A Moabite woman comes under the wings of Israel’s God.
She becomes part of Israel.
She becomes an ancestor of David.
And ultimately she appears explicitly in Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus.
Then Jesus tells a story in which the question becomes:
What will the people who are already “inside the house” do when the Father welcomes home someone who has been outside?
That’s very close to one of the tensions running through Ruth.
The Law had commanded Israel to leave gleanings for the poor and the sojourner (Leviticus 19:9–10; Deuteronomy 24:19–22). Ruth is precisely such a person. Boaz doesn’t merely tolerate that command—he delights in fulfilling its spirit, going considerably beyond its minimum requirement.
The older brother is almost the opposite posture:
Why are we giving so much to him?
Boaz:
Pull some grain out from the bundles for her too.
Father:
Bring quickly the best robe… the ring… the shoes… the fattened calf.
Same extravagant heart.
And perhaps the question Jesus leaves hanging over the older brother is remarkably similar to the question Ruth quietly answered:
When grace costs you something because it is being given to somebody else, will you participate in it—or stand outside calculating what everyone deserves?
Ruth entered beneath the wings.
Boaz opened his wings.
The father opened his house.
The younger son came home.
And the older son—although he had never physically left—still had to decide whether he would come in.
That’s quite a path you stumbled onto at Ruth 2:12.
Ruth 2:12
I’ve skipped ahead, because I don’t want to lose this thought. Boaz in Ruth 2:12 “…the Lord, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come…”
Boaz wholly belongs to the Lord. What is his is God’s and Visa versa. Ruth has actually come under his wings, but he doesn’t refer to or think of that way.
Generosity comes from understanding that all that I am and have is from and to the Lord. The needy aren’t my competition for limited resources, they are joint heirs with me!
What I have often thought about in regards to that older son of the prodigal‘s father, is the complete lack of perspective that the older son has for what his father had been going through. In order for his father to have seen the prodigal son return from a far off and go running to him, he had to have been in the habit of watching every idle moment that he had. How could the older son not have noticed this devotion? How could the older son have missed the love that the father had for the missing one? I can just now of Jesus parable of the shepherd who leaves the 99 and search’s for the “one” that had gone astray.
Folks that come to church, and belong because of their tenure, their seniority the fact that they’ve been coming there for a 10 years now, and so they belong more than the one who has just arrived. They flock towards the other ones who along more than others. They struggle to be known by the ones who have tenure… so after service on a Sunday they don’t bother with the new person, they walked towards the ones they already know, and the ones who are known, the famous ones.
But the ones who noticed those that have just come, and extend the welcoming hand towards them…
We are the ones who have come back to the father and we belong with him and we are His and we turn around and look out over the raging storm of this world looking for the hand that rises up out of the waves to say look father look there is one that needs you and we, and we figure out a way of reaching that one. This is the heart of missions… I cannot rest until the one that is missing is restored to us.
ChatGPT >
I think you’ve followed the thread further, and there’s something important in the distinction you’re making about Boaz’s perspective.
Boaz could quite reasonably have looked at Ruth and thought, She has come under my protection. In practical terms, she had. She was gleaning in his field. Eating his food. Drinking water drawn by his servants. Protected because he commanded his young men not to touch her. And shortly he’ll deliberately instruct his workers to pull grain from his bundles and leave it for her.
Yet Boaz says:
“the LORD, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come to take refuge!”
He seems to see himself almost transparently. Ruth has come under God’s wings, and Boaz happens to discover that his field, his grain, his servants, his authority and eventually his own life are among the things God intends to use to provide those wings.
That makes Ruth 3:9 extraordinary when Ruth later tells him:
“Spread your wings over your servant, for you are a redeemer.”
It’s almost as though Ruth hands Boaz his own prayer back to him.
“Boaz, you said I came beneath God’s wings. Perhaps you are part of how God intends to spread them over me.”
And that gets directly at what you’re saying about generosity. If Boaz thinks, This is my grain, Ruth’s presence represents subtraction. Every ephah she carries home is an ephah Boaz doesn’t possess.
But if Boaz thinks, This field belongs to the LORD, I belong to the LORD, Ruth belongs to the LORD, the arithmetic changes completely.
Ruth isn’t competition.
She’s family being gathered in.
And that makes the older brother even sadder
You’ve noticed something about Luke 15 that the text doesn’t explicitly state, so I’d preserve the distinction: Jesus doesn’t tell us that the father stood watching every day. We can’t know that.
But Jesus does deliberately tell us:
“while he was still a long way off, his father saw him…”
Whatever circumstances produced that sight, the father’s attention is immediately and completely directed toward the missing son.
And you’re right that the larger context makes this crucial, because Jesus has already told us two other stories.
Luke 15 isn’t really three disconnected parables.
A shepherd has 100 sheep. One is missing.
A woman has 10 coins. One is missing.
A father has two sons. One is missing.
And each time something lost is restored, there is a celebration:
“Rejoice with me.”
“Rejoice with me.”
And then:
“Let us eat and celebrate.”
But suddenly someone won’t rejoice.
The older brother.
And here your observation bites: he doesn’t share his father’s preoccupation with the missing one.
His father’s joy at restoration actually makes him angry.
That’s an astonishing condition—to live in the Father’s house while becoming irritated by the things that delight the Father’s heart.
Which brings this uncomfortably close to church
The question isn’t simply, Do I belong?
It’s:
What has my belonging taught me to desire?
Ten years in the Father’s house ought not make someone more possessive of the house. It ought to make them more like the Father.
That’s the challenge I hear underneath what you’re describing about church gatherings.
It’s easy for belonging to quietly become status.
They know me.
I know the pastor.
These are my friends.
This is my church.
That’s my seat.
And none of those things is necessarily wrong. Deep friendships and long relationships are good things.
But something has gone crooked when proximity to the Father produces distance from the people the Father is looking for.
The older brother’s tenure is impeccable.
“these many years I have served you…”
And yet somehow all those years beside his father haven’t taught him to recognize his father’s heart.
Which takes us back to Boaz
Boaz is almost a beautiful counter-image.
His position doesn’t make him territorial.
His wealth doesn’t make him suspicious.
His belonging doesn’t make him exclude the foreigner.
Instead, because he belongs securely to Israel’s God, he can open his hands.
The secure insider makes room for the outsider.
And Ruth herself eventually becomes an insider who once was an outsider.
That matters enormously for the picture you’re forming of mission.
Because Christians aren’t standing safely on shore shouting instructions to drowning outsiders.
We know what the water tastes like.
We are the sheep that was carried home.
We are the coin that was found.
We are the child upon whom the Father put the robe.
We are Ruth arriving in a field that wasn’t ours and discovering that the owner had instructed his people:
Let her glean. Don’t rebuke her. Give her water. Feed her. Protect her. And deliberately leave something behind for her to find.
And perhaps that changes your final image slightly.
We don’t need to persuade the Father to care about the hand sticking out of the waves.
He saw it before we did.
Mission may therefore be less:
“Father! Look! There’s somebody out there!”
and more:
“Father, I see the one You’re looking at. How do I join You in reaching them?”
That is very Boaz.
He doesn’t merely announce that Ruth has taken refuge beneath God’s wings.
He discovers that his own arms are available to God for spreading them.
Running Down Vimy 