God Does Write Straight With Crooked Lines

Friday of the Twentieth Week in course 2025

(Memorial of the Queenship of the Blessed Virgin Mary)

The Book of Ruth is both unique and important for both Jews and Christians. Ruth was an outsider, a Moabite woman married to the son of the widow Naomi, a native of Bethlehem. When Naomi’s two sons died in Moab, one of the newly widowed women, Orpah, left for her family, but Ruth stayed with Naomi and moved with her back to Israel. If you look carefully at the dialogue between the two women, you see that Ruth made what is really a vow to Naomi: I will stay with you wherever you go, your people are mine, your God is also mine. She did that, and by marrying an Israelite, had offspring that in time produced David, the King. So Ruth was David’s great-grandmother. But that’s not all. When St. Matthew wrote his Gospel, he included a long genealogy of Jesus, son of Mary and Joseph, but conceived by the Holy Ghost. In that genealogy, you will find four women, Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and the wife of Uriah, all Gentiles and all in an unaccustomed relationship with the fathers of their sons. Matthew is implying that if these women did not disqualify Solomon as son of David, then they do not disqualify Jesus, whose Messianic title is literally “Son of David.”

That gives us the providential connection to today’s commemoration. Bathsheba, who had been wife of Uriah and then one of King David’s wives, was mother of Solomon, who ruled Israel after David’s death. Remember that David had committed adultery with her and then, to cover it up, had Uriah killed in battle. And from that day, one trouble or rebellion after another haunted David’s family. But the kingdom eventually got used to the situation, and Bathsheba, though a Gentile, became the Queen Mother, and sat next to her son Solomon as he performed his royal duties. She was an active administrator, as you can see in the first two chapters of the first Book of Kings.

When the Virgin Mary was visited by the archangel Gabriel and heard the news that she would be the mother of the Messiah, she understood that God wanted her to be Queen Mother, ruling with her Son, Jesus. That reality is what we are memorializing today. Mary is forever with Jesus as Queen Mother in the divine kingdom, with all that implies. This, by the way, was understood and accepted even by the Protestant leaders of the sixteenth century, so it’s something that can unite all Christians.

As the psalmist sings, “the Lord keeps faith forever.” That’s part of His kingship of the universe. There’s a radical consistency in His rule. Matthew records that Jesus frequently got into disputes with the Jewish leaders of Jerusalem but always did so firmly and as charitably as was reasonable. (Those guys were truly a brood of vipers, only looking out for themselves.) In today’s Gospel it’s the Pharisees’ turn, after Jesus silenced the Sadducees. One of them as a test asked “Teacher, what is the greatest commandment in Torah?” Jesus knew the best answer. After all, hadn’t he studied with the great Hebrew teachers in the Temple when He was twelve, as St. Luke records? The greatest commandment is “Love the Lord, your God, with your everything. And the second is “love your neighbor as yourself.” That contains all of Torah and the prophets as well.

We can only wonder what might have happened if the Sadducees and Pharisees and Zealots, three parties vying for the little power left to Israel by the Romans, had really listened to Jesus and followed Him. But that’s idle speculation. After all, the apostles and others who followed Jesus for three years, even after His passion, death and Resurrection, were asking Him all the way to His ascension when He was going to muster His angelic army and start killing Romans to gain kingship. And we also know, every one of us, how many times we have told God “Thy will be done” with our fingers crossed behind our backs. No, repentance must be our daily habit all the way until God calls us to our eternal destiny in Christ.