Gleaning

But Jesus, our kinsman redeemer, has looked on us with favour.  We have been brought near because of his sacrifice, receiving his ‘shalom’ (peace) even though we were far off.

Living in a rich nation with an over-abundance of food provision, supermarket shelves stacked high, obesity, and an appalling quantity of perfectly edible produce thrown away, it is likely that we fail to understand the true meaning of gleaning. 
Through the centuries the poor have been collecting the leftovers after the harvesters have taken all that is commercially viable from the crop.
Right up to the 18th century it was the legal right of English ‘cottagers’ to glean harvested fields, and of course in many impoverished parts of the world it is still survival for many.
The Hebrew book of the Law commanded farmers not to reap a field right to the edge, nor to gather gleanings (Leviticus 23:22 “And when you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap your field right up to its edge, nor shall you gather the gleanings after your harvest. You shall leave them for the poor and for the sojourner: I am the LORD your God.”) nor to return for a forgotten sheaf but to leave them for the sojourner, the orphan and the widow. (Deuteronomy 24:19 “When you reap your harvest in your field and forget a sheaf in the field, you shall not go back to get it. It shall be for the sojourner, the fatherless, and the widow, that the LORD your God may bless you in all the work of your hands.)
Ruth, in the book entitled by her name, arrived with her mother-in-law in Israel just as the barley harvest was beginning.  Both were widows, and knowing their desperate poverty she asks Naomi if she may go to the fields to pick up the leftovers of the barley harvest, and barley was of less value than wheat, so back-breaking work for a tiny return.  But she finds favour in the field of Boaz who becomes her ‘kinsman redeemer’ and subsequently her husband.
Ruth had everything against her.  As a woman already subservient, as a widow ignored, as a sojourner dependent on charity, as a foreigner outside of the promises of God, and worse still of the Moabite nation which was prohibited entry to the assembly down to the tenth generation (Deuteronomy 23:2 No one born of a forbidden union may enter the assembly of the LORD. Even to the tenth generation, none of his descendants may enter the assembly of the LORD).  This delightful story tells how she received mercy, grace, acceptance and inclusion, becoming the great grandmother of the great king David, and therefore part of the genealogy of the official human line of Jesus.
We are all spiritually gleaners.  Naturally we are sinners and deserve nothing from God; separated from Christ, alienated from Israel’s heritage, strangers to his promises, without hope and without God in the world (Ephesians 2). No rights, no status, before God we are all beggars and gleaners.
But Jesus, our kinsman redeemer, has looked on us with favour.  We have been brought near because of his sacrifice, receiving his ‘shalom’ (peace) even though we were far off.  Jesus has broken down every dividing wall of hostility and given us access to Father God.  In drawing close to Him we are no longer strangers and foreigners but fellow citizens with the saints and have become members of God’s household – part of His family.

Author: John Plumb

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