A single verse, that’s all we have to read today.
It’s about a nurse who dies.
She was buried under a tree.
Unassuming perhaps, but God made sure it was written down.
“Now Deborah, Rebekah’s nurse, died and was buried under the oak outside Bethel. So it was named Allon Bakuth.” (Genesis 35 v 8)
The Bible didn’t need to record her death. In Genesis 24 we first read of her when she went with Rebekah after marrying Isaac. Deborah was there for Rebekah in the silent, long years of barrenness, at the twins’ birth, and during the family strife; she remained by her mistress’s side.
By the time we reach this verse, Rebekah has probably died, and Deborah is Jacob’s final link to a past life. He named her burial plot, ‘the oak of weeping’. A woman we had largely forgotten, who is definitely not a major character in the Bible story, has been given her own tree, a named memorial. She is mentioned in Scripture, given a monument, yet never the central figure of any Bible story.
God always remembers the marginalised.
This verse sits here as a reminder that God remembers the small stories. That love for a minority person, a weeping for the unassuming, is never beneath the notice of God.
You are seen. You are known. You will be remembered. God knows you. This is perhaps the heart of the gospel in abbreviated form.
Missions Paul 