A Hope Story

The substance of the love story

When we decided to work through the book of Ruth at The Listening Post, it didn’t occur to me that we would be looking at it during the week of Valentine’s Day. Even married, I’m not a big Valentine’s Day person, but it does seem kind of timely.

In my opinion, Ruth is one of the best-told stories in the Bible, and also hands down the best love story in it. The wedding of Isaac and Rebecca is pretty sweet, but they have devastating communication problems later. Song of Songs is erotic, but what exactly is the story it’s telling? Who’s speaking? What’s going on? Do I actually want to know? And Esther is all drunken misogynistic politics where the doughty heroine has to fall back on “feminine wiles” to get her voice heard.

Ruth, though? Ruth is sweet through and through. This morning, a small group of us discovered that the sweetness isn’t saccharine, but substantial. In fact, although the story is really quite romantic, the romance is a subplot. The story itself goes much deeper. We just needed to listen together.

Have I told you about the Listening Post? I feel like I haven’t really, at least not here on Substack, so before we go any further with Ruth, allow me to explain a little. The Listening Post is the Pilgrimage’s twice a month Bible study on zoom, primarily for people who (have less traditional work hours and) are triggered by the Bible. It gives them a place to engage the Bible, other people who are still trying to hang onto Jesus, and even Jesus Himself in a nontraditional format, without set questions or an interpretive agenda. I’m going to be talking about it more in the coming weeks and months, probably, because the way we read the Bible there is pretty much the way I read the Bible when I’m writing books like Follower or preparing sermons on biblical narrative, and it’ll help give you some context for much of the rest of my creating. Plus you can join us if you want.

Anyway, today we looked at Ruth chapter 2. We noticed an awful lot of things. Like how the story doesn’t spell out anything about the characters of either Ruth or Boaz, but how we can tell that these two are rock star human beings, because usually the biblical writers aren’t shy about pointing out the so-called heroes’ feet of clay, but neither Boaz or Ruth seem to have that affliction.

Boaz arrives in his farm fields and blesses his employees, and they bless him back, which is how we know that when he asks who Ruth “belongs to,” he’s asking it in a kind and protective way on behalf of a vulnerable person, not in a possessive and acquiring and abusive way. And then as the chapter plays out, what he does matches the good things we have already surmised about him.

As for the young widow Ruth, we already know from the previous chapter that against all reason, she has given up her rights with her own people and pledged her life to her widowed mother-in-law Naomi and to Naomi’s God. In chapter two, even though she’s an immigrant from an enemy people, Ruth takes the initiative to do the work she needs to do to support herself and her mother-in-law, and then when she finds favor with Boaz, she works hard and consistently to continue to support the two of them through two harvests.

We really like and admire these people. They’re not cardboard cut-outs. They aren’t shallow. They’re genuinely good people of substance, whose mettle has been (or is being) tested. But today at the Listening Post we noticed a couple of other things that made them shine even brighter for us in a world where the metaphorical sky is glowering.

The first thing is that this whole story takes place, as the author tells us at the beginning of the first chapter, in the time of the judges. [TRIGGER WARNING HERE: SEXUAL ABUSE] I don’t know if you know anything about the biblical “time of the judges,” but you could read the book of Judges and be appalled. (You might also be appalled to know that as a child it was one of my favorite biblical books. I don’t know what else to say about that.) The book is famous for the refrain,

There was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.

The refrain brackets a cycle of more and more violence, but what I’ve never heard anyone unpack in satisfying enough detail (so please! let me do it in a book sometime!) is how the trajectory plays out in the lives of women. As the book progresses and God’s chosen people get more and more corrupt, women go from having positions of leadership and agency to being raped and dismembered. It doesn’t seem like an accident to me that the author of Ruth—another story about women—makes sure that we know that this story occurs in the same time period.

You know those days when a storm is brewing but the sun manages to slice a ray through the lowering clouds and shine directly on them, so they somehow glow slate grey and everything else is tinged with gold? So that even if the storm does come after all, you can’t help but remember that the sun is still there, that the sun is the reality, that the sun made even the dark clouds beautiful? That’s what the book of Ruth felt like today, as we examined it in the context of the slate grey, rumbling-cloud backdrop of the book of Judges.

In the days of the judges

when everyone did what was right in their own eyes,

and women were used and thrown away,

and oppression was rampant,

and there was a famine,

and a foreign widow going to glean in a field was taking her life in her hands,

and a field-hand-blessing mensch still had to tell his field hands not to touch the women…

Well. Ruth took her life in her hands, and Boaz told his field hands not to touch her, and they were faithful and solicitous of others less fortunate than themselves (Boaz of Ruth, Ruth of Naomi) and did good hard daily work and that, pointed out one of my friends at The Listening Post, is the part of “the time of the judges” that the later Hebrew prophets seem to hark back to when they recall that time, even when they are calling out the evils of their people in their own time.

The small story of good people living in faithful hope is the shaft of sunlight in the storm, the glimpse of the really real underpinning the chaos of the now.

And one other thing.

In our final aloud-reading of Ruth 2, everyone’s locked onto Ruth 2:2:

And Ruth the Moabite said to Naomi, “Let me go to the fields and pick up the leftover grain behind anyone in whose eyes I find favor.”

Not only did Ruth take the initiative in a risky climate where she was one of the most vulnerable, but she had enough imaginative hope to suppose that she might not just find a place to glean—a way to support herself and Naomi—but that she would find favor there. When Boaz does show her favor, she seems surprised, but in fact, she called it. She has only just changed her allegiance from whatever gods she was worshiping in Moab to the the God of Israel, and on the basis of The Time of the Judges and what we know of her loss-filled life experience right now, there’s absolutely no reason she should have imagined favor, let alone hoped for it, let alone acted on that hope. But she did. And her hope was fulfilled, beyond what she asked or, we might imagine, imagined.

At the end of The Listening Post we prayed. We asked God to help us, as one person put it, “go out into the field in desperation, hoping to encounter the One in whose sight we’ll find favor.”

Go in hope, friends.