Why Ruth? ... Not a moral but a genealogy

Scripture: Ruth 4

            For the last week, Kate, Natalie and I have spent time with both sides of our family, and, because we have fairly typical families, family time is both good and it has its moments. Families are great and fun, and they also magnify all of our issues, meaning that family time can be the most relaxing and most stressful time all at once. But no matter how messed up some of our families are we can all take solace that at least our family systems are not like they were in ancient Israel. Or maybe some of us think that still might be an improvement in which case… oy.

As much as we remember the story of Ruth for being a nice tale of Ruth’s faithfulness to her mother-in-law, it’s hard to miss that that faithfulness is necessary because of societal structures where women were treated as property. This story, like so many from the Bible, is timeless in a sense—its morals play as well today as they did three thousand years ago—but it’s also a story with elements of a particular time and culture that we would find unacceptable today. Each generation changes. Every new set of children brings a new sense of what is right. From one generation to another those changes can be significant, but over the course of centuries those changes can make for a cultural sea change. We like to think that we are enlightened, but give it a generation or two and they’ll look back at us as uncultured, and give it a century more and we’ll be considered next to barbarians. This is why it is so important that we do not worship cultural things that change but instead we worship a God who does not.

            These are the distractions we face when it comes to reading Ruth. I’m guessing very few of our women today would willingly go back to a system where you are property of your fathers, transferred on your wedding day to your husband, and then left essentially helpless if that husband dies, completely at the mercy of distant male relatives who now own your rights. Most of us would not care much for such a system. And yet, there certainly are other people spurned by our systems today, at the mercy of forces outside of their control. Perhaps in three thousand years a typical story from 21^st century America will be seen as abhorrent to a more enlightened culture of the future.

            This is always the challenge with looking back on cultures and morals of the past. It’s also why we have such a difficult time applying them today. An Old Testament teacher of mine was once asked to visit a church and give a lecture on the biblical definition of marriage. He declined, offering the explanation that they wouldn’t like what he had to say. He knew that they wanted him to lecture on the biblical definition of marriage as one man and one woman, but if he was going to be true to the scriptural witness that’s not even close to the only example of marriage in the Bible. In fact, there are at least ten different examples of marriage that can be found in the Bible, including heroes of our faith who practiced polygamy and notably for today’s reading this idea of Levirate marriage in which a woman becomes the property of her husband’s nearest male relative if he dies. This isn’t people acting against God’s law; it’s actually part of the holiness code of Leviticus.

            So, what are we to do with that? Are we to accept polygamy and Levirate marriage because they are accepted in the Bible? I think not, but this is the dangerous game we play looking to the Bible for moral absolutes. We need to understand that cultural and moral sensitivities change, and perhaps we are more enlightened now than before in history or perhaps not. But the thrust of the Christian witness depends not on the shifting sands of morality but on the firm ground of the cross. Simply, the purpose of Ruth is not to tell us about what a good marriage looks like.

But the question, then, is: What does Ruth tell us?

            In order to figure that our we need to understand not only what the words of this book are saying but also what this means for the whole of the arc of scripture. It always astounds me when we profess belief in a God who is sovereign over all of creation, who is essentially a God of big plans, and then we ignore the big picture—the whole scope of scripture—and get caught up in all the fine print. When we look at the whole picture we see that Ruth’s story is a precursor to the David story—a connection between the judges and the kings. It is a story that takes family seriously, even if it is a family structure and dynamic we probably find strange and maybe even offensive. The good news is that God continues to work through situations that seem less than ideal. Nobody is going to suggest that Levirate marriage is the perfect definition of marriage, but in this case, precisely because of the need for this institution, the story of Ruth gains its beauty.

Ruth’s next-of-kin, who the author doesn’t even bother to name, decides against inheriting Naomi’s land because Ruth is attached to it. His denial is not on moral grounds but practical ones. If he inherits Ruth as his property he risks losing his inheritance; the result of some earlier transaction that the story does not reveal. There is nothing romantic about this. Boaz isn’t standing up for love a la West Side Story or Romeo and Juliet. There is every chance that Ruth could be inherited by this no-name, and who knows then what would happen! But it doesn’t. And this is the sharp edge of the Ruth story: Was this God’s intercession, or simple chance? Do Boaz and Ruth act heroically, or simply how they are expected to act? And, in the end, does it matter?

See, Ruth is a nice story. Everybody likes Ruth, and I suppose this is because it is about normal everyday things that we can relate to. I might not be able to understand divine intervention or stories of epic battles or miracles or larger than life prophets and kings, but I can relate to a girl and her mother-in-law all alone and a moral that hints at a godly plan at work behind the scenes. I think that’s what we want for our lives. Even if the moral center of the story isn’t what we’d like; even if there are concepts of marriage and property that we would not agree with; this story still speaks to us because it really is about something we want. We want to know that God is in control—not just generally, but also in the specifics of our lives.

But here’s the problem: That’s not what this story is about. Again, this is a case of staring at the fine print and missing the whole picture. When we place ourselves into the story we assume that whatever God did for biblical peoples he will also do for us, and that’s not necessarily true. This is not a story about how God makes everything OK all the time. This is simply a story about Ruth—and the only reason it is bigger than that is not because of some overarching moral message or some small individual plan for our lives; the only reason it is bigger than that is because of a massive plan for all of creation. See, two weeks ago I said that this is not a story that tells us much about God, but the more I think about it the more I think I was wrong, because this fourth chapter of Ruth reveals a meaning that transcends happy endings. Instead, it tells us something about the cosmic nature of what God does.
Ruth ends not with a moral to the story but with a genealogy.

Often we breeze through genealogies in the Bible because they are a lot of names and many of them are hard to pronounce and they mostly mean nothing to us, but in this case the genealogy offers a hint to why Ruth exists at all. As it turns out, Ruth connects the lines between Judah, who was a son of Jacob, from the book of Genesis, and David, who becomes the king of Israel in 1 Samuel. She is a link between Genesis, the kings, and the line that would eventually give us Jesus.

This should bid us caution in applying this scripture to ourselves. This is a story about God’s big plans for all his people. Ruth connected the leaders of the past with the leaders of the future, assuring the chosen people that God is still working to preserve the line that started with Abraham. Ruth is a descendent of Abraham, an ancestor of David, and therefore an ancestor of Jesus. So, without God’s providence in providing for Ruth a husband in Boaz there would be no David, no Jesus, and no Judaism or Christianity as we know it.

Sometimes I think, “Who are we to assume that the Bible is about me?” And then I remember that it is precisely because this is a story about God and about big plans that it is also about me, though perhaps not me specifically. We need to step back. God is at work in the world—silently, mysteriously, and often moving in ways more subtle than we can understand. That’s Ruth: a seemingly unimportant woman, the property of a man she doesn’t know, and a critical link in the histories of two major faiths. The good news is not that God is going to do for us what he did for Ruth. It’s much better than that. Instead, the good news is that, because of the cross made possible by little people like Ruth, we might just be that important, too.