The Message Remix (87 page)

INTRODUCTION
RUTH

 

As we read the broad, comprehensive biblical story of God at work in the world, most of us are entirely impressed:
God speaking creation into being, God laying the foundations of the life of faith through great and definitive fathers and mothers, God saving a people out of a brutal slave existence and then forming them into lives of free and obedient love,
God raising up leaders who direct and guide through the tangle of difficulties always involved in living joyfully and responsively before God.

Very impressive. So impressive, in fact, that many of us, while remaining impressed, feel left out. Our unimpressive, very ordinary lives make us feel like outsiders to such a star-studded cast. We disqualify ourselves. Guilt or willfulness or accident makes a loophole and we assume that what is true for everyone else is not true for us. We conclude that we are, somehow, “just not religious” and thus unfit to participate in the big story.

And then we turn a page and come on this small story of two widows and a farmer in their out-of-the-way village.

The outsider Ruth was not born into the faith and felt no natural part of it—like many of us. But she came to find herself gathered into the story and given a quiet and obscure part that proved critical to the way everything turned out.

Scripture is a vast tapestry of God’s creating, saving, and blessing ways in this world. The great names in the plot that climaxes at Sinai (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses) and the great names in the sequel (Joshua, Samuel, David, Solomon) can be intimidating to ordinary, random individuals: “Surely there is no way that I can have any significant part on such a stage.” But the story of the widowed, impoverished, alien Ruth is proof to the contrary. She is the inconsequential outsider whose life turns out to be essential for telling the complete story of God’s ways among us. The unassuming ending carries the punch line: “Boaz married Ruth, she had a son Obed, Obed was the father of Jesse, and Jesse the father of David.”

David! In its artful telling of this “outsider” widow, uprooted and obscure, who turns out to be the great-grandmother of David and the ancestor of Jesus, the book of Ruth makes it possible for each of us to understand ourselves, however ordinary or “out of it,” as irreplaceable in the full telling of God’s story. We count—every last one of us—andwhat we do counts.

 

 

From:
The unknown author, a master of the short story, wrote sometime after the reign of David, Ruth’s great-grandson. Ancient literature focused on men, especially powerful men, so it’s extraordinary to get a tale from the point of view of two low-class women.

 

To:
For God’s people living in the heady days of the united kingdom of Israel, David was a hero. Life was good and had been good ever since David brought together quarreling factions and drove out invaders. It was an open secret that he wasn’t a pureblood Israelite, and that was awkward in a period where much was made of ethnic purity. The idea that an obscure immigrant woman played such a key role in God’s story was unsettling but necessary.

 

Re:
Around 1100 B.C. About this time, the rich Mycenaean civilization in Greece—which built grand palaces and defeated Troy—collapsed. Climate change, social upheaval, and invasions were probably all to blame. The palaces weren’t rebuilt, and the population of Greece plummeted and stayed low for several hundred years. Among the invaders who settled there were Sea Peoples related to the Philistines.