B247 Pentecost 25

[00:00:06] Speaker A: You're listening to by the well, a lectionary based podcast for preachers recorded on the land of the Wurundjeri people. [00:00:18] Speaker B: Welcome everyone to by the well. I'm Sean Winter. [00:00:21] Speaker A: And I'm Robin Whittaker. [00:00:22] Speaker B: And today we're looking at the readings for the 25th Sunday in Pentecost, Ordinary 32. We're going to look at the Book of Ruth. A few verses from chapter three, verses one to five. And then the lectionary jumps over a lot of the detail and takes us towards the conclusion of the story, chapter four, verses 13 to 17. We're also going to spend some time in the Gospel of Mark looking at mark 12, 38, 44. And along the way we might have a short chat about Hebrews 9, 2428 as well. So Robin, the Book of Ruth, we're in chapter three, which is where the book gets a bit juicy and stuff starts to happen. [00:01:02] Speaker A: It does. Possibly some scandalous sexual innuendo here that church people have been slightly uncomfortable with. But before we get to that. So some of you might have preached on Luke, on Ruth rather, last week. We jump ahead in the story here, but maybe a bit of context is helpful. So scholars think this is a fairly late book. So it lies in our Bibles fairly early because it sets itself in the time of the Judges before the kings. And Ruth will end up being the mother or the great grandmother, but in the line of King David. But in some ways we might think of this as a kind of a morality tale. The grand movement is from hardship. So the story starts in the beginning with famine and bereavement and the displacement of these women, Naomi and Ruth, who are both presented as very faithful characters, you know, sort of good women to. [00:01:59] Speaker B: God and to each other in that way. [00:02:01] Speaker A: Exactly. Yeah, to God and to one another, which is of course that great commandment like love God, love your neighbor. And I mean, I say that this kind of morality tale, it moves from this position of great sort of suffering and hardness to marriage and birth and land, which might all seem a bit glib to us, but it does have this strand of kind of if you're faithful to God and one another, you will be blessed, which is a strand in the Bible. We might want to disrupt that a bit in a moment, but I think it's also in its late setting there is some suggestion it's offering insight into marriage and the inclusion of foreigners. That is an anti voice to the Ezra Nehemiah post exilic narrative where they famously come back from Babylon. And the teaching of Ezra and Nehemiah is, send your foreign wives away. [00:02:52] Speaker B: No intermarriage at all. [00:02:53] Speaker A: Yeah, no inter. Like to be Jews again, we have to be pure. And that means. And so Ruth being a Moabite is really important. Moabites are the. Variously framed as the enemies and the kind of sinful people they come from incest in the. In the biblical tradition. And yet this Moabite woman is faithful and loved and committed to the people of God and ultimately in the royal line. So that's our big narrative framing. [00:03:19] Speaker B: Right. The. The Ezra, Nehemiah thing. I always remember it, that they're both against intermarriage. And when I can't remember which way around it is, when one of them hears about it, he pulls his own hair out and then when the other one hears about it, he pulls out the hair of the people who are doing. Marrying the wrong people. So. So, yeah, a bit of a counter narrative here. It strikes me that, I mean, the dynamic that's really being played with here at the domestic and then at the national level is this thing about security and the enduring nature and security of household, family. Yeah, Land, descent. That then becomes a kind of a micro version of the bigger story about the enduring nature and sustainability of the nation, the covenant, the Davidic line, those kinds of questions. And I mean, it makes sense that those are questions that are really, really under some degree of threat through and out the other side of the experience of exile. So wherever the story comes from, the form that we have it from here is a story designed to meet exactly those contemporary and contextual questions, I think. [00:04:30] Speaker A: Yes. And of course, remarkable because the main two characters in the story are two women, which we don't get very often in the Bible, so worth spending some time on. So the lectionary picks up in chapter three with the first few verses there. And really the situation there is Naomi, the mother in law, saying to Ruth, it's time we get you a husband. She wants to set up her own security, which in this culture and this time does actually mean being married, a chance to have her own children. And she tells her to go in and light the feet of Boaz, to uncover his feet. And, you know, the general consensus is this language of uncovering is used as a metaphor for sort of revealing nakedness. Some people have suggested that feet is a metaphor for something else. I think that could be stretching it, but it has some sexual innuendo. She goes in at night, he sends her away quietly. It's all a bit mysterious and basically I think she's making herself available to him. Is that how you read it? [00:05:30] Speaker B: Pretty well? I think so. I think there's absolutely an innuendo here of one sort or another. But the text is, I mean, very explicit, very deliberately non explicit about what does or doesn't take place. Yep. I used to run an exercise with students where I talked about the kind of metaphorical use of the Bible and we talked about euphemism and we used this as an example. Interestingly, what students then do is they run through every biblical example they can think of a feet and try and run a euphemistic which gets a bit complicated when it comes to Jesus washing the disciples feet. But anyway, we won't go there. [00:06:04] Speaker A: Let's not sexualize everything. [00:06:06] Speaker B: But it's undoubtedly there. The notion that Ruth has to wash herself before she goes, the notion of lying with someone, the notion that she isn't to make herself known to the man, knowing someone is a biblical way of talking about sexual relationships. But as well as kind of giving up that this is really procreation is what this story is going to be about. Now the story also holds back from describing anything at this point until of course, the due processes of a kinsman coming in and taking on a marriage commitment to someone from their own family is fulfilled. So that's the stuff that the lecture doesn't give us, is how all that plays out after this initial event. [00:06:53] Speaker A: That's right. There's a whole narrative in there about the ancestral land and Boaz kind of wanting to protect Ruth really and say whoever purchased this land should also marry her. So in some way it will stay in the family if she was to bear children. He's concerned he's too old for her, but he has her best interests at heart. And whatever happens with this innuendo, I mean, we should also remove our sort of modern understandings of sexuality and marriage. Right. Whatever happened before or, or after, you know, the formal commitments were made, there's no judgment here like that Ruth is not being portrayed in any way as a loose woman or anything like that. Right. Boaz is looking out for her. She's basically suggested to him she's open to marriage, whatever that means. And ultimately he buys the land and marries her and they have a child. [00:07:43] Speaker B: If we, if we brought our own questions to the text, actually I think the question mark is much more against Naomi than it is against Ruth because Naomi seems to be kind of setting up this scenario. One commentator says, you know, she gives these instructions to Ruth and the instructions are Basically to make an arrangement that a quote, well groomed Ruth will meet at night, a possibly inebriate, inebriated Boaz. Like, it's not, it's a, it's a dangerous, risky situation. [00:08:10] Speaker A: It is. [00:08:11] Speaker B: And Naomi has orchestrated it. [00:08:14] Speaker A: She has. And we're told Boaz is happy after dinner, after drinking and eating. Right. So he's. [00:08:19] Speaker B: And, and Naomi seems to know what's going to happen. She seems to have it worked out. And what I find really interesting is when we then move over all of those details to the conclusion, which is marriage, pregnancy, a child, what we get is that Naomi is the one who's regarded as having the child and not Ruth. Right. [00:08:40] Speaker A: I know we get this line about a son is born to Naomi and they called his name Obed. Yeah, yeah. [00:08:45] Speaker B: So there's this real sensor and I think you're right, there's no implicit critique here. And it is out of this, it's a kind of reciprocation for. So when the husbands die at the beginning of the story, Naomi is incredibly vulnerable. And Ruth's commitment to Naomi provides a level of security for Naomi as Ruth stays with her. They go back to Bethlehem. And then now Naomi says, well, I now need to make reciprocal steps to ensure your security in this foreign land and in this family and ethnic community that you don't actually belong to. And the way that that happens is through a son. But even so, Naomi seems to kind of take agency here in a way that really does, is really quite important for the text that it is Naomi who is the Judaite, who does the acting. [00:09:40] Speaker A: Who does the acting and the directing. Yes. [00:09:42] Speaker B: And in the end, that's the line of descendants that we're talking about here. [00:09:45] Speaker A: Yeah. And I mean, we might notice too that all the way through Ruth is called Ruth the Moabite. Like we, we never get to forget that she's foreign. So that tells us sort of one agenda of the story. And you're right, if we, if we dig too deeply, I mean, there is some weirdness to a story where Naomi, who's lost her son, Ruth's husband, then chooses the daughter in law through which to reclaim a son. Like it does get all a bit sort of in the family weirdness, at least for modern ears. But again, this is about keeping a line in the family and what will be in the line of King David as well. [00:10:28] Speaker B: And one of the things that we know is that in the New Testament, in the genealogy of Matthew, this is very strongly identified as a part of the genealogy of the Davidic line that leads through to the birth, to the birth of Jesus. Well, I mean, how do you preach a text like this? What. What do you think you do with all of these kind of questions, like ancient forms of how families work, how relationships work, how. [00:10:53] Speaker A: I think I would want to disrupt that sort of narrative I named at the beginning of, like, reading this too, simply as if you're just sort of faithful, God will bless you, everything will work out well. Because actually, what we see when we go into the details, the story is two very active women prepared to almost make things happen. So this is not some passive. Just sit there and pray and, you know. You know, we could read it a bit more cynically as women manipulating things to get what they need in a patriarchal culture. You know, we want, in some ways the text then can hold up a mirror to us in the way that when we don't have real power, we can end up having to work around and do other things. [00:11:39] Speaker B: I mean, the extent to which Naomi has agency is. Is nothing other than the extent to which, you know, all major male figures in the Hebrew Bible take agency and manipulate events. [00:11:49] Speaker A: Oh, totally, totally. [00:11:50] Speaker B: In order to line them up in the direction of, you know, what they think God wants for them and for the people of Israel. [00:11:56] Speaker A: So, no, and that's important. This is. Manipulation is not a female characteristic in the Bible. I don't know. What would you. What would you preach out of? [00:12:03] Speaker B: I think this question of identity is really important. We all long for an identity that has a kind of stability about it. And there are things that happen that fundamentally disrupt that identity or leave us feeling insecure. And that can happen not just as individuals. It can also happen in communities. Who are we? What story do we belong to? What do we do with people who've come from somewhere else and come into our story? Do we incorporate them and include them? Do we. Do we look after their security? And if so, what does that mean? Those kinds of questions, I think, are really interesting in the Book of Ruth, but it is also an opportunity, I think, to simply open up an extraordinary, lively narrative in the Hebrew Bible and to help people to enter into it in an imaginative and creative way. I think, particularly, I mean, I know that in our own church they've done. People, have done work where women's experience. I mean, women know these experiences or equivalents of them in any number of different ways. [00:13:10] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:13:10] Speaker B: And so that point of identification is really important, I think. [00:13:13] Speaker A: I think so. And I mean, what you touched on there made me. Made me think too. I Mean, the other angle is to put ourselves in the shoes of Ruth the Moabite, who's had to. I mean, whether she had to or felt she had no real choice, but is kind of adopted into this other family, commits to being part of another family, but is always the outsider. And, you know, maybe there's some reflection there what it's like to be that outsider and how we in the church do that to one another. [00:13:40] Speaker B: That sounds great. [00:13:49] Speaker A: So, Sean, Mark 12, 38, 44, just a small bit of text. Where are we in Mark? We've been. [00:13:57] Speaker B: We're coming to the end of Jesus public ministry. And Mark 12 is. So Jesus has entered into Jerusalem at the beginning of what we know of Holy week in Mark 11. And Mark 11 and 12 are basically various kinds of. We sometimes call them controversy stories. Jesus entering into forms of debate or engagement with authority figures, chief priests and scribes and Pharisees or some combination thereof. Marcus notoriously jumbles them up. So we have different combinations at different times of religious leaders. I mean, here what's interesting is that the story last week was of a scribe who comes to Jesus. And the conclusion of that story is that Jesus says to that scribe, you are not far from the kingdom of God. Which feels like a kind of slight compliment. At least you know, you're doing okay, you're doing okay. [00:14:54] Speaker A: Keep it up. [00:14:55] Speaker B: But here we have an absolute denunciation of the people who are called scribes. And along with, I mean, very famous passage in Matthew chapter 23, where Jesus denounces Pharisees in the strongest possible terms, this passage. Passage is the kind of most strong and virulent polemic against a category of religious leadership that Jesus is condemning. Historically, we can talk a lot, I think, about the way in which these traditions or things like them. If it is true that Jesus was in the temple saying such things about religious leaders, then the idea that actually the best thing to do with him is to try and just get him out of the picture may well be a part of the story. But the other thing to say is that it's. We really shouldn't be universalizing the polemic here. As if Jesus thinks that, you know, everyone who is a scribe or everyone who is a Pharisee or everyone who's in the temple is automatically guilty of all of these things that he's mentioned. In particular, I think, and I'm persuaded, I think here, that the scribes that Jesus is talking about here are scribes who also function in a priestly capacity. [00:16:18] Speaker A: Yep. [00:16:19] Speaker B: So the reference to long robes probably the word there is the word that we use for priestly garments. And it's important to remember, scribes in the ancient world are effectively people who have a form of literacy education that places them in a very distinctive place in the social order and the social hierarchy. They have not just literacy, but they have scribal literacy, the ability to actually write documents, publish letters. [00:16:51] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:16:52] Speaker B: Do all of that stuff. And in Jewish society, they sit there as a category of people probably coming from different parts of society in different ways. They've had various kinds of education. And Jesus condemns them in kind of prophetic terms. Yeah, they. They have the best seats in the synagogue, so they have respect, they have honor, they have a place of authority from which they're able to do their work. But they devour widows, houses. So verse 40 is the kind of crucial. [00:17:26] Speaker A: Yep. The crux of the critique. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And that, of course, is playing on. We get similar phrases, particularly in some of the intertestamental books, Testament of Moses and stuff, talking about sort of the bad prophets who do this instead of doing what the prophetic call to do is, which is look after the widows and the orphans, et cetera, call for justice and mercy. They are themselves devouring them, that they're, you know, it's a complete flipping of the role. So, yeah, there's status and class stuff all the way through this with the long robes, the sort of formal greeting in the marketplaces that recognizes them as people of status. They seats at both synagogues and banquets.