"She Lay At His Feet”

When you think of a romance story what comes to your mind? For the more literary types among us it might be Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet or Charlotte Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. For others of us perhaps it could be something more like one of the many dozens of novels of Danielle Steele. Or if you want to go all the way, there is Canada’s contribution to the genre, the epic Harlequin novels, whose output surpasses well over 100,000,000 copies every year under more than a thousand titles.

Yet, when it comes down to it, I don’t believe there is anything that can surpass the little story that we began to look at four Sundays ago—the Book of Ruth. The great German poet and playwright Goethe praised it as “the loveliest complete work on a small scale”. Rudolf Alexander Schröder, a five-time nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature, declared, “No poet in the world has written a more beautiful short story.”

In the original Hebrew it comprises barely two thousand words—not that much longer than a good-sized high school essay. Yet even across an expanse of well over three thousand years after the events it portrays, it continues to speak to our hearts and to hold a beauty and an attractiveness that are impossible to surpass.

Now I’m not sure that Pastor Marvin intentionally timed it this way, but this evening at sundown will mark the beginning of the three-day Jewish festival of Shavuot. Shavuot is Hebrew for “weeks” and it gets its name because it comes seven weeks (that is, a week of weeks) after Passover. It coincides with the celebration accompanying the annual wheat and barley harvest—and it goes all the way back to the days of Moses. In the book of Exodus we read:

You shall observe the Feast of Weeks, the first fruits of wheat harvest… The best of the first fruits of your ground you shall bring into the house of the LORD your God. (Exodus 34:22; 23:19)

So it is that the events we are reading about this morning from the Book of Ruth occurred at exactly this time of the year. And in Jewish homes and synagogues around the world this very evening people will be gathering to read the Book of Ruth. But that’s enough of an introduction to this morning’s passage. Let’s turn to chapter 3 of Ruth and see what the Holy Spirit has there to teach us…

Lying at Boaz’s feet

It has been a long day in Boaz’ fields. The temperatures in that part of the world at this time of year can easily climb into the low thirties on the Celsius scale. So picture Boaz and his farmhands at the end of the day—their faces red from the heat and running with beads of sweat, their backs and muscles aching. And now, having enjoyed a hearty meal, their stomachs would have been full—and I can imagine they may all have been feeling a little heady from the wine. So it could hardly have taken them long to fall into a deep and well-deserved sleep.

All of this would no doubt have been in Naomi’s mind when she pulled aside her daughter-in-law Ruth. Naomi had a plan. She had mapped it out carefully and worked out every detail. “Wash and anoint yourself with perfume. Get all dressed up in your finest clothes and go down to the threshing floor. But don’t let him know you’re there until the party is well under way and he’s had plenty to eat and drink. When the man lies down and falls asleep, keep an eye out for where he is resting. Then go and uncover his feet and lie down…”

Now at this point you may be asking yourself, what was that all about? What was going through Naomi’s mind when she gave Ruth those instructions? And what was the point of bending down to uncover Boaz’s feet?

If we look through the Old Testament, we will find that this is not the only place where something not all that different from this takes place. Many years later, for example, in the days of the kings there was a Shunammite woman whose son the prophet Elisha had miraculously brought back from death. When she entered her son’s room and set her eyes on him—no longer dead but very much alive—she bowed down to the ground and fell at Elisha’s feet. (2 Kings 4:32-37)

Then when we turn to the Psalms, we read how

The LORD, the Most High, is to be feared,

a great king over all the earth.

He subdued peoples under us,

and nations under our feet. (Psalm 47:2-3)

To place ourselves at the feet of another person is an act of respect and submission. It is to acknowledge the power, the authority, of that individual. Feet are dirty, particularly if you’re wearing sandals and working the soil. So for Ruth to lie at Boaz’s feet was a powerful symbolic act that she was humbling herself in his presence, placing herself under his authority, giving herself over to him.