Today’s Scripture Reading (November
21, 2012): Ruth 3
The winner
of the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1960 was a movie called “The Apartment.”
The movie starred Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, and Fred MacMurray and it is a
dark comedy about a man who has an apartment close to the big office at which
he works. The apartment becomes the place that the men can take the women from
the office without their wives knowing. The comedy is built around the open
door policy of the apartment, which works (kind of) for Baxter (played by
Lemmon) until he realizes that one of the girls being brought into his apartment
(and this one by his top boss play by MacMurray) is the girl of his dreams
(played by MacLaine.)
In the story
of Ruth, Boaz’s threshing floor had the potential for the same kind of action
as Baxter’s apartment. The threshing floor was a place with a roof overhead,
but no walls. The result was that anyone could come and go from the threshing
floor without being seen. It was a place where people could hook up at night
without anyone knowing (and without having to pass a key around like Baxter had
to in “The Apartment.”) And on this night that was exactly what was going to
happen.
Boaz had already
been kind to Ruth, but Naomi’s plan was to try to figure out exactly how deep
that feeling went. So her plan was to send Ruth to Boaz at the threshing floor.
Unlike the action at the apartment, in this plan it would be the girl that
would be the sexually aggressive one. But at the end of the night, Naomi would
know whether or not Boaz would be the one to come to their rescue.
There is a
bit of poetry in the story of Ruth. After all, two women who are stuck in their
own dark nights of the soul seek for the answer in a dark night at the
threshing floor. And their answer lies in the willingness of someone to buy
them back from the darkness.
And we wait
in our dark nights for the one that will come to buy us back. And he has come,
if we could only realize that.
Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Ruth 4
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