One of my favorite books in the Old Testament is the Book of Ruth, that exquisite Hebrew short story tucked away between the Book of Judges and 1 Samuel. This may seem like an odd choice for me to place on a top ten list, given that more often than not Ruth is the focus of women’s Bible studies about the faithful heroines of the Bible, studies that are not primarily written with a 49-year-old male like me in mind. However, I had the opportunity to teach a Bible college course on the traditional “Five Scrolls,” the Megilloth of the Hebrew Bible (Song of Songs, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther and Ruth), and the time I spent in Ruth preparing for that study opened up this deceptively simple love story in ways I had never seen it before.
There are many reasons I’ve come to appreciate the Book of Ruth, but high among them all is the fact that the tale it tells is, in one sense, so very ordinary; one of the most ordinary stories in the Old Testament. There are no earth-moving miracles in Ruth, just supposedly “chance” encounters in unexpected places. There are no theophanic manifestations of the divine glory, just everyday people doing everyday things. There are no epic battles between opposing armies, no fascinating court intrigues, no feats of outrageous heroism or villainy.
The ordinariness of the book stands out all the more remarkably when you consider its place in the cannon. It comes right before 1 Samuel, with its glorious saga of David’s ascension to the throne, filled with prophetically summoned thunderstorms, stand-offs against giants, demonic soothsayers and more. Similarly, it comes just after the Judges, a book that lays out in graphic detail the unprecedented spiritual corruption of Israel in the days when they had no king and everyone did as they pleased. Like 1 Samuel, Judges has its fair share of miracles—divinely empowered strongmen, divinely wrought victories over heathen invaders, divinely orchestrated encounters with heavenly messengers, and so on.
In contrast to all this, however, in Ruth we have a faithful widow who sticks by her mother-in-law during a famine, who travels with her to the village of Bethlehem, who wins the heart of a well-off local farmer, who secures his hand in marriage, and who (as the dramatic conclusion to these exciting events) has a baby.
It’s barely dramatic enough to warrant a Hallmark Movie, though it is told with such theological sophistication that millennia of readers have been blessed and intrigued by it.
The book makes many important theological points, points about the sovereignty of God in the midst of loss and grief, points about the Lord’s hidden but inexorable work to bring Messiah into the world, points about the call to live obediently in step with Torah as a response to the widespread moral degeneracy and spiritual corruption of the world. There is one point that stands out among all these points, though, and artfully unifies them all: that God is powerfully present in the ordinary stuff of life. Everyday acts of living well, simple gestures of hospitality, commonplace encounters in ordinary places—these are often the circumstances where God is most vividly evident and most mysteriously at work.
This is a blog series on the filmography of Tom Hanks, though, not a post about Old Testament heroes of the Faith. The reason I’m unpacking this particular theme from Ruth, though—that God is often most evident in the most ordinary stuff of life—is because it brushes up against, and illuminates, a theme that I see often expressed in the films of Tom Hanks.
When you watch the actor’s whole life’s work, you begin to notice how ordinary so many of his characters are, or at least how everyday the circumstances are that begin their story, even if the story that unfolds in any particular film is far from ordinary, when it’s all said and done.
Joe vs. the Volcano starts with the phrase, “Once upon a time there was a guy named Joe, who had a very lousy job,” inviting viewers to understand that the film they are about to see is really just the story of an “ordinary Joe.”
In Saving Private Ryan, Captain Miller’s men have a running bet, trying to guess what Miller did as a civilian before the war. Given that he is a recipient of the congressional medal of honor, most assume he must have some dramatic back story—Reiben speculates that he was “assembled at O.C.S. out of spare body parts from dead G. I.s.” To their no small surprise, they find out towards the middle of the film that he was “nothing more” than an ordinary English Teacher from Addley, Pennsylvania.
In Cast Away, Chuck Noland is nothing but an ordinary FedEx systems analyst when his ordeal begins; in A Man Called Otto, the titular Otto is a merely a grumpy old man living in an ordinary gated community, who gets redeemed by the ordinary love of his neighbors; in Larry Crowne, the titular Crowne starts out his journey of personal rejuvenation as a fired Walmart employee.
Not that all of these films rank equally in caliber, of course. Joe vs. the Volcano was bizarre and Larry Crowne was mostly forgettable. What unites them, though, is the way they explore the great acts of charity, generosity, courage and resilience that ordinary people are capable of, and the oftentimes epic scope of the drama that can unfold from the centre of ordinary lives.
Tom Hanks plays his fair share of over-the-top heroes and villains, too, but one of the clearest messages I take from the totality of his films is that even the most ordinary of lives contains the stuff of epic drama. None of his films spend much time explicitly connecting this idea to anything particularly spiritual, of course, but it does not take a Christian pastor like me much effort to do so.
According to Jesus, the Kingdom of God is like tiny mustard seed planted in the earth, or a bit of yeast kneaded into dough; it's like farmers planting seed or fathers welcoming home their prodigal sons (and make no mistake, all these images would have seemed commonplace and everyday to Jesus’s First Century audience). But if it is like these things, then whatever else it is, the Kingdom of God must be something that thrives—throbs, even—in the ordinary circumstances of everyday life.
If you wanted one more parable to help you imagine what that looks like, you might consider the story of a lawyer being called on to defend a victim of unlawful dismissal (Philadelphia), the bereaved husband journeying with his son through their shared grief (Sleepless in Seattle), the inventive father trying to raise his autistic son (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close), or any of Tom Hanks’ other ordinary characters, who discover epic events unfolding in the midst of their everyday lives.
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