Our passage today is from the middle of the book of Esther. We have to talk a little bit about what makes this book unique before we go on to examine the particular passage we find ourselves in this morning. Esther is set in the period of the Exile—after the conquest of Jerusalem by foreign powers, and it is set among the people of the Exile—a people who have been banished from the land promised to their forefathers and to their decedents. It is set in a time between times—between judgment and punishment by God and the deliverance promised. Right now Esther and Mordecai are a part of a people vanquished and banished, one conquered people among many conquered peoples, scraping along by wit and guile for survival. It is a book that resounds with the silence and the absence of God, or so it appears, and it is filled with people that do not necessarily seem to have personal faith and devotion to Yahweh, the God of Israel, or the Law of Moses, or even Jewish identity. We don’t hear the name of God in this passage, we don’t hear any mention of the Law of Moses, and you won’t find either in the rest of the book either.
There’s something else odd about the way the characters act in this book. In other books of the Bible, the Biblical heroes are normally remarkable because of the ways in which God interacts with them. We remember Abraham because God first spoke the words of promise to him. We remember Moses because God revealed himself to Moses in the burning bush. We even remember a sneaky trickster like Jacob because God sent him dreams and answered his prayers and eventually transformed Jacob into someone you might actually like to meet. We even have other stories in the Bible that are set in the Exile in which the characters and heroes do all of the normal things (Daniel is one conspicuous example): other characters pray, they keep the Law of Moses, they hear from God, they do great deeds in the name and power of God. But not in Esther. In Esther, the characters fast, but they don’t pray, it is not certain whether Esther or Mordecai are interested in keeping the Law, and they certainly aren’t getting about the task of evangelizing Haman or King Xerxes or anyone else. Esther seems to have hidden her Jewish identity for most of the story, and would have gone on hiding it had not she been forced to reveal it for the sake of saving her people. The characters in this story don’t seem to do what they do for the glory and fame of God. The most religious thing a character does besides fast is cast lots, and that’s what Haman does in order to discover when he ought to begin exterminating the Jews. In the rest of the story, religious observance is inconspicuous if it is present at all. But this story is still about redemption, and our passage today is about the defeat of the enemy who is seeking to destroy all of the Jewish Exiles. Let’s get caught up on the action.
Esther 7 walks us into the climax of the action of the story. Esther 1 sets the scene for our story with the downfall of the previous queen, Queen Vashti, which paves the way for Esther to rise in the Persian Court. Esther 2 paints a pretty distressing picture of how Esther is chosen by the licentious Xerxes as queen and shows us just how little power Esther has had over her own life and her own fate. Esther 2 also tells us how Mordecai warns the King about an assassination plot against his life, and establishes Mordecai as an important figure at least temporarily in good graces with the king. Chapter 3 tells us about the rise of Haman the Egomaniac and how Mordecai slights him and Haman the Egomaniac decides a fitting punishment for Mordecai should be the destruction of all of Mordecai’s people. (By the way, the portrayals of Xerxes and Haman are preposterous and exaggerated on purpose—their evil is so evil, it’s absurd. Both of them are insanely greedy egomaniacs who have incredible amounts of power and seemingly very little discretion. Your reaction is supposed to be something like, “These are the people in power? Who put them in charge?) Chapter 3 also chronicles Haman tricking Xerxes into killing off the Jews—Haman doesn’t actually tell Xerxes it’s the Jews he’s killing and Xerxes seems perfectly willing and content to commit genocide just on the word of one trusted official. And Haman gets the king to pay him to do it. Chapter 4 is about Mordecai freaking out and rightly so, and his appeal to Queen Esther to intercede for the Jews. Esther initially refuses, saying she risks her own life in such an appeal and Mordecai responds with some of the most important words in the entire book: "Do not think to yourself that in the king's palace you will escape any more than all the other Jews. For if you keep silent at this time relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another place, but you and your father's house will perish. And who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?" Esther's response is also pretty awesome: “Hold a fast on my behalf, and do not eat or drink for three days, night or day. I and my young women will also fast as you do. Then I will go to the king, though it is against the law, and if I perish, I perish.”
The rest of the book until our passage chronicles Esther’s response to Mordecai’s words, and foreshadows Haman’s demise. She gathers her people together to fast, and then approaches the King. She spends what we might consider a really ridiculous amount of time buttering up King Xerxes to accept her petition—apparently she has no reason to expect benevolence from him, or to be able to appeal to his better nature. Xerxes doesn’t appear to have a hard time ordering the death of an entire group of people and Esther has to use wit, guile, and charm in order to maneuver Xerxes into favoring her over Haman.
Which brings us to our present passage. This is the second banquet that Esther has hosted for Xerxes and for Haman, and our scene finds Haman and Xerxes relaxing and drinking wine after the feast. Xerxes says to Esther for the second time, “What is your wish?” Xerxes said this to Esther at the feast on the day before, but Esther deferred her request, asking for a second banquet. Even now, she must wait until the end of the feast, until Xerxes turns to her and asks her what her wish and her request is. It is clear that Xerxes is the one with absolute power here. Esther knew she was taking her life into her own hands by going against the law to approach the king without being summoned. Now she does it again, knowing that Xerxes could banish or depose or even kill her for opposing Haman. She doesn’t bother to try approaching Haman at all, to try to wheedle a compromise of some sort from him. In Persia, she doesn’t have that kind of independent power.
The words that Esther uses to beg the king for her life and the life of her people are interesting. She speaks in terms of finding favor with the king, and she finally identifies herself with her people (though she doesn’t mention she’s a Jew, yet, that’s the next chapter), and identifies herself with her people when it means getting killed along with her people. She asks for her life and for her people and doesn’t allow herself to be parted from them, and doesn’t allow Xerxes the chance to only save Esther—she demands that he save her people as well. She also casts her presently unnamed enemy’s motives in economic terms—in terms of greed: “we have been sold to be destroyed, to be killed, and to be annihilated.” Haman’s a greedy would-be mass-murderer.
These three words are a constant refrain in Esther: the Jews are “to be destroyed, to be killed, and to be annihilated.” It is said this way and repeated so often I think for a couple of reasons: On one level, it’s a part of the exaggeration we see throughout the book. The villains are crazy villainous and the dramatic tension is epic—so why not turn up the hype? On another level, you can tease out distinctions between destruction, killing, and annihilation. “Destruction” in this context suggests something being violently ripped apart. If the decree of Haman goes forward, the Jews as a people—as a corporate body with corporate unity—will be destroyed. Probably not every single Jew will be killed—no doubt some will escape. But the Jewish identity will be destroyed and erased from the face of the earth. “Killing” is the most literal—Haman destroys the Jews by killing them all, not just destroying their capital city or their local places of worship, or enslaving them all or forbidding worship of the True God. Horrifically, he actually wants to kill them all. Finally, Haman’s purpose is annihilation. He doesn’t just want to kill a few Jewish troublemakers like he perceives Mordecai to be, he wants to completely and utterly destroy them and wipe them off the planet. Annihilation is an appropriately dramatic word for genocide, especially for a coolly calculated genocide such as this, which is motivated solely by Haman’s egomania. A normal person would have found a way to punish Mordecai alone—who resorts to genocide because of personal insult?
Almost surprisingly, Xerxes is moved by Esther’s plea. Partially this is true because he doesn’t really know that he is ultimately the one responsible for the decree. Esther has set it up such that the plight of the Jews is identified with her and has managed to get Xerxes enraged on her behalf. It is only then that Esther identifies Haman as the villain. It’s all over for Haman now. The rest of our reading and the rest of the book of Esther is about poetic justice. The plan that Haman devises for Mordecai falls on his own head, and the people who set out to destroy the Jews on the day that Haman appoints are actually destroyed by the Jews because Xerxes allows the Jews to arm and defend themselves. Genocide is averted and Purim is inaugurated to celebrate this kind of second Passover.
And what is it that we are supposed to learn from this peculiar story of deliverance, in which we see vividly evil and powerful characters at work and so much absence from God? First, God wants us to know that he works through history and he works for our good—for salvation and for redemption and for peace—whether or not we are aware of it. So God seems silent in Esther. Well. Take a look at the world. Take a look at secular history. Take a look at your own life. I am sure that there are gaps and moments or maybe even decades in your own life and in the life of the world in general when God seems conspicuously absent. It doesn’t seem like he’s speaking. It doesn’t seem like he’s around. It certainly doesn’t seem like he’s delivering. It seems as though the powers that be who are in control of the world are evil and clueless and who really knows what God is up to. I think there are a lot of people who spend a lot of time in God’s silence or apparent absence—and they don’t know why. Now, we happen to know that there is a reason for silence in the book of Esther because Esther and her people are in Exile—they have been thrown out of the Promised Land because of the sin and rebellion of the people just as Adam and Eve were thrown out of the Garden of Eden. Part of the reason that God is silent is because the people don’t listen and that lack of ability to hear and obey creates distance between us and God. In Esther we find ourselves with a heroine who may have some strength of character, but may not necessarily have any faith. Maybe she does, maybe she doesn’t. Probably she doesn’t—books in the Bible like to mention faith if people have it.
Another reason why this story is good for us is because it tells a story of God’s faithfulness and God’s redemption of people who have been Exiled, who are religiously clueless and probably disobedient, and who don’t seem to deserve or warrant God’s use of them . . . even as, to a certain extent, they still remain in Exile. So often in Scripture we find heroes—like Abraham, for example-- that seem to “deserve” being used by God. That’s probably not a very good way of reading those stories, but biblical heroes are often remarkable and we oftentimes wish that at the very least, we had their connection to God. I don’t how you feel, but I don’t feel that way about Esther. Esther is basically a slave who is valued because Xerxes thinks she’s beautiful and thinks that he is in love with her. She’s stuck with a powerful man in the most powerful country on the planet, and that man is not a good man. She hides her identity and who knows what kind of freedom she has. Esther doesn’t seem to really know what’s she doing insofar as God is concerned. And at the end of the day, she delivers her people and is herself delivered, but she still doesn’t meet with God. Yuck. I don’t want anything to do with any of that. In many respects, she isn’t your typical role model, and her life is not enviable. But God still redeems her life. He takes someone who could have done absolutely nothing remarkable and made her a deliverer of the entire Jewish people. In that way, she is on par with the earlier Judges of Israel. She’s like Gideon or Sampson or Debrah. And that is completely characteristic of God. He takes our lives, and the lives of others less fortunate than ourselves, and turns what is simply unenviable and tragic into his vehicle for redemption. That is what God does—and you know what, he is always doing it for people who don’t deserve it and for people who don’t recognize that he is the one acting in their lives. And the weakness of Esther reminds us that we, too, are unable to save ourselves and must appeal to someone else with power—to Xerxes. We may think it unfortunate that Xerxes has the power he does, but it does serve to remind us that we don’t have enough power in ourselves to defeat the evil and brokenness in our own hearts and minds.
In many ways, I wonder if the story of Esther is for people who don’t recognize that the good that comes into their lives, the gifts they receive, whatever kind of redemption they receive, is really from God. God doesn’t sign every good thing he does, “Love, from Jesus.” But he does sign it, “Love.” Or “Grace.” or “Mercy.” Or, “Salvation.” As Christians, we know that God is the author of Love and Grace and Mercy and Salvation. Jewish theologians and later Christian theologians knew that God was the only redeemer, the only one who saved. If there was salvation, it was from God. That’s part of the reason we know Esther is a theological book—because it’s a story of redemption, and only God redeems, though he often uses human instruments, willing or unwilling, knowing or unknowing, to do so.
There’s one more element of the story that is important. And it is this element of the story that makes remembering why “believing that only God saves” crucially important. This last element of the story is the character Haman. Haman is the enemy, and in so many ways he is The Enemy, and yes, I mean, Haman is really a Satanic figure. Haman and Satan have a lot of things in common insofar as the Bible characterizes both people. Satan is always someone who is out to get human beings out of pride and malice. He is always accusing people or tempting people or deceiving people who have certainly done him no wrong—and he is always a force working for destruction, for killing, and for annihilation. For whatever the enemy’s reasons are, he wants to destroy, to kill, and to annihilate the people of God. He tricked Adam and Eve into something that actually got them killed and doomed the entire human race to the daily struggle with evil and brokenness and sin. While Haman’s powers are a little more constricted, he is little less malevolent. He only goes after the Jewish people (though the Jews are often representative of humanity in general in Scripture), but does so for senseless and malicious reasons. He wants to destroy all Jews because of a small slight to his pride, and he is only satisfied with their complete destruction. I think this serves as a warning to us on more than one level. After all, Haman’s evil notions aren’t unique—genocide is an old evil that people with too much power seem to employ all too readily. Esther does a good job of showing how absurd and truly insane Haman’s malice is. But why does Haman choose such disproportionately evil actions?
It’s because there is an enemy behind Haman and Hitler and all the other power-crazed psychopaths that keeps creeping back into the scene from every nook and cranny possible, and keeps coming back, time and again. If Haman were unique, Esther’s story would be a little happier than it is. But Haman’s story isn’t unique, and because his story isn’t unique, we know there’s something more going on. That something more is the spiritual kingdom of darkness that wars against God, against human beings, and especially targets the people of God to take them out—to destroy, to kill, and to annihilate.
And this is why Queen Esther is only a temporary deliverer, who is upheld by the Great Deliverer. This is why Mordecai can say to Esther, “For if you keep silent at this time, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another place.” The Jews and human beings will always have a deliverer because God is present even when he appears to be absent. Esther just had the privilege of her life being redeemed to serve God’s purposes. There will always be salvation for the undeserving and for the weak, and we always have a defender.
And we know how this story plays out better than Queen Esther does. We can see the universal themes in Esther because we already know what Jesus did. We know from the New Testament that the real fight for the life of the world doesn’t ultimately concern things like murder and genocide and hatred—unfortunately, those horrible things are only symptoms of a condition that would have been utterly tragic had not God intervened at the source. We need someone who can intercede for us, who can fight that battle for us. Jesus, when he fights for us, wins the battle at the very root of the problem. He’s takes on all the powers of the world and all the spiritual powers behind those powers and shows them how he takes on humanity’s sin in the cross and defeats their punishment and defeats death in the Easter Resurrection. By mercy and grace and redemption and destroying death for us, Jesus humiliates the evil powers. Jesus destroys the real power that sin has, so he can start to loose the chains that enslave us to brokenness, to sin, to defeat, and to evil. But it’s only when you take on the real problem that you have real results. We can’t pretend that symptoms are causes. Esther is a small story that tells the same story as the big story, and reminds us not to fool ourselves about what’s really going on in human life. What’s going on with both the problem and power of evil and the deliverance and salvation of God is far more than immediately meets the eye.
Let’s take a moment to remember who we are and where we are. Father, we live in the midst of a broken world that you sent your Son Jesus to save. Jesus has completely his work and sent his Spirit to create a new people with whom you are very present and very active. But we still live in a time of Exile even though we know that time is coming to an end. Help us to remember who the real enemy is and who the real Deliverer is, and that because of what you have done for us in Jesus Christ, life triumphs over death.
Sources: I found two books of particular use and interest in crafting this sermon. The first is The Gospel in Esther by Michael Beckett . . . and I can’t quite find the second book, so I will update it when I do.
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