It was a conversation I had with myself before my son went to college. I had not saved quite enough for room and board and tuition. So I sat in a hot bath reflecting on all the stupid ways I had wasted money. Then I made a huge resolve to do things differently. That’s when I started shaving my head, so as to save 25 bucks every two weeks.
Yours could be a conversation that might take you by surprise. “Have you got a moment? I need to talk to you about your mom or your dad. It’s about your son he was in a bad accident.” You can tell by the tone that this is something that is going to shape the rest of your life.
That’s what it was like when Esther got a message from her cousin Mordecai. They were living in Susa, one of four capitals in the great Persian Empire. It was 475 years before Christ. A hundred years previously, the Jewish people had been taken into exile in Babylon. Fifty years later the Jews had been allowed to return home, but some Jews chose to stay where they were. They’d discovered something very important. God didn’t just live in the land of Israel; God was here too. Mordecai and Esther were among those Jews who stayed. But living as a Jew at the heart of the Persian Empire was a risky business, as the book of Esther makes clear.
Straightaway in this story we meet King Ahasuerus and we find the most powerful man in the world to be a reckless, extravagant and easily manipulated character. This is especially dangerous because when he passes a law, that law can’t be changed – even if it turns out to be a disaster. The king is so absent-minded that even when Mordecai saves his life, he forgets all about it. Not only do the Jews live under an unreliable monarch and with an unworkable legislative system, they also have sworn enemies.
One is called Haman. Haman and Mordecai despise each other, and when Haman rises to the post of Prime Minister, Mordecai riles him so much that he manipulates Ahasuerus into issuing a decree that will wipe out all Jews in the Empire, including those in Israel. So the king’s decree threatens to eliminate the Jews from history altogether.
There’s only one faint hope for the Jews – one tiny thread holding them up from the abyss. Five years before the passing of this decree, Mordecai’s cousin and adopted daughter Esther, without revealing her ethnic identity, had joined the king’s harem, undergoing a year-long grooming to prepare her for a one-night stand with the king. Ahasuerus liked her so much he made her his queen. But becoming queen didn’t give Esther the intimacy with the king one might imagine.
Ahasuerus still kept his harem, and no one got to address the king unless they took his fancy and he waved his golden scepter at them. (The symbolic significance of the golden scepter is something I’m going to leave to your imagination. Let’s just say that the Bible has a sense of humor.) If you approached the king without him waving his golden scepter at you, you would be put to death, even if you were the queen.
So this is the context for Mordecai’s conversation with Esther. Esther, despite being queen, is so isolated that she doesn’t even know that she and all the Jews are due to be exterminated in a few months’ time. Mordecai informs her about the genocide decree. He somehow omits to tell her that the decree came about partly because of his mindless stubbornness in angering Haman. But he does say – “Look, Esther, you’re the only one who can do something about this.”
You can feel Esther’s stomach muscles tightening and her breath getting short. She tries to escape: “But don’t you realize that if I approach the king without him waving the scepter at me I’m dead meat?” Mordecai says coolly, “What makes you think you’re going to survive this massacre? But it’ll be too late for you and me. Maybe this was exactly why you became queen. You thought it was saving yourself, but God thought it was for saving Israel. Maybe God put you here for exactly this moment, for just such a time as this.”
And what does Esther do at this decisive moment? She stops denying, stops ignoring, stops making excuses, stops running away. She grows up. She resolves that she’ll face up to her responsibility and go in to the king, great wobbly scepter and all. She recognizes that what she must do has to include disclosing her true identity as a Jew. She takes stock of the realities of her situation and says simply, “If I perish, I perish.”
Esther goes to the heart of the empire to save the Jewish people. She becomes Christ. She saves her people. She’s stirred to an act of extraordinary fortitude.
She does so because she strings Ahasuerus along till he’s putty in her seductive hand. She does so because of a benevolent turn of events triggered by the king’s insomnia. And she does so because Haman’s oversized ego and his hostility to Mordecai obscure his political judgment. In other words Esther requires a mixture of courage, charm, contrivance and luck. The king issues a new decree that enables the Jews to live another day.
The story reveals a number of layers of truth. One layer is that life under arbitrary authority is dangerous for everybody, especially women and minority ethnic groups. It teaches us that power is not simply an all or nothing thing. Esther is queen and yet still vulnerable, she’s a Jew and yet she can marry the most powerful man in the world, she can be unaware that she’s up for execution.
Yet she can wrap the king around her little finger by using her exquisite sense of timing, her insight into human nature, and her beauty.
The heart of the story lies in these echoing words, words which I hope make your stomach tighten and your breath falter just as much as if Mordecai were saying them to you today. “Perhaps you have come to this place, to this moment, to these people, to this challenge, for just such a time as this.”
I want you to think about Esther. She had some things. She lacked other things. She had beauty. She had a certain kind of training. She had a very ambitious cousin. She had a very powerful husband. But she didn’t have any power over her own life. She didn’t have any security in the face of those who planned to kill her and her people. She didn’t have any real personal intimacy with her husband. Think about Esther, and then think about yourself. You have some things. You lack other things.
Maybe you have the gift of great intelligence. Or maybe you don’t and are free of the burden of feeling you have to be clever all the time. Maybe you have good looks. Or maybe you just look normal. And because of that you are free of the projections and expectations good looks can bring.
Maybe you have had a calm and stable family life, and understand what trust and promise-keeping and security mean. Maybe you have a prominent public or commercial role, some kind of job that puts you behind a big desk in a big office.
Or maybe you have the freedom of being out of the limelight, your actions not being perpetually judged and your words not being endlessly evaluated.
Think about yourself, what you uniquely have and what you uniquely lack. And then think about the context you’re in. Think about the ways you feel powerless.
Think about the number of times you’ve said “What this country needs”, or “What Downers Grove First needs”, or “What my family needs”, or “What the world needs.”
Think about the number of times you’ve thought that there was nothing anyone could do about it. And then feel, sense, hear this exasperating man Mordecai tap on your shoulder, and say “Perhaps you’ve been given these skills and experiences, these privileges and deprivations, so that just at this very moment you could do what no one else could do, you could be what no one else could be.
God made you just as you are because God wanted, and we needed, someone just like you. Maybe all this happened and you came to be here for just such a time as this.”
Think again about Esther. She didn’t have it all easy. Neither, no doubt, do you. She had some real gifts. So do you. She embarked on a long period of training and preparation, the final purpose of it all for the most part she didn’t understand. Maybe this is how you feel too. She found herself at a crucial moment, a moment when she realized the rest of her life must be given for one cause that went way and above her own safety, her own privilege, her own status.
You could call it a moment of conversion. What she was converted to was a further time of preparation, of waiting till it was worth taking an enormous risk and then of executing a careful plan. And perhaps most curious of all, the person who brought her face to face with her destiny was no saint, but Mordecai, her stubborn, proud, scheming cousin, who’d done a whole lot to put his people in this mess in the first place.
Whoever you are, and however good your excuse is for saying none of this applies to me: watch out: here comes Mordecai – not an easy character, not a role model, but nonetheless speaking the truth. He says, “Look back at all those parts of your story that make you unique, especially those events that felt like setbacks at the time, but are now vital to who you are.”
Look at the position you’re in now, not about what it’s not, but seeing the unique opportunity that’s yours. And look at these massive challenges facing us. Global challenges about intercultural understanding, poverty, disease and climate change. Ecclesial challenges about standing for unity, but also holding out for truth. Social challenges about austerity, and unemployment, and banking, and homelessness, and immigration.
Perhaps God has put you right here, right now, for just such a time as this. Esther listened. Without Esther there would have been no Jesus, because there would have been no Jews. Let’s follow a bit of Esther. Will you do what Esther did, realize the reality of your situation, seek all the help you need, plan carefully and put yourself in the hands of God? Has God put you right here, right now, for just such a time as this?