Reading: Esther 6-10, Psalm 54
You ever go to one of those modern circuses? Where the antics of clowns and sideshow oddities are replaced by pop music and wild acrobatics by circus performers every bit as impressive as Olympians? I’ve been a couple of times to the bigtop style shows, and I’m always impressed with how the wild and apparently random activities that begin the show coalesce into a single event in the center of the tent. Bits of the performance fall away and collapse until there is only one character left at the center of the action.
Yesterday we read the setup of the book of Esther, which left a bunch of things in the air. Mordecai’s unveiling of a plot against the king. Haman’s super tall gallows. Esther’s delayed plea for her people. The king’s delivered but not yet acted upon edict to kill all the Jews. Today the story begins to unwind as the bits of the story land and characters begin to fall away.
First, we have the scene where the king cannot sleep. His solution is to have the royal records read aloud to him. Instead of falling asleep, he hears the story of how Mordecai saved his life. Here comes one of those balls in the air. Meanwhile, recall that Haman had just decided to hang Mordecai from an absurdly tall gallows at his home, and was headed to get permission from the king to do him in. These stories collide when Haman comes into the court and the king demands he come up with a plan to honor someone. Haman, as always entirely self absorbed, concocts and elaborate plan assuming it will be for himself. But the king wants to honor Mordecai, and Haman has to fulfill his own plan for his hated foe.
The second scene is Esther’s dinner party for the king and Haman. Haman is already steamed because of the Mordecai incident, but here he is in much worse shape, as Esther accuses him of attempting to have her killed, as well as ethnic genocide. The king is so steamed he walks out of the room, and in his attempt to plead with Esther for his life, Haman puts himself in a position where he appears to be assaulting her just as the king walks back in. The scene ends with Haman hung on his own 75 foot tall gallows. Finally, Mordecai is advanced to the head of the kingdom, 2nd only to the king himself.
The story reads like a delightful, if tragic, farce. Unlikely moments stack up until the villain of the story is destroyed by his own devices. The unworthy motivations of the “beauty pageant” are counteracted as well. The king’s officials were worried that their wives would be disobedient because of Vashti, but Esther is far more daring in her disobedience to custom and law. The Jews were despised enough that an edict to kill them all could be sent throughout the empire, but now a Jew is running the kingdom.
The denouement of the story is how that edict plays out. While the king is unable to take back an edict once sent, he tells Esther and Mordecai to write whatever new edicts they want. So they go with the heavily armed option. On the day that Haman had planned the slaughter of the Jews, the tables are turned and the Jews win the fight. Their enemies come after them, but the now well armed Jews fight them off and turn the tide against them.
The whole story wraps up with the institution of the festival of Purim, which is named for Pur, or cast lots. Basically a celebration of chance, or good fortune. If the book of Esther is a farce, built on chance happenings and unlikely events, then the festival of Purim is an acknowledgement that there is less fortune involved than providence. While God does not appear in the book of Esther, by the end of the story we have only two options to consider about what the book means. Either the Jews are incredibly lucky, or somebody is messing with the odds behind the scenes.
Recall also that the book of Esther tells a story of Jewish people in exile. They are kind of an alternative population along with those in the book of Ezra and Nehemiah. The returned exiles were not able to bring about the restoration of Israel in Jerusalem, but the story of Esther tells us that God’s chosen people are present now throughout the known world. They are not gathered in Jerusalem, they are throughout the nations. There were Jews in all the provinces of Persia, and there was a Jew running the empire. At this point in the story, God’s chosen people are everywhere. As we will see in the next book, they are in positions of power and authority throughout their exile, and God reveals things to them that the returned exiles could only guess at.