Esther's Choice

[The following commentary is intended as a companion piece to my latest article in the Covenant Discipleship Quarterly, which is available here.]

The OT Book of Esther has always fascinated me. For one, it has no direct mention of God anywhere in the text. The closest it ever comes to mentioning God is Mordecai's cryptic statement that, should Esther fail to act on the Jews' behalf, "deliverance will come to the Jews from another quarter."

Beyond that odd fact, Esther is also interesting in the portrayal it gives of the Jews living in exile. So many peoples in history (including the Israelites of the Northern Kingdom) have disappeared from history after suffering conquest and/or exile. But not the Judahites. Their identity as a people did just the opposite - it persisted and actually became stronger. The Jews of exile undoubtedly began codifying their sacred texts into the Old Testament scriptures that we have today. Of course, God's providential care sustained them throughout the Babylonian captivity until they could return to the Promised Land. But practically, they had to take the steps that would allow them to maintain their corporate existence in the absence of a land or a Temple cult. The fact that they succeeded remains one of the great marvels of history.

Then there's the figure of Esther herself. Young, ethnically different from the people who surrounded her in the court of Xerxes, and faced with a powerful adversary in the court official Haman, Esther makes a compelling heroine. Early in the book, her chief assets seem to be her beauty and a very capable uncle in the person of Mordecai. But when crisis strikes and Haman's plots threaten the destruction of all the Jews in Persian lands, Esther risks her own life - first by seeking an audience with the king uninvited, and then by baldly exposing Haman's plot to the king.

Now, the Babylonian Empire is gone by the time of the events described in Esther, and the Persians have allowed the Jewish elite in exile to return to their land. But many Jews have stayed in Persia, and after all, Judah itself is now incorporated into the massive Persian Empire. If Haman's plots had been carried out, it mostly probably would have meant the extermination of the Jews as a distinct people. The actions of one young woman were thus crucial to the survival of God's chosen people.

We might ask the question, "Why did Esther act at all?" Mordecai issues his famous challenge ("Who knows? Perhaps you have come to the throne for just such a time as this.") and simultaneously threatens Esther that she will not escape Haman's wrath just because she is the queen. But that must have seemed like a desperate threat from a man who - because he was one of Haman's chief enemies - must have been at the top of the proscription list.

Nevertheless, Esther acts. Faced with a choice, she chooses to risk her own life and position in what must have seemed like a desperate gamble. And that choice proved salvific for God's people. I look at this story in my current article in the Covenant Discipleship Quarterly. I believe there are a number of reasons why Esther found the courage to do what she did. Foremost among these is the way she was nurtured and formed by the practices of a close-knit religious community. Esther could act because of who she was raised to be. If she did not know how to pray, or how to fast, or how to identify with her faith, Mordecai's appeals to her would undoubtedly have fallen on deaf ears.

Is there a lesson in this for us? Sure there is. Formation in the faith is key to our identity as Christians. People are almost never sanctified in an instant. It is a long, slow process that extends over one's entire life. But when we are shaped in faithful ways, we can be assured that, when He comes to us, we will recognize Him for Who He Is.