1. Having once accepted her dreadful task, Esther proceeds to carry it out with courage. The hour is come. For many days the king and his courtiers have been feasting in Shushan. The halls are filled with incense and music; the doors are defended by stolid Nubian guards. Who comes yonder along the marble walk? They start in amazement and whisper to one another. It is the queen! For a woman to intrude upon the king's revels at such a time is to incur a double certainty of death. She draws near, arrayed in her royal apparel-a vision of beauty. They stand aside, overawed, to let her pass. Young, fair, resplendent with royal garments, she stands silent where the king may see her as he sits high on his lofty throne. His eye lights upon her, and as he beholds her face, he holds out the golden sceptre. “So Esther drew near, and touched the top of the sceptre.” Her beauty, her calm demeanour, her magnificent courage, have vanquished him. “What wilt thou, queen Esther? and what is thy request? it shall be given thee, even to the half of the kingdom.” The sceptre is stretched out; the crisis is past; Israel is saved!
2. But if Esther's courage is sublime, her discretion and forethought are equal to it. Her plans are formed with the utmost deliberation. She has to assail an all-powerful minister and to reverse a royal decree. The time is short, and yet to be precipitate will ruin all. The golden sceptre was held out, and she was at liberty to state her request; for the king assumed that she would not have taken this unconventional step unless she had a request to make.
What a supernatural restraint and wisdom were implied in the request she made! She never mentioned her grievance. She kept the thought of her imperilled people concealed. With simple grace she asked for the honour of entertaining the king and his great minister at a banquet. This, though it evidently implied something more, was gladly granted, and at the banquet the king graciously asked again what she desired. Surely some inner monitor warned her to delay, assured her that during the night invisible spirits would co-operate with her design, and led her to make a request that her husband and the great man would honour her by coming to her banquet again on the following day. Haman was lulled into unsuspicion, and his head was turned by the distinction of drinking with the king and queen alone. He went forth flushed with pride, full of joyfulness, lifting his head on high; but, lo! as he went through the king's gate there sat Mordecai, the Jew, who, loyal to the implacable traditions of his race, “stood not up nor moved for him.” Haman went home insane with fury, and at the instigation of his wife, prepared a gallows fifty cubits high on which to hang the insolent Mordecai.
3. It is just at this very time that an event occurs which is apparently quite unconnected with the story, but which, we are forced to conclude, was no accident, but a response of God to the prayer and to the need of His people-the sleepless night of the king, the reading of the chronicle of a bygone year, and the discovery that the servant who saved the king's life has been unrewarded. Next morning Haman has audience of the king on business of State. He is asked to say what should be done to some one “whom the king delighteth to honour.” The vain man is so certain of the royal favour as to believe that he himself is the person to be so honoured. And he suggests a certain public procession next day through the streets of the capital, when almost royal honour should openly be paid to the unknown man. His advice is taken. The man in question turns out to be Mordecai, the Jew; and Haman is to attend, and to walk beside the horse, while the proclamation is made, “Thus shall it be done to the man whom the king delighteth to honour.” This is done. The hand of God is in it. The first step has been taken to save the people of Israel, and deliver them from their fate.
The queen's banquet is ready, and Haman is summoned to attend. He is not long kept in suspense. Esther's petition is presented. She asks for her life and the life of her people, doomed to die by the malice of an enemy. “Who is he, and where is he, that durst presume in his heart to do so?” The king is all on the alert. Esther says it is Haman, and the monarch is furious. Haman's appeal to Esther is the signal for his removal. What is to be done with him? The tree prepared for Mordecai occurs to one of the attendants. Just what was wanted. “Hang him thereon.” Haman had already given Mordecai what he had chosen for himself, and now what he had chosen for Mordecai is given to him.
But the wonderful interposition of God was not yet finished; the Jews were still in danger. The decree of death had gone forth, and unless the king's heart could be touched and turned, they would fall by the sword. What was to be done? Queen Esther fell down at his feet, wept tears of grief and love, and besought him to reverse his decree. It was done! This great, beautiful, royal woman prevailed with her master and lord, and swift messengers went forth at once to all the provinces, giving permission to all the Jews to stand for their lives. This was done through Mordecai, the Jew, who had been promoted to high honour, and entrusted with the king's ring for that purpose; and hence we read in the fifteenth verse of the eighth chapter that “Mordecai went forth from the presence of the king in royal apparel of blue and white, and with a great crown of gold, and with a robe of fine linen and purple.” And “the Jews had light and gladness, and joy and honour.”
4. Up to this point our author has, with considerable skill, presented a brave and noble character in his delineation of Esther. But here his patriotism overmasters him. Remembering that his object is to glorify not the woman but his people, and to furnish an adequate theme for the exultations of the feast of Purim, he allows his own fiery vindictiveness to run away with him, not noticing that by connecting the heroine with deeds of wild and useless slaughter he is marring the character which he has successfully drawn.
It is painful to see how the woman who had saved her people at the risk of her own life pushed her advantage to the extremity of a bloodthirsty vengeance. She pleaded for an extra day of slaughter, and begged that the ten sons of Haman who were dead should be publicly impaled on the stake. And the feast of Purim, instituted to commemorate God's mercy, became also a memorial and a glorification of this senseless deed of vengeance.
It is all very well to say that, as the laws of the Medes and Persians could not be altered, there was no alternative but a defensive slaughter. We may try to shelter Esther under the customs of the times; we may call to mind the fact that she was acting on the advice of Mordecai, whom she had been taught to obey from childhood, so that his was by far the greater weight of responsibility. Still, as we gaze on the portrait of the strong, brave, unselfish Jewess, we must confess that beneath all the beauty and nobility of its expression certain hard lines betray the fact that Esther is not a Madonna, that the heroine of the Jews does not reach the Christian ideal of womanhood.
5. We could have wished that the book which bears the name of Esther had not been marred by this gleam of fanaticism; but as we have been desirous to praise and to imitate the noble Jewess, we are, for the vindication of our Christian morality, compelled to repudiate expressly and vehemently the passion of the vengeful Jews. And if we complain of Luther for wishing to cut the book out of the Canon, on the ground that the character of the woman gives us a fine example of inspired portraiture, it is only just to the great reformer and moralist to admit that it would be far better to part with the book than to allow ourselves, even for a moment, to justify the events which were celebrated in the feast of Purim. The eternal laws of God forbid that goodness can ever be produced by revolting tales of vengeance. If the Jews had been represented as being able to forgive, the book would have been less historical but more edifying. And we can cling to our beautiful Esther only on condition that we may entirely separate her from the pitiless zeal of Mordecai, and the aspersions of the author who created her character.
If-as seems probable-our Lord honoured the Feast of Purim by taking part in it (Joh_5:1), He must have credited the national life of His people with a worthy mission. Himself the purest and best fruit of the stock of Israel, on the human side of His being, He realized in His own great mission of redemption the end for which God had repeatedly redeemed Israel. Thus He showed that God had saved His people, not simply for their own selfish satisfaction, but that through Christ they might carry salvation to the world. Purged from its base associations of blood and cruelty, Purim may symbolize to us the triumph of the Church of Christ over her fiercest foes. The spirit of this triumph must be the very opposite of the spirit of wild vengeance exhibited by Mordecai and his people in their brief season of unwonted elation. The Israel of God can never conquer her enemies by force. The victory of the Church must be the victory of brotherly love, because brotherly love is the note of the true Church. But this victory Christ is winning throughout the ages, and the historical realization of it is to us the Christian counterpart of the story of Est_1:1-22 [Note: W. F. Adeney, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther, 403.]
6. But we must not look only at the visible persons and forces. This Book of Esther does not say much about God, but His presence broods ever it all, and is the real spring that moves the movers that are seen. It is all a lesson of how God works out His purposes through men who seem to themselves to be working out theirs. The king's criminal abandonment to lust and luxury, Haman's meanly personal pique, Esther's beauty, the fall of the favourite, the long past services of Mordecai, even the king's sleepless night, are all threads in the web, and God is the weaver. The story raises the whole question of the standing miracle of the co-existence and co-operation of the Divine and the human. Man is free and responsible; God is sovereign and all-pervading. He maketh the wrath of man to praise Him, and with the remainder thereof He girdeth Himself. To-day, as then, He is working out His deep designs through men whom He has raised up, though they have not known Him. Amid the clash of contending interests and worldly passions, His solemn purpose steadily advances to its end, like the irresistible ocean current, which persists through all storms that agitate the surface, and draws them into the drift of its silent trend. Ahasuerus, Haman, Esther, Mordecai are His instruments, and yet each of them is the doer of his or her deed, and has to answer to Him for it.
I find some of my friends greatly agitated in mind about Responsibility, Free-will, and the like. I settled all those matters for myself, before I was ten years old, by jumping up and down an awkward turn of four steps in my nursery-stairs, and considering whether it was likely that God knew whether I should jump only three, or the whole four at a time. Having settled it in my mind that He knew quite well, though I didn't, which I should do; and also whether I should fall or not in the course of the performance-though I was altogether responsible for taking care not to-I never troubled my head more on the matter, from that day to this.1 [Note: Ruskin, Fors Clavigera, Letter 37 (Works, xxviii. 14).]
To his friend R. B. Litchfield, Clerk Maxwell writes from Aberdeen:-“In one phase, human actions are the resultant (by parallelogram of forces) of the various attractions of surrounding things, modified in some degree by internal states, regarding which all that is to be said is that they are subjectively capricious, objectively the ‘Result of Law'-that is, the wilfulness of our wills feels to us like liberty, being in reality necessity. In another phase, the wilfulness is seen to be anything but free will, since it is merely a submission to the strongest attraction, after the fashion of material things. So some say that a man's will is the root of all evil in him, and that he should mortify it out till nothing of himself remains, and the man and his selfishness disappear together. So said Gotama Buddha (see Max Müller), and many Christians have said and thought nearly the same thing. Nevertheless there is another phase still, in which there appears a possibility of the exact contrary to the first state, namely, an abandonment of wilfulness without extinction of will, but rather by means of a great development of will, whereby, instead of being consciously free and really in subjection to unknown laws, it becomes consciously acting by law, and really free from the interference of unrecognized laws.”2 [Note: Life of James Clerk Maxwell, 306.]
I asked whether the existence of persons able to introduce moral disorder into themselves was a fact that demonstrably contradicted the idea of a divinely ordered universe, which I had accepted as the necessary postulate of human experience. Was it not possible that a universe totally empty of free agents-and therefore of their moral as well as immoral acts, and thus of their disturbing abnormal influence-might be less divine universe than the mixed universe in which we find ourselves; which contains persons able to do what they ought not to do, and who can introduce suffering as the natural consequence of their sin? If “freedom” to become what one ought not to be is implied in an individual personality, and in responsible agency; and if a universe that contains moral agents is more worthy of existence than a wholly non-moral one-the temporary existence of sinners and sufferers on our planet, or elsewhere, would even be a consequence of the divinity of the Whole. Omnipotence itself cannot overcome the visible contradiction that is involved in persons being at once free agents and not free agents. Moral agents must be able to originate the acts for which they are responsible, notwithstanding the risks implied in this freedom of their acts from divine natural law;-unless it can be demonstrated that the universe in which such risk is run must be an undivine universe, simply because it contains moral agents upon trial. The presence in it of persons who may become what they ought not is otherwise no disproof of theistic optimism. It does not demonstrate that the theistic presupposition, on which life and experience depend, must be untrustworthy. A universe which has room for the probation and education of independent agents may be a better universe than one that consists only of impersonal things-one containing no agents on trial, or in progressive education of character, through the mixture of joy and sorrow that is found in human experience.1 [Note: A. Campbell Fraser, Biographia Philosophica, 311.]
