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Sunday, September 29

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Hespeler, September 29, 2024 © Scott McAndless – Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Esther 9:1-17 (Compare Esther 7:1-6, 9-10; 9:20-22), Psalm 124, James 5:13-20, Mark 9:38-50

The Book of Esther tells a story that is set during a time when some Jewish people are living in exile in the Persian Empire. It seems they have many enemies there, people who want to destroy them. But their greatest enemy is a powerful man in the king’s court named Haman. Haman goes to the king and persuades him to make a decree calling for the extermination of the Jews as enemies of the state.

But the book tells the story of how a young woman named Esther and her older cousin, Mordecai, foil Haman’s plot. Esther won a beauty contest and became, as a result, the principal wife and queen to the Persian king. So, the book tells the story of how she, guided by her wise cousin, uses her power and influence to save her people from destruction.

The Happy Ending

It is a great story full of palace intrigue, tension and strategy – a wonderful read. But it is a story that comes up only once in the lectionary, the three-year cycle of readings that usually guides what we read in church each Sunday. The solitary reading from Esther comes on this Sunday and the reading that has been assigned is basically the happy ending of the story. Thanks to Esther’s wisdom and bravery, the Jewish people are saved, their enemy, Haman, is impaled on the pole that he himself built in order to impale Mordecai in what appears to be perfectly balanced justice. The people rejoice in their salvation. Just a wonderful happy ending.

But I have a bit of a problem with the specific text that is assigned by the Revised Common Lectionary. According to it, we are supposed to read Esther 7:1-6, and then we are supposed to skip several verses and pick up the passage at verses 9-10. Then we are supposed to skip over an entire chapter and a half to continue to read at chapter 9, verses 20-22.

Why Skip So Much?

But surely that is not a big deal, right? I mean, we must skip those verses because they don’t have anything important in them and because otherwise the reading would just be too long, not to mention filled with all manner of weird names like: “Parshandatha, Dalphon, Aspatha, Poratha, Adalia, Aridatha, Parmashta, Arisai, Aridai, and Vaizatha.” But there can’t any other reason to skip over all those verses, can there? Can there?

Well, it turns out that maybe there is another reason. I chose this morning not to read the assigned text from Esther and instead to read some of the verses that we are supposed to skip. And you may have noticed something in what we read. It turns out that the salvation of the Jews from the persecution of their enemies did not end with the equally measured retributive justice of Haman being hanged on the scaffold he built for Mordecai.

The Massacre

It turns out that their salvation required them to go on a two-day murderous rampage during which they killed five hundred people in the capital and seventy-five thousand in the provinces! We are also told that their salvation required that Mordecai become so powerful that he inspired terror in his enemies throughout the land. It was not enough for the evil Haman to be eliminated, he had to be replaced by someone just as powerful and feared by the enemies of the Jews.

Now, I think I understand, to a certain extent, why the folks on the Lectionary committee don’t want us to read that part of the story. The Jews are supposed to be the heroes of this book, and we hardly want good Christians to take them as examples by setting out to engage in wholesale slaughter of their enemies! There are unfortunately already too many examples of that kind of thing in the history of the church. So, we don’t want to encourage that, but is the only alternative just to pretend that that part of the story isn’t there at all? That doesn’t seem right to me. Surely, we need to come to terms with this very objectionable part of the book.

God is Not Named

So, I want to come to terms with it. But, before we do that, I need to bring up one other important thing about this Book. Of all the books in the Bible, Esther is the only one in which the name of God does not appear. The Jews in the story, including Esther, do various religious things like fasting and holding festivals, but God and God’s action never really come into the story.

The closest we get to God doing something, is when Mordecai says, while trying to persuade Esther to speak up, “if you keep silent at this time, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another place, but you and your father’s family will perish.” That is often taken as meaning that, if Esther doesn’t save the people, God will. But, of course, since Esther does speak up in the end, apparently that means that God doesn’t need to step in to save the people.

So, God is curiously absent from this story. Does that mean that God is not involved? No, many have taken this as a story of how God sometimes works behind the scenes and through the actions of people to bring about salvation even when nobody asks God to do it. And I tend to agree. But it does make me wonder how that lack of an acknowledgement of God in the story may have contributed to the massacre that they came to see as necessary to their salvation.

Esther is Not Satisfied

Esther was pleased. She and her cousin had successfully navigated the intricate power structure of the court. They had managed to bring down the second most powerful man in the entire kingdom by skillfully maneuvering him into a compromising position. He and his plot to destroy her people had come to nothing and he himself had been impaled in a gruesome public execution.

She should have felt happy. She should have felt as if she and her people were safe. Her enemies had been thwarted. Surely, with Haman gone and Mordecai officially taking his place, no one would dare to follow through on his plan to slaughter the Jewish communities. They had won; their enemies had lost. That should have been enough.

But it wasn’t. For her side to win, the other side didn’t just have to lose. Everything that they had even dreamed of doing and everything that Esther could imagine them wanting to do to be done to them. And so, Esther and Mordecai went into the king one more time.

Esther’s Request

“Ah my dear,” said Ahasuerus extending his scepter to her, “Your enemy is dead. Now what shall we do, celebrate? Mordecai can write to all of the people in all of the provinces and tell them that it is my will that no one follow through on Haman’s plans to kill the Jews and all will be well.”

But Esther did not agree. “No, my king, it is not enough. We as a people have been threatened with extermination. Sure, we have been saved today, but so long as we know that our enemies are alive, how can we possibly ever feel safe again. In order for us to win, they have to all die!

The king was taken aback, as well he should be! He might not agree with some of the racist attitudes of some of his people, but they were his people. Surely the king owed a duty to protect them as much as he did to protect the Jews under his jurisdiction. “Surely there has to be some other way,” he insisted. “Surely the protection of the law is better than wholesale slaughter and retaliation!”

The Law of the Medes and Persians

Mordecai and Esther had expected this objection. And they had their response ready. “Ah, but you see, my lord, the law is precisely the problem. Haman passed a decree – using your signet I might add – that permitted the slaughter of the Jews. And everybody knows that, according to the law of the Medes and the Persians, no royal decree can ever be changed or repealed.”

“What?” cried the king, “That’s not the law. Why does everyone keep telling me that is the law? How could a kingdom possibly last – much less manage to rule the known world – if it was never able to amend its own policies? And what king could ever be considered a great ruler if his own power was so limited that he couldn’t even change his own mind? No, that’s just crazy.”

“Well, guess what, Ahasuerus,” smiled Esther, “there may be no reference to any such law in all the libraries of ancient Persia or even in all the writings of the Greeks and the Egyptians, but we Jews are the ones who get to tell this story. And the way that we’re going to tell it, that is the law. Therefore the only way to prevent what was planned against us is to do it to our enemies before they ever have the chance to do it to us. So, get out your signet ring and start decreeing.

Ahasuerus felt that he owed it to his beautiful young wife to do as she demanded.

A Persecuted Minority

The Book of Esther tells the story of a persecuted minority living in Persia. That, to me, sounds quite credible. Given what we know of human nature, the persecution of minorities is something that has a way of rearing its ugly head again and again throughout history. We also know that the Jews, in particular, have suffered through a long history of such persecution up to and including the Holocaust and beyond. So, I really do not doubt that the Jews in Persia lived in fear of their many enemies.

And whenever we see such terrible things unfolding throughout history, the question we are often inclined to ask is, where is God in the midst of this tragedy? Why does God permit this kind of thing to go on?

When God Doesn’t Show Up

That is a good question, of course, and one worth delving into. But that’s not where I want to go today. Instead, I would like to note that something curious often happens to those caught up in such persecution. At some point, it seems, you may decide that whatever God is up to, you are not going to wait around for it. You decide to move on as if God wasn’t there, at least until God decides to show up.

That is, for example, what a great many Jews did during and after the Holocaust. When God didn’t stop it, they decided to take matters into their own hands. In fact, the Zionist movement was, in its origins, a rejection of the idea that God might save God’s chosen people. They couldn’t wait for that and so decided to go ahead and protect themselves in the country that they built for themselves.

When You Don’t See God at Work

And I can’t help but think that the Book of Esther – with its total lack of even a mention of the name of God – might be a similar reaction to persecution. God may have saved them – I’m pretty sure that that is what is going on behind the scenes – but when they didn’t see God at work, they decided that they must have saved themselves. I can see Esther coming to that conclusion.

And, as we see in the Book of Esther, when you start thinking like that, there seems to be a danger that you won’t be satisfied just with stopping your enemies. You will decide that you will only be safe once you have had your vengeance and you have found a way to kill them all.

The explanation that is given in the story – that a decree of the king could not be changed – does not make any sense historically speaking or from a practical political point of view. But it functions as an excellent pretext for what the persecuted Jews want to do. It illustrates how we will use any excuse we can come up with to justify our extreme vengeance against those we perceive to be our enemies.

We Need to Leave Vengeance to God

In Paul’s letter to the Romans, Paul says this quoting from the Book of Deuteronomy: “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, says the Lord.” (Romans 12:19, cf. Deuteronomy 32:35) This seems to promise that we don’t need to take revenge when we are oppressed, that God, who takes care of the forgotten of this world, will set things right and so we don’t have to.

That is a very encouraging and comforting idea. But what if that message is not just meant to comfort us? What if there is a deep problem with humans taking vengeance. And what if the problem is that when we start taking vengeance, we just don’t know when to stop and before you know it, there are seventy-five thousand dead in the provinces of the Persian Empire. Maybe we have a deep need for God to take on that vengeance because we can’t handle it because we don’t know when to quit.

It is just a thought. That is where my refection on the disturbing end of the Book of Esther leads me today. Maybe as you struggle with this part of the story, your reflections will lead to you to another conclusion.

I think that is the point of a passage like this one. It is meant to disturb us, to force us to think critically about what seems to be a serious flaw in our human nature. That is why, though most churches will simply gloss over this part of the story today, it is important that it is there, and it is important that we don’t ignore it. We need to be thinking about this part of our human nature because it definitely continues to shape human war and destiny to this very day.

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Hespeler, September 22, 2024 © Scott McAndless – Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Proverbs 31:10-31, Psalm 1, James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a, Mark 9:30-37

Her name was Leah. She was almost four years old. She lived in Capernaum in the house with her extended family. Hers was a life that, as short as it was, had already been marked by sorrow. She had gone to bed hungry far too many times in her brief span. She had also experienced her share of grief and death, even if she didn’t quite understand what it was yet. Many of her young siblings and cousins had not managed to live as long as her. Some had not even survived a few hours after their birth.

But despite the sorrow that surrounded her, Leah was a bright child. Sometimes the adults in the family found it hard to become too attached to the children who came along, knowing that many of them would not survive until adulthood. But Leah had a way about her. When she smiled and placed her little hand in the large palm of an uncle or a cousin, it just made their hearts melt. They couldn’t help but love her even though they knew the risk of experiencing loss that came with such love.

Her Parents and Family

Leah was especially close to her parents, of course, particularly to her mother who still nursed her daily. But both of her parents were working today – her father out in the boats and her mother working at the fish drying racks – so she was here with her aunt and her grandmother in the house.

While they worked in the outdoor kitchen, she played happily in a corner with a few of the treasured possessions she had amassed during her life: a stone that was shaped as an almost perfect sphere, a piece of wood that her uncle had crudely carved in the shape of a donkey and a scrap of cloth that had come from her mother’s tunic.

She heard the group approaching well before they appeared at the door. There were about a dozen of them, and they often stayed in this house when they were in Capernaum. They were arguing loudly with one another as they approached, which was not unusual. The argument seemed to have been going on for a while but at least they seemed to be arguing good naturedly.

The Argument

As usual, the loudest voice among them was one that was very familiar to her. It was the voice of her uncle Simon. She looked up as her aunt turned away from her work and ran to the door to greet the husband who was often away for long periods of time.

Uncle Simon – the others in his group called him “Rock” for some reason – was very loudly proclaiming that he was absolutely the greatest among them all. “Of course I’m the most important disciple of all,” he proclaimed. “Surely that is why the teacher started calling me Rock. I am solid, dependable and the kind of person who is foundational to what he is trying to build.”

“Oh really?” laughed another in response. “And what makes you think that he doesn’t call you that because he thinks that you’ve got rocks in your head?”

They all laughed at that, even Uncle Simon. So, it was a merry company that entered the house. They moved quickly towards the inner courtyard, calling out to the cooks and asking if there was any food to share.

The Teacher

One last straggler entered a moment behind the main pack. He was quieter, clearly caught up in some deep thought. But his eyes flashed around the room as he came through the door. He gave a wide smile as he saw Leah looking up at him. She smiled right back because he had always been one of her favourite visitors.

Once the newcomers had greeted everyone, they settled down in the courtyard of the house while Leah’s aunt and grandma served them a bit of bread and oil. Leah wandered in too looking for a snack as well. She sat down at the edge of the group, just a little behind the teacher. She watched his every move with wide eyes. For some reason he just fascinated her.

“Listen guys…” he eventually interrupted the small talk. Leah noted how quickly they all fell silent and turned to him as if they were afraid that they might miss something that he said. “Before we left to come here to Capernaum,” he continued, “I said something to you. I said, ‘The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.’

An Awkward Question

“But you guys didn’t say anything at the time. You sort of just stared at me like a deer might do if someone were able to shine a bright light on it. But I heard you talking together on the way here, so I assume that you talked through what I said and you maybe have something to share about it now. So, what were you talking about on the road?

Leah was just a little girl, but even she could pick up just how extremely uncomfortable the entire group became. The others stared awkwardly at the floor or suddenly became completely absorbed with some strange thing they had discovered on their fingernails.

The teacher rolled his eyes. “Right, don’t tell me. You were probably arguing with each other about which one of you is the greatest, weren’t you?” He sighed. “It’s like you don’t listen to a word that I say! You certainly didn’t listen to what I was saying about where this movement is going because, if you had, you probably wouldn’t be so keen to be seen as great within it.”

The Lesson

With that, he sat down before them. In that culture, teachers always took a seated position to give their instructions. Even at her age Leah understood that. If an adult sat down in front of her, she would be expected to pay close attention to the lesson they were going to give her. And so, all of the others in the group leaned forward with anticipation.

“Don’t you understand what it meant when I told you that?” he asked them. “It means that whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all. It means that if you are arguing with one another over who is the greatest, then you do not have the first clue as to what I am trying to do here.  How can I make you guys understand?”

He glanced around and his eye fell on Leah, who was looking up at him with rapt attention. “Leah,” he said holding his hand out to her, “come here for a moment girl, will you?”

Leah’s Response

Without a moment’s hesitation, she got right up and went straight to him. When he went to hold her hand she walked straight past his outstretched fingers and climbed up onto his lap. Knowing what she wanted, he wrapped his arms around her tightly.

As she sat on his lap, she looked at the men spread through the courtyard. Then she leaned back her head onto his neck. She breathed in the smell of him – his sweat and the dust of the road. She could even smell a hint of the dried fish he had had for his last meal.

She felt completely safe and comfortable. And I know you might think that it is an easy thing to make a child feel safe and comfortable, but Leah had actually known little of either of those things in her short life. But here, in this moment, everyone could see it in the expression on her face.

“Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me,” declared the teacher. “And whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”

“Let the Children Come”

On a few occasions, Jesus had some pretty surprising things to say about children and the kingdom of God. The most famous incident, of course, comes in the very next chapter of this same gospel we read from today when “people were bringing children to him in order that he might touch them, and the disciples spoke sternly to them. But when Jesus saw this, he was indignant and said to them, “Let the children come to me; do not stop them, for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs.” (10:13-14)

Passages like that one and this one that we read from today, certainly convince me that Jesus really did believe that children had a better understanding of this thing that he had come to announce, this kingdom of God, than anybody else. But haven’t you always wondered what we are supposed to do with that? How are we supposed to become like children in order to enter the kingdom? What does it mean to welcome children? I mean, we are adults. How are we supposed to just put aside everything that we have spent our lives building ourselves up to be in order to be part of God’s kingdom?

Putting Ourselves in Their Positions

And I do not think that we can really answer those questions without trying to put ourselves into the position of children, and specifically of the children who would have been there listening to Jesus say such things.

I know that we have all been children at some point in our life. You may sometimes look at some of the people in your life and have a hard time believing that, but we’ve all been there. But it can be an experience that we have a hard time putting ourselves back into, maybe especially if it was a long time ago.

But it is also true that there were some things different about children in Jesus’ time. We do know, for example, that the infant and newborn mortality rate in those times was so high that, if we saw it today, we would be completely outraged and demand government action. So, what does it mean to be a child living in a world where many of your siblings do not make it out of infancy and where people have their doubts about whether you are going to make it to adulthood. That’s a very different kind of situation than children have to live with today.

Parents Love Their Children

I have heard some people argue that, because of that infant mortality rate, parents hesitated to invest much love or attachment in their children, based on the idea that, if you’re not attached, you’re not going to feel grief when you lose them.

But I do not believe that for a moment. Parents have always loved their children and the reality that your child might not survive actually only has the effect of making you more attached and more loving, committed to make the most of whatever time you are given. So, it is definitely not that children were not loved or valued.

Coming to Jesus Like a Child

So, whatever Jesus was saying, he was not saying that you need to come to see yourself as insignificant, unloved or unworthy in order to come into the kingdom of God. It is true that children had very little in the way of status in that society, but they definitely had a place, and they were valued for who they were.

No, what I think Jesus was saying was that he was looking for those who would come to him much like a child like Leah would have come to him. She brought no pretensions. She did not feel the need to pretend to be something that she was not. She was not afraid to open herself up to him, to throw herself into his arms or to climb up on his lap.

That is what we forget how to do as we grow up. We learn suspicion and mistrust. We learn to guard ourselves against loving too much or trusting too much for fear that we will be disappointed yet again. A child knows nothing of that. That’s what Jesus recognized in the children that he encountered. And he celebrated it because he saw in that something of the nature of this kingdom that he had come to announce.