Esther

Preacher: Rev. Maggie Guillebaud

A Summer Sermon

Esther 8: 1-8

I wonder which books influenced you most when you were a child? Mine were Heidi and Little Women. Heidi, the brave little orphan  sent to live with her grumpy Grandfather in the Swiss alps,  and Little Women, with four sisters coming to maturity during the American Civil War.

Both books, I realised as an adult, were deeply imbued with faith.  They taught me subliminally many things about kindness, patience, friendship and perseverance. They gave me valuable lessons for life.

As a nation we were brought up on stories which shaped us: Magna Carta, the invasion of Britain by the Romans and the Normans,  the Tudors, the Stuarts, two World Wars, the foundation of the NHS. The list goes on. We are a product of our history.

The Book of Esther, the subject of my sermon this morning in a series of summer sermons on Books of the Old Testament, helped shape the consciousness  over many millennia of the Jewish people. No one can agree on whether or not it is based on fact, and it is a book which presents us with several dilemmas.

First, it is famous in the Hebrew original, along with the Song of Songs, for not mentioning God.

Second, it exists in three forms: Hebrew, Greek and Latin, each slightly different in its telling of the story. The earliest Greek version, for example, interpolates  an additional six chapters where God is very much present. The New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, which is used by the Church of England, does not incorporate these chapters, whereas the NRS Roman Catholic version does, thus completely altering the nature of the story. It’s all rather complicated. But as Anglicans we stick to the one where God is not mentioned.

The story is exciting: King Ahasuerus of Persia banishes his Queen Vashti for disobeying his orders. A beauty pageant follows where Esther, a Jewish woman being brought up by her Uncle Mordecai, is chosen as her replacement. Jews were not permitted to marry Gentiles, but Esther keeps her identity secret.

Mordecai discovers a plot set up by Hamman, an important court official to whom Mordecai refuses to bow, to kill all the Jews in the Empire.

Mordecai pleads with Esther to protect her people, and the scene is set  for an epic struggle to avert the coming genocide.

She manages this with exemplary patience and bravery. Over a course of three banquets attended by both Hamman and the King she gradually exacts one favour after another from her husband. In passages reminiscent of Salome asking for the head of John the Baptist, a well-oiled king asks Esther: ‘What is your petition, Queen Esther? It shall be granted to you. And what is your request? Even to the half of my kingdom it shall be fulfilled.’

Esther finally reveals her Jewish origins, the plot against the Jews, and who is behind it. Hamman and his complicit sons are hanged. And in a final plea from Esther to the King, as we heard in this morning’s reading, orders are sent throughout the empire to preserve the Jewish people. The Jews are saved from genocide.

There follows a dreadful revenge when thousands of those ‘who hated the Jews’ are slaughtered. But in gratitude for their deliverance from genocide Mordecai declares a holiday for all Jews, with many days of feasting and the giving of gifts. To this day the Jewish holiday of Purim celebrates these events as instructed in the Book of Esther: that ‘these days of Purim should never fall into disuse among the Jews, nor should the commemoration of these days cease among their descendants.’

The Hebrew Bible is  full of  heroines such as Esther,  who shape the history of Israel either by example, as in Ruth, or in action, as in Esther or Judith. They are part of almost 3000 years of their people’s history. And given the centrality of the Hebrew Bible as an instrument holding together a scattered people, they also help shape the narrative of contemporary Judaism. And if we do not understand this, I would suggest our grasp of what is going on in Israel today is seriously flawed.

The Jewish people  have always been persecuted. When Israel and Judah  were two separate kingdoms, Israel first went into exile in 733 BC when the Assyrians took over their kingdom. Judah went into the Babylonian captivity in 597 BC.

After the First Jewish War in 73 AD came the final blow, when all Jews were expelled from Jerusalem by the Romans, and the Temple was destroyed. They did not return in significant numbers until the C20th, in the long interim facing  persecution and suspicion in the countries to which they had fled during the Diaspora. They held  together their identity as a people without a country for almost 2000 years, endlessly  thrown out of over 70 countries and states, including England in the C13th century, and locked up in ghettoes all over Europe and Russia. Pogroms in Russia in the late C19th and early C20th held terrifying echoes in the abductions and murders of last October.

As the ugly face of antisemitism shows itself in our own time, particularly on university campuses, we need to check in with history. We need to understand why the State of Israel is how it is, even if we abhor what is happening in Gaza, and deplore the actions of the State of Israel in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. This is a country fighting for its life, a country where many, but of course not all, were brought up on the stories of exile and persecution as told in the Hebrew Bible, moulded by stories of heroic defiance and the long search for the Promised Land. This is a people terrified of being scattered to the winds again for another 2000 years.

Now it is not my place to go into the political rights or wrongs about the foundation of the State of Israel: I leave that to the politicians and historians.  But if peace is to emerge in this horrible war then we must listen to the foundational stories of both sides of the conflict. If we don’t, this mess may never be resolved.

Both Matthew and Luke describe Jesus weeping over Jerusalem as he enters it for the last time. His despair sounds strangely poignant to modern ears. In Matthew: ‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it. How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings.’ And in Luke  ‘If you….had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes.’

We too weep for both Gaza, and for Jerusalem, the centre of three great faiths who could and should live in harmony. And we pray this appalling conflict will be resolved in a manner which honours both sides of a  complicated, historical dilemma. Only compromise, and the abandonment of revenge as a spring for action, can heal the wounds so deeply inflicted by both sides on each other.

 

Amen