The Book of Esther and the Glorious Ones of the Earth

          In scholarly circles, battles rage on over (of all things) the Book of Esther.  In this boxing match, we see Liberals and Conservatives slugging it out.  The Liberals deny the historicity of the Book of Esther, while the Conservatives defend it.  The Liberals point out, for example, that the Queen whom Esther replaces was not Vashti (as the Biblical text says), but was Amestris (as secular history like that of Herodotus says).  Similarly the name Mordecai does not appear in any secular history at all, which is a little odd if he replaced such a high official as Haman.  And the empire wide attempted genocide of the Jews and their empire wide slaughter of their would-be assailants also find no mention in the secular histories.  Moreover, such xenophobic genocide sounds a little odd coming from the Persians, who were known from the days of Cyrus to be exceptionally tolerant of their conquered peoples.  After all, they let the Jews return to Jerusalem and even funded the Temple building for them (see Ezra 6:8), as they did with temples in Uruk, Ur, and Babylon.  So it is that Liberals deny the historicity of the text and Conservatives rush to defend it, each one brandishing historical parallels, real or imagined, like broad-swords. 

            Both sides, it seems to me, are in danger of missing the point of the Book of Esther.  Especially if the text is read in a holy stained-glass voice like the kind you find in church, one misses its fundamental characteristic, which is satire.  That is, the author of the Book of Esther is making fun of the big and powerful Gentile rulers of the world, and laughing them to scorn—and inviting us to do the same.  The Book’s two main theological points are:  1)  the high and mighty movers and shakers of this godless world are all idiots; and 2) God’s people know this and should not be overly-impressed by the world’s pomp and power.  Let’s look a little closer at the actual story of the Book of Esther.

            It opens with a tremendous banquet, at which the high and mighty King of Persia, being heartily drunk, decides to bring out his Queen to show off how hot she is.  Not surprisingly in this story, the Queen responds by telling him in effect to get bent, and she refuses to come.  The King is royally ticked.  He quickly gathers a royal study commission of experts to determine what to do next.  The learned gentlemen he calls solemnly decide that the authority of every husband in the empire is in jeopardy and so they solemnly pass a royal edict that each husband must be the king of his own castle.  Letters are sent out across the Empire to tell everyone of this edict.

            This is, of course, one’s first clue that one is reading satire.  Other clues come quickly enough.  The old Queen is out, so another Queen must be found.  The King decides to pick one on the basis of a beauty pageant.  He picks Esther, without apparently doing any other investigation, so that he does not even know that she is a foreigner and a Jew, or that her relative “uncle Mordecai” was the one who thwarted an assassination attempt on his life and whose name was written in the official royal records.  Anyway, Esther is in as the new Queen.

            Haman has it in for Mordecai because Mordecai has offended him.  Rather than just quietly getting rid of him, he engineers a plot to kill every Jew in the Persian empire.  He does this by suggesting to the King that this genocide would be a good idea, and the King (who before could not even pass a law that each husband should be head of his own house without help from a royal commission) now decides johnny-on-the-spot to authorize the genocide.  No problem. Haman seals the deal by bribing the King with ten thousand talents of silver, the ancient equivalent of about $15,000,000.  None of this sounds remotely plausible, but the point is not the plausibility.  The point is the King’s asinine stupidity.  Though the King is all-powerful, he is still pathetic.

            The plot continues.  When word is spread that a genocide of the Jews is in the works, Esther reveals to the King that, alas! she too is Jewish.  This is news to him.  He asks who is responsible for this terrible genocide.  “A foe and an enemy is this wicked Haman!” she cries, pointing to the terrified and stricken Haman.  The King was furious at Haman and abruptly leaves the room.

            What?  The King doesn’t know what he himself decreed?  Or that Haman was the one who suggested it to him?  And gave him ten thousand talents for it?  Like I said:  asinine stupidity.  Anyway, the King has Haman strung up on the gallows meant for Mordecai.  But he can’t simply annul the law.  (Again:  what?)  So, he passes another law, saying that Jews are legally allowed to defend themselves—as if they wouldn’t do the same anyway, with or without such a law.  The Jews do attack their would-be assailants, to the point where Persian blood is spilled throughout the empire, to the tune of 75,000 dead.  When the King is informed that 500 of his subjects have been slaughtered by the Jews in the capital of Susa alone, all he can say in effect is, “Wow.  Imagine then what it’s like outside the capital!  So, Queen Esther, is there anything else that I can do for you?”  She says, why yes, there is.  Please authorize an extra day of slaughter and also kill Haman’s ten sons.  The King’s response:  sure, no problemo. 

            Reading the text with an eye to the central plot reveals how idiotic the King is.  And that is the point.  The Jews of the exile were comparatively powerless, having then no land, no king, no army.  All they had was God.  It was easy enough for them to be awed by the seemingly invincible power of the Persians, and to imagine that the gods of the Persians were superior to their own God.  The Book of Esther, being a polemical satire on pagan power, holds up the Gentile world to ridicule.  No reason, it says, to be that impressed with pagans and their gods.  At the end of the day, they are rather pathetic.  Assimilation is not the answer, however tempting it may appear.  Stick with your ancestral ways.  Our God has not abandoned us.  Like the story says, He works behind the scenes, and He will bring us through. 

That lesson remains a valuable one for us Christians today, as we also face secular godlessness that appears to have all the power.  It is as our Matins liturgy for Lenten weekdays says:  “Bring more evils upon them, O Lord; bring more evils on the glorious ones of the earth!” (from Isaiah 26:15 LXX).  When Christians are persecuted (as they are today in many parts of the world), we may be tempted to despair, or throw away our faith and try to fit in.  The glorious ones of the earth seem all but invincible.  The Book of Esther reveals that behind their powerful façade lies the weakness of folly.  God has not abandoned His people, and He will overthrow our foes, whether our foes be ancient Persia, or pagan Rome, or Islamic Iraq.  The Book of Esther calls us to perseverance and courage.

           

I Wish We'd All Been…Smarter

Aging Jesus People like me will remember singer Larry Norman, one of whose songs became something of an anthem in those heady days of Jesus People enthusiasm and anticipation of the imminent return of Christ: “I Wish We’d All Been Ready”.  The first verse and chorus ran:  “Life was filled with guns and war, And all of us got trampled on the floor.  I wish we’d all been ready.  Children died, the days grew cold, A piece of bread could buy a bag of gold.  I wish we’d all been ready.  There’s no time to change your mind.  The Son has come and you’ve been left behind.”

            Okay, so it’s not exactly Shakespeare (or even Wesley).  But its popularity did not stem from its lyrics, but because it gave voice to one of the Jesus People’s deepest longings—namely that Jesus would return soon, within a few years hopefully, no later than a generation of forty years certainly.  And when He returned, all the true-born Christians on earth would suddenly disappear.  Bumper stickers proclaimed it with certainty:  “Be Prepared:  Jesus Is Coming at Any Moment…Driver will disappear!” 

And not just drivers in cars, but every single Christian everywhere on earth, no matter what they were doing.  One anticipated nightmare scenarios of airplanes falling out of the sky and crashing to earth after the Christian pilot and co-pilot disappeared leaving the aircraft without anyone to guide it to safety.  The imminent sudden return of Christ would allow His people with no time to finish what they were doing when it occurred:  no time to park a car or land an airplane.  Nope:  when the Second Coming occurred, every Christian would be snatched up bodily to heaven.  This event was called “the Rapture”, a term thought to be derived from the Medieval Latin raptura, meaning “seizure”, derived in turn from the Latin raptus, “carrying off”.  In evangelical parlance, the noun even became a verb—“to be raptured”, or taken up from the earth at the Second Coming.  I can even remember “Rapture Practice” with some of my fellow Jesus People while in a convertible:  this involved someone suddenly shouting “Rapture!” and everyone standing up while the vehicle was moving.  (Everyone except the driver, of course:  we were crazy, but not that crazy.)  Those were the days.

The teaching purports to find support in 1 Thessalonians 4:15f: “For this we declare to you by a word from the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep.  For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God.  And the dead in Christ will rise first.  Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord.”   This was often coupled with 1 Corinthians 15:51f:  “Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed.”  Note:  “in the twinkling of an eye”—no time for drivers to park or pilots to land.  And what happened after that?  Well, everyone left behind (great title for a movie, n’est pas?) was doomed to endure the rise of Antichrist and the persecution he would unleash on the earth.  Faithful Christians (presumably converted after the Rapture) had to go through the Great Tribulation, when the Antichrist sat in the (rebuilt) Temple in Jerusalem, and made and broke covenants, and—well, you get the idea.  It would all be very exciting.

Looking back on those Jesus People days, I wish we’d all been smarter—or at least more biblically literate.  Or at very least, able to count—by anybody’s figuring, if the Rapture constituted the Second Coming of Christ, then the final return of Christ when He would slay the Antichrist and end the world would be not His Second Coming, but the Third Coming.  This alone should have been our first clue that something wasn’t quite right with the evangelical exegesis.

In those days we spent a lot of time reading the predictions of the Second Coming in Matthew 24 and its parallels in Mark 13 and Luke 21.  Full exegesis of those chapters is beyond the scope of a blog article, but suffice it to say that Christ was speaking there about the destruction of Jerusalem (which occurred in 70 A.D.) and also about the Second Coming and the resulting end of the world.  In Mark’s version of this passage, Christ says, “But in those days, after that tribulation, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.  And then they will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory.  And then He will send out the angels and gather His elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven” (Mark 13:24-27).

Note several things:  the Second Coming is described here as taking place “after that tribulation”, not before it, as in the evangelical Left Behind scenario.  And if you read it all in context, that “tribulation” centers on the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D., not the end-time Antichrist.  (This is clearer in Luke’s version: “Great distress shall be upon the earth and wrath upon this [Jewish] people; they will fall by the edge of the sword, and be led captive among all nations, and Jerusalem will be trodden down by the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled.  And there will be signs in sun and moon an stars…And then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory”.)  Also note the bit where Christ says that He will send out His angels to gather His Christians from the four winds, “from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven”.  This is what Paul was talking about in 1 Thessalonians 4 and 1 Corinthians 15—not a special secret rapture of the Christians followed by end-time horrors for those left behind, but the end of the world itself when Christ finally returns as Judge.  The evangelical interpretation of Paul’s words which makes the Last Trumpet into a Secret Rapture has no historical pedigree at all.  The Fathers all understood those Pauline texts as referring to the end of the world and the Last Judgment.  The interpretation of it as a secret Coming of Christ to “rapture” His people years before the end of the world cannot be traced back much before the nineteenth century and John Darby.  It was later popularized by the Schofield Reference Bible, which is really where Larry Norman got it from.

But what about Larry Norman’s verse about “two men walking up a hill; One disappears and one’s left standing still”?  Isn’t this what Christ was talking about in Matthew 24:40, “Then two men will be in the field; one is taken and one is left”?  Surely this vindicates the evangelical understanding of the Rapture, doesn’t it?  Keep reading:  a verse or so earlier Christ refers to His Second Coming as being like the flood in the days of Noah—“for as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, and they did not know until the flood came and took them all away, so will be the coming of the Son of Man”.  In Matthew 24:40 the one who is “taken” is the one who is taken away in the flood of final judgment, not someone taken up out of the world to be with Christ in heaven.  The verbs for “taken” in verses 39 and 40 are different in the Greek (airo and paralambanomai), but the thought is the same:  in the days of Noah and at the time of Christ’s coming, the one “taken” is swept away in judgment; the one “left” is the one who remains to inherit the earth.  Christ is not speaking here about any supposed Rapture, but about the suddenness of the coming judgment. 

The movie Left Behind may well be as exciting as the book and series it is based on, but nothing short of a huge donation to our church’s Building Fund could induce me to either see the movie or read the books.  I look back fondly on my old Jesus People days, and my youthful enthusiasm.  Being a teenager with all those other Bible-totin’, bumper stickin’ Jesus People was wonderful.  I can even smile at Rapture Practice.  But eventually there comes the time to grow up, and read the Bible for what is actually there.  I like fantasy and science-fiction.  But I no longer confuse it with Scripture.

Mother's Milk

          Fr. Alexander Schmemann famously said that Christianity is “the end of religion”.  But if Christianity is not a religion, what is it?  In a word, it is the source of a new birth, a new nature, a new kind of human being.  Apart from Christ, all people share a human nature that is weak, fallen, darkened, vulnerable to evil spirits.  As St. John wrote, “the whole world lies in the Evil One” (1 John 5:19).  In Christ, we have the possibility of having a new human nature, one strong, upright, filled with light, safe from the grip of the Evil One, sheltered in God.  The world therefore consists of two kinds of people:  those who have been born only once, and those who have been born twice.  The Church is the home of the twice-born.

            The Lord revealed this one night to Nicodemus, teaching him that entering the Kingdom was not simply a matter of keeping the Law, but having being born again, born from above.  That which is born once, of the flesh, remains merely flesh, and cannot enter the imperishable Kingdom.  To enter that Kingdom one must also be born from above, by the Spirit (John 3:3f).  St. Peter echoed this teaching in his First Epistle, written to the newly-converted baby Christians of Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia.  Before their baptism they were merely children of flesh, wandering in the futile pagan way of life inherited from their forefathers (1 Peter 1:18).  But now, he wrote, they had been “born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead” (v.3).  Their former birth of course came through the seed of men, but this new birth came “not of seed which is perishable but imperishable, that is through the living and abiding word of God”, the very Gospel word “which was preached to you” (v.23, 25).

            Now that they had been born again, what were they supposed to do?  What do newborn babies do immediately after their birth?  They long for their mother’s milk, and that is what Peter tells his newborn converts to do:  “like newborn babies, long for the pure milk of the word, that by it you may grow up to salvation” (1 Peter 2:2).  The phrase here rendered “milk of the word” is the Greek logikon gala, a phrase notoriously hard to translate.  The Greek word logikos is cognate with the word logos, “word”, a noun rich in nuance and history, one that occupies over two pages of explanation in a Greek lexicon.  Some versions render the phrase “spiritual milk” (compare Paul’s use of the word in Romans 12:1, where he bids us offer up our bodies as a logiken latreian, as “spiritual worship”), a contrast to the literal milk from the mother, with the meaning “metaphorical”.   

            However the phrase is rendered, from where do we get this milk?  The Church is our mother, certainly, the one who gave us birth in the baptismal waters.  But where is this milk found?  In the Word.  We partake of the logikon gala when we listen to the logos of the Church’s teaching.  This comes through sermons, through listening to Scripture being chanted in church, through private Bible reading.  St. James tells us the same thing when he bids his readers to “receive in humility the implanted word (Greek emphyton logon) which is able to save your souls”, the “law of liberty” (James 1:21, 25).

            Why is listening to Scripture so important?  Because every day we are bombarded with propaganda, with lies and half-truths (or as one wag said, “lies, damn lies, and statistics”), distortions which would turn our hearts from God and His righteousness.  Like all effective propaganda, it is does advertise itself as such.  We do not turn on the television at 6.00 p.m. and hear the announcer say, “Welcome to the six o’clock brainwashing.”  No, he or she says, “Welcome to the six o’clock news”, but for all that there is a strong element of propaganda and brainwashing there just the same.  It is like air pollution—largely unseen, but all around us.

            We are constantly bombarded with such secular brainwashing.  I remember a story once told by Barry McGuire, famous for his sixties’ protest song The Eve of Destruction.  After his conversion to Christ, McGuire was derided by some unbelievers who said, “You Christians—you all been brainwashed.”  He replied, “That’s true.  But let me tell you, so have you.  The only difference between all us Christians and you is that we’ve all at least chosen who we want to wash our brains.”   Barry was right:  the brainwashing from the World is daily and constant and never-ending.  All that we have to counter-act it is the pure milk of the Word, a word which we have freely chosen and in which we find true liberty.  Drinking this we receive pure spiritual nourishment, and we turn from lies and half-lies to truth in all its fullness.  No wonder St. Peter told his newborns in pagan lands to long for it.  In this dark world, it is the only way to grow up to salvation.