Esther 2: God who works through brokenness
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It is easy for us to want to cast people as either all good or all bad. Simplistic narratives are easy to buy into. Someone can be the heroic victim or part of the problem. Yet, while it’s tempting to categorize people simplistically, we have to admit that we’re drawn to complex characters. In the shows we watch and the books we read, we’re drawn to the villain who has a soft side or to the hero who doesn’t have it all figured out. We resonate with such characters because they better reflect reality. We’re morally complex people living in a morally complex world.
And so, too, was Esther. She would become a person of incredible courage and faith. Yet, she began, as we find her in chapter 2, as one who seemed nearly broken by the world, and also one who was consistently breaking God’s Law. Esther comes on the scene in this account as a compromised figure. She was compromised both because of what she had done and what had been done to her. In this compromised state, could she have believed that God might not be done with her?
Esther was compromised by what she had done. First, she hid her identity as part of God’s people (2:10), and there is no mention of any desire or attempt on her part to keep God’s Law. Compare that to Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego who courageously followed God in the midst of a pagan society (Dan 1:8-17). Such faithfulness led to Daniel being thrown into a lion’s den (Dan 6:1-28) and the three young men into a furnace (Dan 3:13-30). But, not so with Esther. She hid her identity and did not follow the Law. Second, her physicality became the focus of praise. It was not her courage or virtue. Rather, there was an overwhelming emphasis on her physical beauty (Esth 2:12). Third, she married a pagan king in clear violation of God’s Law. She married a Gentile at the very time that Ezra was fighting intermarriage between Jew and Gentile in Palestine (Ezra 9-10). Indeed, intermarriage was one of the reasons the people of God were in exile in the first place (Mal 2:10-16).
Esther was also compromised by what’s been done to her. Esther had a hard life. She was an orphan. The author puts it rather matter of factly “for she had neither father nor mother” (Esth 2:7). Her parents had died and she had been taken in by an older cousin Mordecai. She was living in foreign land and had lost much of her family. Then, when some semblance of stability and normalcy might have been coming back to her life, she was taken by the king (2:8). He rounded her up with many young women and took them into his custody. She had lost her family and was now being exploited by the most powerful king of her day.
It’s not hard to imagine how compromised she might have felt by what she had done and what had been done to her. From the outside looking in, she seemed to be nearly helpless: an orphan from a defeated people who were on the verge of extinction. She was a woman in the court of a king who exploited and then cast off women.
She was compromised and powerless. Yet, this would all be a prelude, for God had been at work in and through Esther this whole time. In his providence, he had been positioning her to preserve her people and to carry out his good purposes. In her commentary on Esther, Karen Jobes explains: “Our God is so gracious and omnipotent that he is able to use that weak link in a chain of events that will perfect his purposes in and through us.” God is so good and so powerful that he will bring about his good purposes not just in spite of what we have done or has been done to us but often through those very things that compromised us.
Esther reminds us that God loves and can work through broken and compromised people. On the cross, we see the depth of that love when Christ came and was broken for broken people like us. Just as God would work through Esther’s brokenness to deliver his people from the threat of death, so to an even greater extent he works through Jesus’s being broken to deliver his people from sin and death.
