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 narrative are easy to buy into. Either Esther can be the heroic victim or she’s 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 movies 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, is Esther. She’ll become a person of incredible courage and faith, but she begins, as we find her in chapter 2, as one who seems nearly broken by the world but also one who is consistently breaking God’s Law. Esther begins as a compromised figure. She’s compromised both because of what she’s done and what’s been done to her. In this compromised state, she least expects that God might not be done with her.
Esther is compromised by what she’s done. First, she hides her identity as part of God’s people (2:10), and there is no mention any desire or attempt on her part to keep God’s Law. Compare that to Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego who courageously follow God in the midst of a pagan society. They do so at the cost of Daniel being thrown in a lion’s den and the three young men into a furnace. But, not so with Esther. She hides her identity and compromises on the Law. Second, her physicality becomes the focus of praise. It’s not her courage or virtue. Rather, there is an overwhelming emphasis on her physical beauty (2:12). Third, she marries a pagan king in clear violation of God’s Law. She marries a Gentile at the very time that Ezra is fighting intermarriage between Jew and Gentile in Palestine. Indeed, intermarriage was one of the reasons the people of God were in exile in the first place.
Esther is also compromised by what’s been done to her. Esther has had a hard life. She’s an orphan. The author puts its rather matter of factly “for she had neither father nor mother” (2:7). Her parents have died and she’s been taken in by an older cousin Mordecai. She’s living in foreign land and has lost much of her family. Then, when some semblance of stability and normalcy might be coming back to her life, she was taken by the king (2:8). She’s rounded up with many young women and taken into the king’s custody. She’s lost her family and is being exploited by the most powerful king of her day.
It’s not hard to imagine how compromised she might feel by what she’s done and what’s been done to her. From the outside looking in, she seems to be nearly helpless: an orphan from a defeated people who are the verge of extinction. She’s a women in the court of a king who exploits and then casts off women.
She’s compromised and powerless. Yet, this is all prelude, for God has been at work in and through Esther this whole time. In his providence, he’s been positioning her to preserve her people and to carry out his good purposes. In her commentary on Esther, Karen Jobes puts it this way: “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’ve 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 will work through Esther’s brokenness to deliver his people from the threat of death, so to an even greater extent he will work through Jesus’s being broken to deliver his people from sin and death.
