Sunday School at 9 am | worship at 10 am

Beauty and the Beast

At first glance the story of Esther looks like an ancient version of Beauty and the Beast. But this is no fairytale story of a poor, Jewish girl falling in love with Prince Charming. There’s nothing romantic about the story of Xerxes and Esther. Rather, it is a dark and uncomfortable tale of abduction and even abuse. The king’s men scour the empire for its fairest young maidens. The young women who are selected are not being invited to participate in a contest. This was not an open contest in search of the next “Miss Persia.” These young women are being drafted into the king’s harem. Their lives were going in one direction and now suddenly they are being snatched away to become the play-things of the king—hardly the stuff of a Disney fairytale.

One by one, these young women are required to spend the night, each of them in turn, with the king. Esther wins the throne, we learn, on the basis of her night with the king. To be sure, some want to exonerate Esther. “Nothing ever happened that night,” they will say. Others want to come down hard on Esther and accuse her of using sex as a tool to gain power. The truth, however is that Esther was hardly in a position to refuse. Perhaps she could have refused and subjected herself to the death penalty, as Shadrach, Meshech and Abednego were willing to do when they felt pressure from the king to defile themselves. But Esther did what she did, and God used her to accomplish his purpose for his people. So, on the one hand we don’t need to amend the text to clean it up. And on the other hand we don’t need to scold Esther as though she were an ambitious, modern starlet trying to sleep her way to a position of influence. Rather, we need to read these words with a different perspective.

God’s Word speaks to the extremes of our experience even when our society doesn’t know what to think. The Lord is not confounded when the unthinkable happens. He is not silent when tragedy and sorrow and sin break in on us and leave us broken. His Gospel is a real world Gospel that works in the darkest realities of our lives. Esther 2, as bleak as it is, offers us unspeakable hope. God is at work even when he seems to be absent. And he is perfectly willing to use his weakest servants for his greatest works.