Before we dive into Esther’s story, a word of caution. Ordinarily, the hero of a story is the person we might relate to the most, imagining how our own heroes are emulating similar actions and leadership in today’s context. Yet for many of us living in North America, with a fair amount of privilege and access to resources, we actually have more in common with the people of Persia and the empire.** So instead of hearing this story and wondering how it relates to our own journey, I’d like to invite us to imagine that Esther represents a hero of an oppressed and marginalized community walking beside us.

The question to keep with us as we move through Esther’s story is:  
Who may be speaking up right now that we urgently need to be listening to?

Alright, let’s dive in: 
Esther is an orphan, and part of a marginalized minority group.   If children were at the bottom of the social order as we spoke about last week, you can imagine where an orphan child from a minority group was going to rank on that hierarchy. Thankfully, she had a cousin named Mordecai who could raise her. 

Now Mordecai frequently sat at the king’s gate, which is how he learned about King Ahasuerus (A-has-u-erus)’s latest scandal. After six months of partying, surprise, surprise, the king was drunk. As a rule, this king tended to be more concerned with having fun than actually exercising leadership. In his drunken state, he demands for his queen to come to him at once. As she was in the midst of hosting her own gathering, she declined to come. 

The king was outraged by Queen Vashti’s refusal. So much so, that he spoke to his lawyers about how the law might punish her. The lawyers suggested that not only had Queen Vashti offended the king, by not coming to him when called for, but she had also offended every male in the kingdom. For if Queen Vashti did not go to her husband when called, soon, other women would begin to disobey their husbands! While Queen Vashti kept her life, she was removed from her position as queen. 

When Mordecai realized the king was looking for a new queen, he sent Esther to the palace and made her promise not to tell anyone she was Jewish. He promised to come by the gate each day to check on her.  To be clear, he is trafficking Esther to be a child concubine, in the hopes that she might become the next queen.**

Esther was one of many beautiful young women who underwent a year of beauty treatments before they each were given an evening with the king. When it was Esther’s turn with the king, he loved her more than all the others, and made her the new queen of Persia. 

For the most part, the king seems to focus his attention on whatever will give him pleasure in a given moment, while leaving the governing to his new prime minister, Haman. Here’s a shocker:  the guy the king puts in a position of great power is greedy and lusts after more power and status. Which is why it should come as no surprise that the new prime minister actually expected people to bow to him whenever he passed by. And everyone did bow, except for Mordecai. 

This deeply irritated Haman. When he learns that Mordecai is a Jew, he actually plots to kill all the Jewish people within the kingdom.  Haman suggests to the king that there were a people scattered throughout the kingdom who were not keeping the king’s laws, and the best way forward was to eliminate these people. The king, spineless as ever, agrees, and a date was set for the ethnic cleansing of all the Jewish people within the 127 provinces of the kingdom.

When Mordecai overhears these plans, he exchanges his clothes for a sackcloth and wails outside the king’s gate. Through a messenger, he asks Queen Esther to speak up to the king on behalf of her people. This put Queen Esther in a difficult position. If she approached the king without being summoned, she could end up with a similar fate as Queen Vashti,  or worse, she could be killed.  Yet Mordecai pressed her on the matter: 

“Do not think that in the king’s palace you will escape any more than all the other Jews. For if you keep silence at such a time as this, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another quarter, but you and your father’s family will perish. Who knows? Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this” 
(Esther 4:13-14). 

Queen Esther agrees to approach the king, and instructs Mordecai to gather the Jewish people and fast for three days. On the third day, Esther puts on her robes and approaches the king, who gladly welcomes her in. In fact, he was so delighted with her that he offered her anything she wanted. She asks for the king and prime minister to join her for a special meal the next day. 

Meanwhile, Haman is just about done with Mordecai’s disrespect, and at his wife’s encouragement, he has a gallow built, and plans to ask the king to hang Mordecai. And that plan just might have worked, had the king not found himself tossing and turning, unable to sleep that night. He asked one of his servants to bring him the book of record and read it to him.  And it just so happened, that the servant read about the time a man named Mordecai saved the king from two guards who had plotted to kill him. 

When the king realized nothing had been done to honor this man, he sent for the prime minister so they might honor this hero. Yet Haman arrogantly assumes the king must want to honor him, and suggests offering the man royal robes and horses. You can imagine Haman’s horror when the king asks him to adorn Mordecai, standing there in his sackcloth outside the gate, with royal robes. 

Alas. Later that evening, Queen Esther hosts the king and prime minister, and they have such a wonderful time that the king offers Esther anything she wants.  Queen Esther answered,“If I have found favor in your eyes, O King, and if it please the king, give me my life, and give my people their lives. We’ve been sold, I and my people, to be destroyed—sold to be massacred, eliminated.” 
(Esther 7:13-14 The Message).

Stunned, the king asked who would presume to do such a thing. Queen Esther tells him--a foe, an enemy, this Haman. The king, overcome with anger, storms out into the palace garden, while Haman throws himself upon Queen Esther and begs for his life.  Yet when King Ahasuerus walks back in, all he sees is Haman on top of Esther, and he is consumed with rage that Haman would dare assault his queen, in his own house, in his own presence!  

From there, things shifted pretty quickly: 

• Haman is hung on the gallow built for Mordecai.
• Queen Esther presents her cousin Mordecai to the king for the first time, and the king gives him his signet ring and the prime minister’s former home. 
• Most importantly,  the king rescinds his earlier decree ordering the ethnic cleansing of the Jews.
• A new edict was written, that should anyone try to harm the Jewish people, they instead should be killed. In all, several thousand people were killed.  

This story ends with a celebration that becomes known as Purim, recognizing the way the Jewish people have been saved by the courage of Queen Esther. 

This is not a disney-esque princess story.  These are powerful leaders of empire, using their power, authority, and privilege to gain their most selfish desires. The king uses young women and alcohol in order to meet his every bodily need. The prime minister seeks to use his position to annihilate his enemy and plan genocide. Even the uncle, while hoping to gain some respect for his oppressed people, is willing to potentially sacrifice his cousin’s self-agency in order to get it. 

Yet this young queen is smart, and knows exactly what these men want and crave. She plays them; using her bodily assets, charm, and wit to save her people.  Her actions shine a light into the bleakest corners of their kingdom. 

Queen Esther is one example of many unsung heroes, who are doing everything within their power to cry out on behalf of their people. To bring an end to injustice, prejudice, hatred, and oppression. 

Who may be speaking up right now that we urgently need to be listening to?

How might we, as a people of faith, engage in the essential work of amplifying their voices?  

Amen. 

* See Mary Joan Winn Leith’s commentary in The New Oxford Annotated Bible New Revised Standard Vision, edited by Michael D. Coogan.   
**See Elaine T. James commentary at WorkingPreacher.org for more information on reading this book from this framework. 

So let’s recap.  The first thing to remember about today’s narrative is the fact that Jesus had traveled into foreign territory, to the region of Tyre.  It was a gentile region, a pagan region, not a place where a faithful Jew would travel without specific need.

And I think Jesus did have a need - he needed a break from the exhausting intensity of demand, rejection and conflict he had been experiencing among his own people.  

Here’s what Mark tells us that he had been up to in the days and weeks before his sojourn in Tyre: 
After feeding the five thousand, Jesus’ attempt to carve out some time for prayer was interrupted by the need to rescue the disciples, caught in a storm on the sea.
Landing on shore, (and virtually everywhere he went,) he was surrounded by crowds bringing those in need of healing.  
His healing ministry was then, in turn, interrupted by conflict with the religious leadership, as he was repeatedly challenged over his disciples’ disregard of the Jewish Purity Law traditions.

He probably headed to Tyre to get a break, to recharge and renew his spirit.  Entering the place he would stay, he asked that his presence and privacy be safeguarded;  Mark tells us

He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there.

But rumor of Jesus’ power had spread through even the pagan countryside.   The daughter of a local woman, a gentile of Syrophoenician background, was suffering:  she was gripped by an unclean spirit and could not find rest or peace.  

It’s a measure of the mother’s desperation to help her daughter that she was willing to seek out the Jewish stranger, approach him, humble herself, and ask for aid for her child. 

And Jesus’ answer was to dismiss her plea:  “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”  

But the woman wasn’t to be deterred.  Fueled by the passion of a mother’s love, she showed both determination and cleverness as she turned Jesus’ own words back to him:  “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”

And here’s the remarkable moment where the story pivots: rather than chastising the Syrophoenician mother for what could certainly be seen as inappropriate behavior, Jesus rewarded her persistence: “For saying that, you may go—the demon has left your daughter.”  And she went home, found the child lying on the bed, and the demon gone.

When we come to this story, every “B year”in our lectionary cycle, I’m bothered by Jesus initial refusal to help the Syrophoenician woman’s daughter, and it disturbs me to read what certainly seems to be Jesus’ egregious rudeness to the mother.

I think, however, that there are two things going on here.  One is simply Jesus’ exhaustion, the depletion of his basic resources including his patience and his compassion, but the other factor at play is his initial understanding of how the woman’s request fit into his own mission.

When Matthew tells the same story, Jesus explains that “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”  Jesus’ starting point is that the mother’s request falls outside of his scope of responsibility:  he already has more than he can handle in teaching and healing his own people, and just can’t take on the problems of the gentile community.  The mother’s persistence, however, somehow causes Jesus to pause and reconsider.  

And in doing so, he broadens his vision and extends his care to include someone who is NOT his responsibility.  

I love the fact of Jesus’ capacity to change his position, to be affected by the depth of love of a mother for her daughter.  Unlike so many public figures in our own world, Jesus allows himself to hear feedback, to reconsider, to change and to grow.

The Syrophoenician Woman’s moment of persistence in fact sparks a turning point in Jesus’ Gospel mission.  The mother helps the one who is the Chosen, but who is still living into the fullness of the vision God set before him, and to live more fully into his call.

I am also tremendously reassured, somehow, that Jesus struggles with discernment of what is and is not his responsibility, with where he should invest his energies.  It’s a question I think about a lot, and I expect that you probably do, too.

Recently I read a wonderful piece by Nadia Bolz-Weber about this very dilemma, and I want to share some of what she has written.  (Many of you know Nadia Bolz-Weber; we read one of her books for our summer book discussions in 2019, and she was recently installed as the first “Pastor of Public Witness” in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.) Here’s how she describes the problem – and I warn you that I’m about to read a word you wouldn’t ordinarily hear in a sermon:

…when I check social media it feels like there are voices saying “if you aren’t talking about, doing something about, performatively posting about ___(fill in the blank)___then you are an irredeemably callous, privileged, bigot who IS PART OF THE PROBLEM” and when I am someone who does actually care about human suffering and injustice (someone who feels every picture I see, and story I read) it leaves me feeling like absolute shit. I am left with wondering: am I doing enough, sacrificing enough, giving enough, saying enough about all the horrible things right now to think of myself as a good person and subsequently silence the accusing voice in my head? No. The answer is always no. No I am not. Nor could I. Because no matter what I do, the goal of “enough” is just as far away as when I started. 
And yet doing nothing is hardly the answer.

Bolz-Weber offers us an analogy that I find incredibly helpful.  She remembers an apartment she once lived in where trying to use her hair dryer when the stereo was on inevitably led to a trip to the circuit breaker panel to reset the breaker.  The apartment, she observes, was just not wired to support both stereo and hair dryer on the same circuit.

And so with our own hearts and spirits, she suggests – they simply were not built to “hold, feel, and respond to ….every tragedy, injustice, sorrow and natural disaster happening to every human across the entire planet.”

Nadia encourages us to ask ourselves:
What is mine to do, and what is not mine to do?
What is mine to say, and what is not mine to say?

And then she offers us yet another wonderful analogy:  “the world is on fire” she says, and we each have a bucket of water “to help with the fires.”  We need to figure out where our water is going to do the most good, and throw it there.  She also invites us to be “grateful for the people who are called to work on and respond to worthy issues that are not fires we ourselves are equipped to put out.” *

Jesus struggled as we struggle, facing the fires of the world.  He got tired, as we do, and he had a whole lot more water in his bucket.  One day in Tyre he decided that he could spare some water for the daughter of an unknown Syrophoenician woman.

May we not be overwhelmed by the fires, but rather, may we be blessed with true discernment of where to throw our water.


“If you can’t take in any more, there’s a reason”, essay published in “The Corners” newsletter, substack.com, August 17, 2021