Well, I don’t know about you, but that’s not been my experience. More often than not, confronted by Jesus, I have more questions than answers. And you know I’m not so sure that that’s such a bad thing. The big questions of life are not solved so quickly with easy platitudes and sentimental phrases. If Jesus really has answers, how come life seems to be just a series of questions, even for Christians? And why is it that despite the questions without answers, Jesus still seems relevant to me, to us, today, at such a time as this, for such a time as this.
What is this time that we live in and where does God fit into it? Does God fit into it at all? These are real life questions for today… for such a time as this, but more often than not these questions come out in different forms, in forms relevant to our time, in questions that don’t even mention God—questions like: Why do bad things happen to good people? Why do the best intentions have unintended consequences? What is the purpose of the fleeting nature of mortal life? What is it that we really want and where on earth can we find it? And though God is never mentioned, these questions are explorations of ultimate things. They are questions about God and about everything in relation to God. They are faith questions, questions of meaning and purpose, questions of ultimate reality.
When confronted by such questions, the Judaeo-Christian tradition tends not to offer easy answers or definitive statements. No, more often than not, Jewish-Christian responses to these important life questions about ultimate reality are answered with prayers, with honest expressions and outpourings to God—Why God? How God? When God? Who God? What God?—with lament and thanksgiving, confession and supplication, with praise and invocation—and in the wake of those outpourings, we discover something about the nature of God, the nature of ourselves and the nature of everything in relation to God—but what we discover are not glib answers, but real life wisdom discovered through prayer.
And if those important life questions about ultimate reality are not worked through in prayerful torrents, they are generally responded to with story—narratives, and tales and parables.
And thus, we come to the story of Esther—a story which never mentions God—but which deals with an awful lot of ultimate questions, questions of meaning and purpose; a story about a woman challenged to find her purpose “for such a time as this”.
The book of Esther is a novella, a short story written with great skill and artistry using the literary techniques of suspense and caricature. It "combines fairy tale, legendary, heroic, or mythic elements with a history-like orientation to daily affairs in [a] recognizable sphere of life within a smaller community [and] … in high politics" (Gottwald, 1985:551-552):
Set in the time of the Persian Empire, the book of Esther tells of "a spectacular last-minute deliverance of all the Jews within the Persian Empire from a plot to annihilate them. The plot is hatched in high government circles and it is Jews serving in those very circles who become the agents of Jewish salvation. Esther, the Jewish queen of Ahasuerus, helped by her cousin and one-time guardian Mordecai, frustrates the designs of Haman to kill Mordecai and then to slaughter the entire Jewish populace. Instead, in perfect poetic justice, Haman is hanged on the gallows he prepared for Mordecai. The enemies of the Jews who would have killed the Jews are themselves killed by the Jews.And in the midst of all this is the figure of Esther, Jewish girl risen to the rank of Persian queen. She is caught in a dilemma: a dilemma about identity, about loyalty, about survival or herself and her people. She is facing her own set of ultimate questions—what matters? Can one person make any difference? Am I responsible for myself or for my people or both?
The plot is replete with dramatic reversals: the Persian Vashti is replaced as queen by the Jewish Esther; newly promoted Haman, who cannot stand Mordecai's lack of deference toward him, in scheming to kill his rival loses his own life and his position is granted to Mordecai; an imperial decree to slaughter the Jews concocted by Haman is superseded by an imperial decree to slaughter the enemies of the Jews dictated by Mordecai.
The action is framed by court banquet scenes and audiences with the king. The driving tension in the plot is whether the anti-Jewish or the pro-Jewish forces in the court will receive the blessing of the king who appears as a manipulable power figure without decided judgments of his own (Gottwald, 1985:561).
Esther must negotiate this dilemma of relating to two cultural homes, that of her ancestors and that of her husband and, indeed, captor, for the story is set in the time of the exile of the Jews from their homeland. Esther has experience the lifestyle of captive and captor and her position of privilege is due to the silence which is kept about her racial origin. Who am I and where do I belong? What is my purpose? Why am I here?
Esther is a special story and a special book. It is also a different piece of writing from many others in the canon of Scripture. Esther is one of what are called the Festal Scrolls. There are five of them. The others are Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, Lamentations, and Ruth. Each of these books is related to an annual Jewish ceremony and even today, those books are read on the relevant ceremonial dates.
Esther belongs to the feast of Purim, a time when Jews celebrate the deliverance from anti-Semitic pogroms such as those conducted in the Maccabean Hasmonean times before the coming of Jesus and in Tsarist Russia and in Nazi Germany. Purim is a celebration of the overcoming of Gentile opposition to Jewish identity but the victory over the Gentiles comes in quite a different way to that in the book of Daniel and indeed, it cuts across many of the laws found in the book of Deuteronomy.
Esther is firmly bound up in the traditions of the people amongst whom she lives, the Persians. She uses their system of government and their laws to overcome the threat at hand to her own people. She is at one time a good Persian queen and a good Jew, perhaps living in a world of compromise but negotiating the boundaries of such an arrangement with artistry and skill. She does not fit the paradigm of the orthodox Jews who seek to keep themselves separate from contact with Gentiles especially through intermarriage. In addition to this, the book of Esther in the Hebrew canon does not contain "a single explicit reference to God or the religious practices of Judaism" (Anderson, 1975:566).
In the first three centuries of the Christian era, there were doubts expressed amongst Jews over the right of the book to be in the canon. Yet it was also regarded as the scroll par excellence, the most perfect of all the scrolls. In later Jewish tradition, it was second only to the Torah this story of Jewish identity, of privileged position and of victory through devious means and political power plays over those who plotted against the Jews.
Now, it would be very easy to theologise away the significance of the story of Esther; just as it’s easy to say “Jesus has answers”. Even theology is used to avoid dealing with issues of power being played out before us. Esther could be seen as an example of the role of privileged people who have recognised their identity in Christ in taking responsibility for caring or pastoring those who have not yet discovered that identity. That's an important message if heard in the right context but it is only part of the significance of Esther for us.
The story of Esther is also a story about a woman in a privileged position working with the tools she has to free her people. And that work involves her risking the very privileged position that she enjoys “for such a time as this”.
The interplay of power dynamics is of course not confined to the story of Esther. We see it played out on the world stage—in the talks about responses to climate change. We see them played out nationally—in the toings and froings of oppositional politics. And we see them locally in different community groups vying for public attention. But they are also, of course, part of our own community situation here in this congregation. The play of power dynamics is part of what it means to be human; and that doesn’t mean it’s all bad, but it is a part of our everyday lives in a myriad of ways.
Esther is a story about someone who is clearly a part of her society, embroiled in it. But the important thing is that Esther uses her position to bring salvation to her people, not destruction—to build a future for her people, not to consign them to the past, however glorious a past that was.
As Christians, it can be tempting to think ourselves separate from the things that happen around us. Some Christians choose to do that. But that was not Esther's way, she used her position of privilege to bring about social change: not by withdrawing from her society but by actively participating in it—with all its questions and dilemmas—by acknowledging her position of privilege, understanding her people's plight and by putting herself, her reputation and even her life on the line.
The action of God, the act of salvation, is very clearly seen to be performed through Esther who is willing to enter into the struggle for freedom of her people. But she could only do it because she entered into her dilemma. She faced the ultimate questions of life and death, meaning and purpose facing her and her people.
And that is the gift and the example given to us in Jesus—not glib answers to ultimate questions, but a God who dares to be with us in the midst of the dilemmas, of the ultimate questions; a God who dares to get down and dirty, to get messy, to be human, to wrestle with life and death, to want to give up, to risk everything for the sake of what’s really important. And as the body of Christ, this also is our calling—to be in the dilemmas, in the dialogue, in the conversation, in the mess, in the struggle—for the sake of what’s important.
The Jesus All About Life ads are asking people to wrestle with some real life issues. Remember we’re asked to be prepared to have conversations around these ads. Perhaps as with me, the catch-phrase “Jesus has the answers” rests a bit uncomfortably with you. Perhaps, you’d prefer to say something like “Jesus makes a difference” or “Jesus understands” or “Jesus is in the conversation about real life issues” or something else. Maybe “Jesus has answers” is the way you’d say it. However, you would want to respond to those dilemmas or talk about your understanding of the relevance of faith in Christ for those dilemmas, they are real life dilemmas and as such they are invitations to conversation about what is really important, about ultimate questions, about meaning and purpose. Jesus is all about life; and life is all about questions. We are called to risk being in the conversation, and more often than not that means risking our privileged positions in our families, our workplaces, our communities.
And that’s where I want to make one more connection into our own community here, into this congregation. We are a marvellously diverse community, but there’s no doubt about it, our demographic strength lies in the over-60s; and that’s not a bad thing. It is in fact a strength we can celebrate; and we do in the document that is the outcome of our Visioning Process. We celebrate the spiritual maturity of our congregation—maturity that comes through faithfulness and life experience and lifetimes of waiting on God. But within our strengths are also our challenges.
For older people, some of the ultimate questions that are important may be—What is my legacy? Will the things that I think are important continue? Can I trust that the others who come after me will understand what has been important to me? And can I trust them to continue to do things in the way that I have done them?
Now it would be easy to think that there were easy answers to these questions. That we could prescribe how things are always to be done and what is understood to be important. But deep down, we know that we can’t. So here too we are called to risk. In this position of privilege—of longevity in the community, of participation in processes of decision-making, of being part of the regular crowd—we are called to risk giving it all up—to risk creating the space for others to be involved, to take up the tasks that have previously been ours, to express their praise and honour of God in new and fresh ways that keep the essence of what we are on about alive. We are called to risk our future, by letting it go in outpourings of prayer, of lament and thanksgiving, confession and supplication, praise and invocation; to risk it by giving it up in story—in narrative and tale and parable; and ultimately to trust that while there are no glib answers, God is with all and in all and through all, after all.
So, let’s risk the conversations; and let’s risk our powerful positions for the sake of what’s really important. We can do nothing less if we claim that we bear the name of the one who risked everything for our sake.
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