Two Queens
When we talk about kings and queens, we might think of fairy tales, whether it’s a Disney princess, a beauty queen, or a drag queen. It’s a Once Upon a Time start to a story that ends with happily ever after.
The other way we think about kings and queens is in terms of power and authority. No longer do we see the head of the monarchy as just below God in a great chain of being, but we have the queen on our currency and in a mostly ceremonial role in government. We also have kings and queens on a chessboard.
The book of Esther starts by telling us that once upon a time there was a king, and the king is called Ahasuerus although he’s thought to be Xerxes I, the king of Persia who ruled in the fifth century BC as part of a great dynasty. The Persian Empire is strong during his reign. Xerxes is described as a Hero among Kings, or even the King of Kings, and at the start of Esther, he rules 127 provinces from India to Ethiopia.
The story also gives us a queen but, almost like a wicked stepmother in a fairy tale, she is quickly deposed, setting the stage for a beauty queen kind of pageant to choose a new queen.
In fact, this part of Esther’s fairy tale has enchanted people so much through the years that in the early decades of the twentieth century there were Esther pageants in the United States where there would be a six-month search before someone was crowned “Prettiest US Jewess” and would win a trip to Palestine.
In Esther there is a nationwide search, too, and girls from across the country of Persia are taken into the palace where they undergo a year’s worth of beauty treatments to prepare them to be judged by the King of Kings. How long does it take to become a queen? In the Esther fairy tale, it takes a year and then the king picks her and, voila, Esther is crowned the new queen and lives happily ever after.
But that doesn’t even start to get us into our text today. Because this is more complicated than the Esther Pageant. That’s because Esther, although Jewish and both lovely and beautiful, is not crowned as Queen of the Jews but Queen of Persia. The Persians have no idea she is a Jew. She somehow passes for Persian. And her uncle-slash-pageant mom Mordecai who knows the politics of pageants tells her to keep her identity under wraps.
Because being Jewish at the height of the Persian Empire was a liability. Esther is in the king’s palace in the citadel of Susa, 1500 kilometres from Jerusalem. Esther’s people have been in exile for a long time too – first the Assyrians, then the Babylonians, and finally the Persians have been taking turns being the dominant empire during the past two centuries. Under Xerxes, things are at their cultural height, as we can see in the first couple of chapters where there are lavish banquets and beauty treatments.
Then after a year, the makeover is complete, Esther is crowned queen and is installed in the palace. She’s a bit like Cinderella who is transformed from drudge to beauty, captures the attention of her prince and has her happily ever after.
But like Princess Fiona in Shrek, Esther’s kind of kept up in the highest room of the tallest tower. We know this for two reasons – she can’t communicate directly with her uncle Mordecai but has to do so through servants, and she hasn’t heard the news.
Mordecai has heard the news. The whole town has heard the news and the text tells us everyone is in an uproar. Except the queen in the highest room of the tallest tower who hasn’t heard a thing.
What she has heard is the other thing that happens to queens: gossip. She hears about some guy weeping and wailing out in the town square, unable to come into the palace gates because no one wears sackcloth in the palace. Sackcloth is out. And so is Mordecai, the Jew. Have you heard? Esther is distressed by this and she sends a servant out with proper clothes for this man, not revealing her real relationship to Mordecai. She sends her servant out and the Bible says Mordecai told the servant “everything that had happened to him.”
What had happened began about 500 years before this, at a time when Israel had power. God told the Israelites to wipe out the Amalekite people, but King Saul spared King Agag along with “the best of the sheep, the oxen, the fatlings and all that was good” and that disregarding of God’s command is why Saul lost his kingship. And that’s why Agag lived another day to reproduce generations who saw the Israelites as their enemies and wanted revenge, all the way down to a man named Haman who in chapter 3 of Esther has become the favourite of the king. Mordecai inflames this quarrel when he refuses to bow down to Haman so Haman puts a bounty on the heads of all the Jewish people. The chess rematch is on.
Mordecai tells Esther’s servant the exact amount of money Haman had promised to pay for the destruction of the Jews, and gives him a copy of the plan for annihilation. He tells the servant to instruct Esther “to go into the king’s presence to beg for mercy and plead with him for her people.”
Her people. It’s a bold chess move and suddenly the queen’s carefully guarded position is exposed. But Esther has spent a year learning how to put on a good face, and she sends back a message that might have been crafted by a PR department: “All the king’s officials and the people of the royal provinces know that for any man or woman who approaches the king in the inner court without being summoned the king has but one law: that they be put to death unless the king extends the gold scepter to them and spares their lives.”
Esther has been washed and cleansed for a year, maybe having her olive skin lightened, and now she feels kind of badly about this terrible plan but she also washes her hands of the whole affair, and she’d really rather Mordecai put on the nice clothes and remember that she still could probably get some perks for him if they both play the game well.
But here’s where we revisit the fairy tale version of the story. Because we know that Esther hasn’t always been a queen, but the hard reality is that all Esther’s life she has been a pawn. She’s an orphan of a minority group, a refugee who’s been raised by an uncle who has told her what to do, and she’s been obedient to him because really what other choice does she have. She’s a pawn. Then, when it comes to the beauty pageant, we are told twice in chapter 2 of Esther that the women are taken to the palace. Between the plan to take the young women and the execution of it, we are told about Mordecai and Esther’s family background, that the Israelites were “carried into exile…among those taken captive.” Here, like those captives, Esther has been treated like an object: for a whole year she’s been buffed and polished like a statue before being judged under the objectifying eye of the king of kings. That she wins the contest may not be a fairy tale ending either. Like the many wives of Henry the VIII, Esther only had to look at what had happened to her predecessor to know that her position was precarious.
But sometimes it takes a year to become a queen and sometimes it takes an instant.
There’s a play in chess where a pawn makes it to the far side of the board and becomes a second queen. It’s called promotion. Pawn promotion often brings about the endgame in chess. That’s because the queen in chess is no beauty queen nor a mere figurehead who christens ships and sits in profile on coins. No, the queen is the most powerful piece on the chess board.
That’s what we see happen between verses 14 and 15 of Esther 4. Sometimes it takes a year to become a queen and sometimes it takes an instant. She’s been a pawn until now, a pawn of society, a pawn of her uncle’s big plans, a pawn of the king and a pawn of the Persian empire. Now suddenly she steps into her power and becomes a queen.
A game of chess is won is by the fall of a king. That’s why Saul’s failure to kill Agag was a loss in the game of chess. Saul laid his own kingship down when he let Agag live. Between verses 14 and 15, Esther realizes there’s a rematch going on. And Esther realizes her own position as queen means she can do more than provide new clothes to her uncle, get the latest gossip and try to stay afloat within the palace system. She can risk using her power for the good of her people.
Now Esther takes charge. She tells Mordecai to get the Jewish people to fast for three days as she will. Her preparation for becoming the fairy tale queen was to get “beauty treatments and special food.” Her preparation for becoming the chess queen is to fast. It’s another generation before the Jewish exiles will return to rebuild the broken walls of Jerusalem and hear the law of God they have forgotten. But somehow the endgame begins in this space between verses 14 and 15 with this young woman who is both lovely and beautiful, who has played the fairy tale queen, and who now takes on true queenship in all its powers.
Esther will do things her way, and, like a master chess player, she thinks several steps ahead, with a plan to intrigue the king in a series of banquets before she makes the checkmate move against Mordecai.
This is a book about who moves when and in what direction. Back at the start of the book, the problem with the first queen was that she didn’t come when her husband commanded her presence, and the worry was that the established order would be toppled. It’s all about who moves or doesn’t move. Esther moves into the palace, Mordecai can’t come into the palace courts in sackcloth. Esther sends a servant out to him. He sends a message in to her. She steps into the king’s presence unbidden.
Esther’s story does not mean we are all queens who need to take on our queenship. In the game of chess, some players can only move in one direction or one space while others can do elaborate moves, or go in any direction. The popularity of the Esther pageants in the early 20th century, one scholar says, may have been “acts of self-preservation and aspiration” by Jewish immigrants who may have been trying to achieve acceptance and prominence in a new country. Sometimes we only have small moves available to us.
But Esther does make us ask ourselves how we move, how we make use what we have, whether that be position or privilege or power or stuff. Do we use it to simply clothe ourselves and our families better? Or do we use it – in as great or little supply as we have – to make a move to stand for the good of people and the commands of God? Are we content with trying to get our happily ever after? Or do we fast and consider that we may not be queens, but we may have been put exactly where we are for such a time as this.
