The Girl Queen, the Captive Conqueror: A Devotional Commentary on Esther (1:11-20)

King Ahasuerus orders the beautiful Queen Vashti into his presence, with the express purpose of showing her off to the nobles, as though she was just one more "thing" in the long list of treasures we read about in verses 1-10. Vashti refuses, presumably on her dignity as a human being, and the King gets furious. And here's where it gets especially interesting, because when he asks his counselors what to do about it, they start waving red flags all over the place: if Vashti gets away with this, they warn, all the women in the empire will think its okay to buck the system and stand up for themselves, too. So they advise Ahasuerus to take Vashti's "royal position" away and give it to another, more worthy than her (read: more docile).

And this is the point where the text grabbed me, because in the Hebrew it says, "give her 'rule' to a 'neighbour' better than her"; and the wording here is almost exactly the same as what Samuel said to Saul in 1 Samuel 15:28, when the Lord took the kingdom from Saul and gave it to David: "YHWH has taken the kingdom from you and given it to a neighbour who is better than you." Considering that Saul lost the kingdom because he didn't follow through on YHWH's directive to destroy King Agag of the Amalekites, and Haman, the villain of Esther is a descendant of King Agag (see 3:1), this parallel can't be coincidence. Just like Saul lost his royal place and it went to his neighbour, King David, Vashti lost her royal place and it went to her neighbour, Queen Esther. And just like David is a saviour of God's People who foreshadows God's true Messiah, Jesus Christ, so, too, is Esther.

Once all those wires connect, a light bulb goes off and scintillating light starts to shine on something important going on in the Esther story. The reason Ahasuerus gives Vashti's Queenship to Esther is because he wants to underscore the status quo, reinforcing everything his culture says about power, and wealth, and gender relations (after all, what will the other women do or say if Vashti gets away with this?); and the irony here is that this is exactly what Esther doesn't do.

By the end of the story, roles will be reversed, powers will be upheaved and the status quo will be hanging from the 75-foot gallows it built for the necks of the vulnerable. And if Esther is a pattern for the coming Christ, then some difficult but important conclusions seem unavoidable here: just like Esther didn't underwrite the cultural staus quo, Christ didn't, and won't.

Well, that's a pretty round-about way to say just this: I've been thinking a fair bit this morning about how I might be sitting a bit too comfortably with the cultural status quo when it comes to things like wealth and power and gender relations, and worse, if maybe deep down I'm hoping the Messiah will simply underwrite it for me-- the status quo--instead of doing what he does do, and turn it on its head.