WHEN GOD HIDES: DIVINE ABSENCE AND THE BOOK OF ESTHER
It comforts me to know that God is everywhere. Psalms 139:7 (NRSVue) says, “Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence?” The Incarnation of God as Imanu-El, God with us, means that God is present, not only in divine reality, but also in human experience (see Isaiah 7:14, Philippians 2:6-7). And there is another perspective on God’s presence recorded in scripture, perhaps the most famous example of which is Psalm 22, which Jesus quotes from the Cross (Matthew 27:46, Mark 15:34), “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The psalm continues (vv. 1b-2), “Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night but find no rest.” Does God forsake? Is God ever far away from any of us or hesitant in answering prayer? I am tempted to read erroneous thinking, a lack of perspective, onto the psalmist’s grievance, but Christ’s own channeling of these words seems to say, “No, you will not dismiss the depths and divinity of this suffering.” Jesus takes on our suffering not only to save us from it, but also to prevent us from waving it away with convenient theologies, whether it be someone else’s or our own.
When the Son cries out to the Father, “Why have you forsaken me?” I trust that Jesus means that God has forsaken him. In some mysterious way that does not violate my staunch Trinitarianism, God the Father forsakes God the Son in his death, affecting an absence of light from light, true God from true God, if I may coin a dark inversion of the Creed. God forsook or emptied God-self for us (this is called kenosis in Greek), to demonstrate the correspondingly abyssal depths of God’s love in the only sacrifice sufficient for our salvation. Like a timely answer to the “problem of evil,” God responds to human pain by taking it on comprehensively, thus validating and exalting human experience down to its deepest psychic roots.
Lovely, but we Christians find ourselves stuck with a theological tension as usual: God is present with us, except that sometimes God is not, because God does what God pleases. And that absence is painful, yet it is also part of the mechanism of our atonement and salvation. Dismissing our experience of divine absence not only flies in the face of the sacrificial work of Christ, but it also silences our distress signal, which itself is bound up with the plan of redemption. If we are saved, in part, because of an acknowledgement of our need of God, what would it mean to dismiss the suffering that teaches us our need?
This is not what I was thinking about when I proposed the Book of Esther to my Bible study group this year. I chose Esther because I like to cover books we seldom hear in church, but it also occurred to me that the political themes would be useful in our time. Esther resists oppressive and dysfunctional systems from within. She is a non-simplistic and relatable hero, expressing her own reluctance to risk death for a dispossessed people, but going ahead anyway.
When the class began, discussion turned toward comparisons between Donald Trump and Ahasuerus—the pathetically incompetent and emotionally incoherent Persian emperor, likely a post-Hellenist projection onto Xerxes I. The class noticed how the advisors to Ahasuerus are the decision makers in court, not the king himself. Even more embarrassing for the leader of a patriarchal society, the women (like Vashti and Esther) take the most decisive action in the text, while the king only reacts to circumstances as they unfold. The book of Esther suggests, through the emasculation of Ahasuerus, that human power is limited and unreliable.
We expect the next line to read, “God, on the other hand, is faithful and responsive!” The only problem: God is not once mentioned in the (Hebrew) Book of Esther.
Now the book does not fail to mention God, it intentionally omits God in all the places we expect Deus to come flying ex machina. In Esther 2:17 the king falls in love with Esther when, “of all the virgins she won his favor and devotion, so that he set the royal crown on her head and made her queen instead of Vashti.” This has divine interventionist reversal written all over, but where is the Intervener? Two verses later Mordecai, after he just so happens to overhear Bigthan and Teresh plotting regicide, reports it to the king with Esther as liaison. Again, we cannot help but read God’s providence into the text.
In the rest of the Hebrew Bible, similar events are associated with divine action consistently and explicitly. God overturns the primogenitor (the first born) Esau and raises up the younger twin, Jacob. God sends scrappy female killers Deborah and Jael to take down Sisera and his army. The trend continues among the inheritors of the Hebrew tradition in the New Testament, where God chooses a poor Jewish girl to clothe the Second Person of the Trinity in flesh and bear Christ into the world. With the appearance of Gabriel at the Annunciation, subtlety is set aside, there is no doubt that God is present. Yet such things as these simply happen in Esther.
The clever reader will wonder whether the book of Esther trains us to find God in tricky situations, especially helpless-feeling political situations, regardless of God’s seeming absence. But then, if God’s absence is only “seeming,” have we not just committed the sin described above of explaining away the suffering of all the Jews in Susa? While Hellenized Jews of the last few centuries before Christ alleviated their own discomfort with Esther by adding several chapters of Greek material inserting God into the text, we do not need to “fix” the text. We could, as with the crucifixion of Jesus, take God’s apparent abandonment of Esther, Mordecai, and all the Jews under Ahasuerus at face value, and I wonder if that is exactly what we are meant to do.
The helplessness of Esther and her comrades is real, and God leaves Israel helpless in an enemy nation. The book of Esther is not simply a story with a moral, teaching us to seek out the Presence when God seems absent, rather Esther calls in our courage to resist evil, even though the abandonment we sense is real. Whether in the court of Ahasuerus or Pilate and the Sanhedrin, we must face the possibility that the experiential absence of God is itself a salvific vehicle.
I do not like this idea, nor do I think it will be a popular take, but intellectual honesty and a reverence for scripture compels me to assert: the Bible is disinterested in proving God’s righteousness to human beings on our own terms. Yes, the Bible asserts that God is righteous, such as in Ezra 9:15, “O Lord, God of Israel, you are just.” But God’s justice is hardly ever what we expect based on our own standards. We believe that God does good, yet in Isaiah 45:7 God takes credit for literally everything, “I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe (lit. “evil”); I the Lord do all these things.”
We face an impossible situation in our country: the president is a man hungry for fascism, not because he genuinely believes in it (or anything at all), but because he stands to profit from the suffering of his own people. He relies on the capacities of others who, like court magicians, will steer his reactivity and shield him from righteous consequences. Queen Esther faces the same helplessness in her book, which she highlights in response to Mordecai, when he demands her help:
“All the king’s servants and the people of the king’s provinces know that, if any man or woman goes to the king inside the inner court without being called, there is but one law: to be put to death. Only if the king holds out the golden scepter to someone may that person live. I myself have not been called to come in to the king for thirty days” (Esther 4:11).
She knows the rules and, more importantly for her personal safety, she is aware of the king’s behavioral history. Nevertheless, Mordecai persists and offers her this warning:
“Do not think that in the king’s palace you will escape any more than all the other Jews. For if you keep silent at this time, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another place, 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” (12-14).
Mordecai asserts that Esther’s survival is dependent on her cooperation with what we imagine to be the will of God in this situation. He trusts that “relief and deliverance will rise…from another place,” which implies God’s faithfulness regardless of Esther’s fear, or even failure. But to be part of that relief Esther needs to take her place in it, otherwise she misses the boat. In stepping up, Esther demonstrates radical acceptance of the people’s state of abandonment, and her unique non-helplessness. God’s absence may then be read as the very intervention which ensures her participation - and thus reception - of saving grace. She, like Christ, empties herself, transforming condemnation into redemption, taking on divine agency in the face of divine silence.
And this is why the book of Esther has survived the theistic scrutiny of centuries and millennia to reach into our lives today. Regardless of the strange silence of God, Esther is a mirror reflecting human experience back to us. In such a time as this, we sense God’s absence, even refusal to explicitly interfere in human squabbles, but it is this very absence which calls us to action, on the hunch that God’s purposes are discerned in the unraveling mess. If we are defeated by temporal human powers, that would be better than to fail in the eyes of the just and loving, absent, present, self-emptying Almighty God.
Be strengthened by the living and active Word (Hebrews 4:12) to resist evil wherever you find it (see our Baptismal Covenant), for perhaps, as Mordecai counsels, we too “have come…for just such a time as this.”
