December 19

Providence Without a Name

The hospital phoned the daughter who lived twenty minutes away. Her brothers loved their mother as much and lived four hours off, so the calls came to her, then the forms, then the decisions everybody dreaded. She was simply the one near enough to reach.

Esther had not applied for her position either. She had been taken into the king's house and had ended up its queen, and when a decree went out for the destruction of the Jews, Mordecai, the cousin who had raised her, sent word asking her to go to the king about it. Her first reply was the obvious objection: anyone who goes in to that king uninvited faces a death sentence unless he extends his scepter.

Then Mordecai sent them back to Esther with this answer: "Don't imagine that being in the king's house will let you escape any more than the rest of the Jews. If you stay silent now, relief and deliverance will come to the Jews from another place, but you and your father's house will perish. Who knows whether you have come to the kingdom for such a time as this?"

Then Esther gave them this answer for Mordecai: Go, gather all the Jews in Susa, and fast for me. Do not eat or drink for three days, night or day. My young women and I will fast in the same way. Then I will go in to the king, which is against the law, and if I perish, I perish.

Esther 4:13-16

Mordecai is sure that relief and deliverance will come to the Jews from another place even if she keeps quiet. Where that place is, and who would be working from it, he leaves alone. And on why she is where she is, the most he ventures is who knows.

Her answer keeps the same reticence. She never takes up his suggestion about why she is queen. She calls for a fast and leaves what she expects it to accomplish unsaid. Then she settles on going in to the king against the law, and reckons the cost aloud. If I perish, I perish. It is a plan that guarantees her nothing, made by a woman who will not predict how it ends.

In the Hebrew text, the book this scene belongs to runs to ten chapters without the name of God in it. No prayer is recorded there, and the account never pauses to identify who is arranging things. What happened to the Jews of Persia can be told from end to end as court politics, nerve and lucky timing.

Christians have long read that silence as the way God chose to work there, and the reason is a birth. The God who kept his name out of Esther's book was born with a name of his own, and the world's story can no longer be told without him.

Esther had the position, the fast, the law and the risk, and nothing to confirm she had read the situation rightly. If something has fallen to you because of where you happen to be standing, you may have to move on it long before anybody tells you it was right, and you can. Weigh what it might cost, the way she did, and then go. What God is making of where you stand is his business before it is yours.

You know where I am, Lord, and the good of it is still out of sight. Give me nerve for the next right thing, and stay with the work I cannot finish.