Canter Bridge

We rarely receive the moment of our lives on our terms.

Almost always, the line in the sand is drawn a beach or two away from where we would have preferred. The defining issue is seldom of our choosing.

After these things King Ahasuerus promoted Haman the Agagite, the son of Hammedatha, and advanced him and set his throne above all the officials who were with him. And all the king’s servants who were at the king’s gate bowed down and paid homage to Haman, for the king had so commanded concerning him. But Mordecai did not bow down or pay homage. Then the king’s servants who were at the king’s gate said to Mordecai, ‘Why do you transgress the king’s command?’ And when they spoke to him day after day and he would not listen to them, they told Haman, in order to see whether Mordecai’s words would stand, for he had told them that he was a Jew. And when Haman saw that Mordecai did not bow down or pay homage to him, Haman was filled with fury. (Esther 3:1–5 ESV)

The biblical Book of Esther is full of fools. Yet none of them outdoes the legendary Haman the Agagite, who figures in the book’s troublesome narrative as a kind of Fool of All Fools. He is an idiot prince, this Haman, a man whose self-absorbed banality is surpassed only by the arrogance that fuels his rise.

Mordecai does not have much, as these things go, to say for himself. Pretensions of grandeur are absent from his story. His dual concern reduces to his niece and his people. Apart from that, things may roll on as they will. He is not large enough to care very much about such things.

Yet Haman the Great—as the man sees himself—presents Mordecai with a battle that the latter would rather not have joined. All Mordecai need do in order to save his skin is join the puerile throngs in bowing down to this empty suit each time his chariots rush by.

Mordecai will not.

He is not very strategic, this Jewish uncle, this wrench in the spokes of empire, this churlish rebel.

Mordecai did not choose the moment. Yet the whole Book of Esther and the unnamed God who will preserve his people are nothing in this moment if not for one small man’s principled rebellion. ‘I will not bow down before this imperial idiot’, Mordecai might have mouthed to himself, yet probably not to others. ‘There are limits.’

It is nearly always so.

We don’t get to crow about the elevated principles that undergird our moment of virtued glory.

Instead, we get a Haman. A fool. An idiot, presented in full regalia as a royal fait accompli.

It would be perfectly excusable to look way. To go along with the crowds. To bow down.

Mordecai will not.

Somewhere in the watching heavens, the unnamed God’s habit of saving his people from peril is activated, aroused. Somewhere here below, sleeping Jews in provincial towns, unaware that their doom will otherwise fall upon them, dream of other things, not of a perturbed uncle keeping lonely vigil among the gates of empire because his niece is in there, somewhere.

Almost nobody knows. Yet this is it.