Response to Lynn Jost: Esther, Paraguay, and Us

On March 31, 2006, Lynn Jost gave a lecture in chapel at Fresno Pacific University (my Mennonite-affiliated undergraduate college) entitled "For Such a Time as This: Esther, Paraguay, and Us". This was an unusual chapel session because of the candid way that Jost tackled a very difficult text. The following is a summary of Jost's points and of the equally candid reaction they stirred in me.

Jost began his presentation with a critique of the situation in the United States. Christianity here, he says, is being co-opted by militarism and nationalism. A theology of war emanates from our government and our churches. We are seeing the language of “religious empire” used by Christians. The roles of God, church, and nation are being confused with a mission to rid the world of evil. It is a troubling situation.

He then turned to Esther. This, too is a troubling tale. It is a tale of lewdness and violence. The Jews are faced with a difficult situation and turn to seduction and mass murder as a solution. Jews become the oppressors, initiate a slaughter, and to this day eat Haman’s ears to commemorate the event.

And finally, Jost looked at Paraguay. Paraguay is a country that suffers from a great deal of poverty, corruption, and dishonesty. He named several important figures in the government—including the president—who are working to solve these problems. They set an example for us: they are Christians who get involved in politics in order to help solve their nation’s problems. They do not just “stand and lob criticism from the margins,” as many Mennonites have done in North America. The story of Esther, Jost suggested, may not offer us specific formulas for solving our nation’s problems, but it does encourage us to get involved in government as the Paraguayan Mennonites have done. (Those who are not familiar with the Mennonite denomination may not realize how scandalous a position this is for a Mennonite scholar to advocate in a Mennonite chapel. Non-participation in government is one of the denomination's major historic distinctives.)

In addition to the above-mentioned theme of political involvement, Jost identified one other redeeming quality of the Esther narrative: the transformation of Esther from a pliant servant to a risk-taking and empowered woman who gives orders and saves the day.

But are these redeeming qualities enough to cancel out all the parts of the story that seem to endorse violence and seduction? According to Jost, some things in the story invite “deconstruction”. Most significant for him is the fact that God’s name is never mentioned. Indeed, where we might expect to find God’s name, we find instead a “coded message” on Mordecai’s lips about the possibility that God might help the Jews by some other means. Perhaps this means that we should not take the means of redemption in this narrative as a divinely ordered or divinely approved event. Jost also noted that the story is designed to provide a rationale for the purim holiday and that the “moral of the story” seems to be that Saul should have killed the Agagites when he had the opportunity. I did not understand, however, why he thinks these things invite us to deconstruct the text.

I am wary of the notion of “deconstructing” a text. I prefer the language that feminist theologians use: “retrieval” or “recovery”. Perhaps our goal should not be to critique and demolish Esther for the purpose of using it as a negative example but rather to identify the parts that we, as a church, accept as normative. What is the “good” in Esther? If there is none then it does not belong in the canon.

And why should Esther be in the canon? Clearly the cons outweigh the pros. The “good” things Jost identifies in the narrative are found elsewhere in scripture. Why hang on to it? I suggest that the church has as much authority today as it did during the church councils over a thousand years ago, and so we should not be afraid to make decisions about what does or does not belong in our Bible. We have for too long been chained by the baggage of a medieval view of scripture as a divinely-dictated, infallible, and immutably closed canon. The purpose of the Protestant Reformation was to free the Church from medievalism; the medieval canon, however, was the weapon of the Reformation against greater abuses, and so came to be viewed by the Reformers as the one really holy and unquestionable standard of truth. We freed ourselves from one master only by shackling ourselves to another. But now that the greater abuses of medieval Catholicism have been extinguished, perhaps it is time at last to cast off the last remnant of medievalism and to meditate as a body on the possibility of reopening and/or modifying the Protestant canon.