Sermons
ABIDING, BESETTING PRIDE
Esther 3:1-6 / Esther 4:1-9
July 18, 2010
As should already be obvious to you this morning, pride is the theme of this sermon. This is as it should be. For pride is a major theme in the book of Esther. It is on display from the very beginning of the story. It is there in the actions of King Ahasuerus.
The book of Esther opens with the king throwing a huge party. It is a grand and obscenely lavish spectacle celebrating his rule. It is an excessive display of pride in every way. Indeed, at the height of the many days of feasting, the drunken king calls for his beautiful wife to parade in front of his guests. She is reputed to be the most beautiful woman in the land. The king means to show off his “prize possession” to all the people. But, amazingly, Queen Vashti refuses his command. She will not demean herself in this way.
The king, of course, is furious. She has shown him up in front of all in the kingdom. Ahasuerus acts to save face by doing away with Vashti and, eventually, holding a contest for a new queen. (Esther wins that contest, of course.)
So it is that the opening chapters of the story show King Ahasuerus to be a most pride-filled man. The ensuing chapters introduce us to another man of great pride – Haman.
Haman is a political operative who has risen to power in King Ahasuerus’ kingdom. We are not told for what reason he is promoted, but only that Haman receives a high position in the king’s government. He is, it seems reasonable to infer, second only to the king in power. For, the king issues a command that all in the kingdom are to bow in the presence of Haman just as they would in his presence.
Haman loves his position of power. He is infatuated with it. We see this on display most readily when Mordecai refuses to bow down to him. When Mordecai withholds this act, Haman smolders with angry vengefulness. Rather than just have Haman locked up for his insubordination, Haman goes to elaborate lengths in planning his revenge. There is the sure sign of a man eaten up with pride.
We will see how his pride causes his downfall in a couple of weeks when we return to this story. We will see how the trap he sets for Mordecai to exact his revenge gets sprung on him. We will see his pride on full display then; but we see enough of it here in what we have read this morning. Haman’s smoldering resentment bespeaks his enormous pride.
We have these two figures in the story, filled with great pride. But it is not their pride I want us to reflect on this morning. I want us to turn to another major character in the book – to a man who is treated in the story as a hero. I want us to think about Mordecai. I want us to see the pride that fills his heart. For, it is of the type that usually escapes our notice, both in our stories of others and in our own stories.
Mordecai is introduced earlier in the book as Esther’s older cousin. He comes on the scene when the king’s search for a new queen begins. Once he finds out that she is to be taken before the king, Mordecai counsels Esther on how she is to comport herself in the Persian court. Important things are revealed about Mordecai in this part of the story.
First, we learn that “Esther” is a recent appellation for the soon-to-be-crowned queen. Her Jewish name was Hadassah. It had been changed along the way, presumably by Mordecai who, we are told, had raised the orphaned girl. This was necessitated by the fact of Israel’s exile. The story is set in the period of Jewish exile. After having been defeated, the Jews had been taken into captivity. They were, truly, a prisoner people, forced to live in a new land under the reign of a foreign king. What better way to get ahead – or to avoid trouble – in this new situation than to take on a Persian name. Mordecai’s name, too, suggests a move to maintain an advantageous dual identity. For, it does not appear to be of Jewish origin (though no other name is given for Mordecai in the book).
A second thing to note here is how Mordecai counsels Esther to keep her true identity as a Jew concealed. It will do her no good – it may, in fact, do her harm. As a minority people in this new land, there was surely grief to pay. Hiding one’s Jewish identity was a resource not only for survival but for promotion in this new setting.
There is one more thing to note – Mordecai himself does appear to have a position in this kingly court. His easy access to the court of the king’s women indicates that he probably enjoyed a low level position of authority over the eunuchs who tended the king’s harem.
The sum of all this is to see that Mordecai is a man with a mission of his own. He is angling for a seat of power of one sort or another in the king’s court. We need not assume that it is self-serving only – we can well imagine that he was seeking influence for the welfare of his people. We need not assign negative motives to Mordecai’s political posturing. But we should not ignore the fact that as a political opportunist of sorts, Mordecai was that much more vulnerable to attacks of pride. (As the famous quote of Lord Acton puts it, “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely.”)
Indeed, we can see pride at work in his refusal to honor Haman. As a we said a moment ago, Haman has been promoted to a high position in the king’s court. This comes in spite of the fact that Mordecai has just saved the king’s life. The last verses of chapter 2 tell us of how Mordecai learns of a plot to assassinate the king. He passes on the information to Queen Esther, who passes it along to the king. She tells the king it is Mordecai who has uncovered the plot. You would expect that it is Mordecai who gets the big promotion. Mordecai himself, no doubt, expected to get the big promotion. But it goes to Haman instead. We are not told why – we are just told that King Ahasuerus appoints Haman to the highest office in the land.
It is next in the story, chapter 3, that we are told of how Mordecai refused to bow in honor of Haman when he came into his presence. He refuses not just once but every time he sees Haman. He will not bow down before the king’s high official, even though the king himself had commanded such honor be bestowed on Haman.
Now, some have speculated that Mordecai was acting on religious principle here – that he was not honoring Haman because he wouldn’t bow before anyone but God. But we are never told that this is why Mordecai doesn’t obey the king’s command. And we are not told that other Jews refused Haman the honor. Neither are we told that Mordecai refused to bow before the king (which we would reasonably expect to have been told since Mordecai was evidently in the king’s presence often as an employee of the royal court). It seems to be an isolated event, Mordecai’s refusal to acknowledge Haman. By the placement of the stories in the book, it seems the author of the book is suggesting that bitterness and revenge are the motives behind Mordecai’s actions.
One other corroborating clue is given. Back when Mordecai is introduced in the story, we are told that he is a Benjaminite. He is a Jew of the tribe of Benjamin. When Haman is introduced, we are told that he is a decedent of one of the Benjaminite’s most hated rivals. There is a history of enmity between the peoples of the two men. This adds fuel to the fire, then, for Mordecai. Not only has Haman been promoted in his stead to a position Mordecai surely thought he deserved, Haman is a member of a tribe of people Mordecai’s people detest. The sum of the matter is that his wounded pride takes the additional hit of seeing his proud lineage take a back seat to a hated enemy. For all intents and purposes, Haman represents to Mordecai the same kind of affront that Vashti represented to King Ahasuerus. His refusal to bow before Haman is motivated by his pride.
Now, please don’t hear me dismissing Mordecai with all this. He is still a great hero in the story. His advice helped Esther win a position of great power in the kingdom. His revelation of the assassination plot saved the king and surely saved the territory from political and social upheaval. And his admonition of Esther in the second lesson we read this morning motivates her to take the decisive steps that save Israel in the face of this plot to destroy her. Mordecai is a hero in the story, make no mistake about it. But he is, as all heroes are, a flawed hero. His pride gets the best of him in this one instance. It causes him to needlessly provoke Haman to hasty and potentially destructive action.
Let us take note of the situation. Mordecai’s rebellion doesn’t bode ill for him only; it inspires Haman to plot, and almost pull off, the complete annihilation of the Jewish people. Furious at Mordecai, Haman uses his power to set in motion an edict and plan that called for the elimination of the Jewish people altogether. The sum of the matter is that the very action that Mordecai prompted Esther to take to save Israel was necessitated by his own previous acts of insubordination before Haman. His pride, then, was the potential source not just of his own fall, but that of his people, too.
Here is proved, once again, the old biblical adage: “pride goeth before a fall.” Pride almost always leads to destruction. And it leads to bigger destruction than we can imagine. Mordecai’s deep grief and lament captured in our second lesson surely derives from his shame at having put his own people in such a precarious position.
Well, I have gone to all the trouble of pointing out Mordecai’s pride because it is the kind most of us have to deal with. Not many of us are prideful in the obvious ways of a King Ahasuerus or Haman. We do not think overmuch of ourselves as they did. Neither do we scheme to elevate ourselves so blatantly and shamelessly as they did. But all of us are susceptible to the kind of pride that tripped up Mordecai. The fact that a good and honorable man such as Mordecai – a man who was very much used by God for great things – the fact that he could fall to pride should be a warning to us that we are just as prone to fall to pride in our own lives.
I fell to pride the other day – right in the midst of preparing for this sermon. I had been fleshing out the final details of this sermon when I received a phone call from a man who might be interviewing with my former church for the pastoral position there. He called to ask me about the church and my time there. This is a common practice among ministers. It is, when done right, a good step in helping candidates know if they would make a good fit for that church.
This man called and asked if I would speak to him, and I was glad to do it. I love the people at Buena Vista church. They were good to me and my family in so many ways. I want to see them get a good minister. I want to see them do well in the future. So, I was glad to share my thoughts about the church with this man. But as I did so, my pride got the best of me.
I started talking like an expert about the church and church health. I started telling the man the problems I thought the church had. I began to tell him what I thought they needed to have right in order for the next minister to have a successful ministry there. I talked and talked and talked. And as I talked, my confidence in myself and my abilities swelled. The casual listener, listening in on the conversation, might well have begun to wonder how that church ever made it before I got there, and how it hadn’t fallen apart since I left.
Fortunately, when I got off the phone I came to my senses. I saw immediately what had just transpired, and I was thoroughly disgusted with myself. It wasn’t just the fact that I had let pride fill me so. It was that I had done this not a half-hour past my sermon preparation on this very subject. If I was ever going to pull off humility, you would think it would have been in those moments of temptation. But I fell to that sinful inclination without so much as a whimper of protest.
Listen folks. This is a serious issue. Pride is ever at hand. It travels with us everywhere we go. It lurks in the shadows of all our interactions, waiting for the opportunity spring into action. It is always around us, always tempting us. We need to be mindful of this truth always. We need to be on guard at all times.
I have spoken on another occasion about the weapons we need to take up in the fight against pride. I have included them in a bulletin insert for you this morning (they follow at the conclusion of this printed version of the sermon). What I want you to get this morning is just how susceptible we are to pride. It is always at hand, for the strongest of us and for the weakest of us. It is there to trip us up, and it will. And grievous will be our fall! It tripped up a good man like Mordecai. It tripped him up and nearly brought about the ruin of Israel. It can trip us up and bring devastating consequences. We must be on guard at all times, in every way, concerning abiding, besting pride.
OUR WEAPONS AGAINST PRIDE
I have preached on the subject of pride before and how we ought to go about trying to uproot it from our lives. I repeat in brief here what I have said previously.
- Pride is more of a sinful attitude than an outright sin. Pride manifests itself in and through many sins.
- Pride can be defined simply as the attempt to exalt the self before or over others.
- Our first weapon against pride is the constant remembrance of the truth that we are creatures and not the creator. “Know ye that the Lord he is God: it is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves” (Psalm 100:2).
- Our second weapon against pride is the constant remembrance of our sinfulness. We are to be like the tax collector in Jesus’ parable who, when he came before God, “would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner’” (Luke 18:13).
- Our third weapon against pride is to try in every way to think of others as better than ourselves, and to put them first in our thoughts and actions. (Romans 12)
- Our fourth weapon against pride is to become restrained more and more in our speech. Nowhere do we exalt ourselves more than in our conversation. (James 3:1-12)