Mordicai and Esther

The twelve-book history of God’s people begins with Joshua leading God’s people into the promised land, but ends with them a thousand miles away, persecuted in a foreign country. Esther’s story tells us many things, but its leading point is that despite God’s people’s stubborn disobedience, the Lord’s promise to Abraham still stands, and he faithfully keeps his promise to protect his people from annihilation.

With wonderful Jewish humour Esther’s story opens with the emperor telling the peoples of his empire what a buffoon he is; ‘every man should be ruler over his own household’, thereby announcing that he is the one person in the empire who is struggling at this point.

Throughout Esther, it is the interaction and co-operation between Queen Esther and her uncle Mordecai that quietly stands as the answer to Emperor Xerxes’ foolishness. Indeed, it is quite difficult to state which is the leading character; both are mentioned by name around fifty times. But it is the interplay between this man and woman that so fascinates, and becomes another point of interest for our study on mentoring in this plan. Esther (Hadassah) enters the story as a young, beautiful orphan. A girl, not a woman, who dutifully does all she is told to do, even hiding her Jewish identity and giving herself in unmarried sex with the emperor. But her story is not just a journey into womanhood, the focus is her journey into adulthood. Esther changes from being a child to being an adult as she takes her life into her hands and appears unannounced before the emperor. And from that point on, she is the one at the helm of the story. She is the one who invites the two most powerful men in the empire to her private dinner. And the men come running along, just as she told them to. She, Esther, is now the central character so skillfully determining the outcome of events. Esther is the one exercising ‘de facto’ power throughout the empire.

And so we watch the development from Mordecai ‘mentoring’ his young niece Hadassah change into an astonishingly fruitful and powerful co-operation between this man and this woman to the point where it is difficult to tell who is the leading partner. Mordecai the mentor has become Mordecai the partner in one of the most powerful partnerships in all Jewish history. As man and woman serve each other, both win in spades!