A sermon on Esther 1:1-2:18 by Rev Richard Keith on Sunday 15 March 2026
Think of the most powerful person you have ever met. Not just someone with a title, but someone who, when they walked into a room, you could feel it. Someone whose approval you wanted and whose disapproval you feared. Now imagine that they are not just your boss or your father, but your master. They own you — not metaphorically, but literally. Your life, your future, your body, all of it subject to their whim. Your complete happiness depends on whether they like you. Because that is the world Esther lived in, and her story is one of the most remarkable in the entire Bible.
The Bible has sixty-six books, but only two of them are named after women. The first is Ruth, whose story of costly love we explored a few weeks ago — a refugee widow, far from home, clinging to a God she had only recently made her own. The second is Esther. Also far from home. Also clinging to God. A Jewish girl living in exile in the capital of the greatest empire on earth, among people who did not know her God, holding onto promises that had not yet come true. Both women displaced. Both women waiting. Both part of the same long story of a scattered people and a faithful God.
The book of Esther is special for another reason too. Of all the books in the Bible, it is the only one that never once mentions God — not the Lord, not any other name for God, no prayer, no prophecy, no miracle. Just people trying to survive in a godless empire. In our current series on Women in the Bible, many of the women we have been looking at — Rahab, Ruth, Hannah — were powerless, living in worlds shaped by men, and yet in each of those stories God was at work, not despite the circumstances but through them. Esther’s story is no different. The name of God may be absent from the page, but his fingerprints are on every chapter. He is about to act decisively for his people in exile — but not yet. Not in chapter one. Not in chapter two. Not today. But soon.
To understand Esther’s story we need to understand Xerxes, the man at the top of the great Persian empire. He is not a villain — there is a villain in this story, but he will come later. Xerxes is something more ordinary than a villain, and in some ways more dangerous, for he is a man with absolute power and no particular malice. He doesn’t scheme. He doesn’t plot. He simply does whatever he wants, whenever he wants, because no one has ever told him no and survived it. This king Xerxes, with absolute power from India to Africa, held a feast for his generals and officials — a feast that lasted for six months.
This is how men with absolute power signal their status among other men, and it is something we do too, just on a smaller scale. Someone on an average salary buys a nicer car than they need — a BMW, a Mercedes — sending the message that they are doing well, above average, worth noticing. A millionaire buys a yacht or a harbour-view apartment, things that money can buy but most people can’t afford, signalling that they are in a different league from ordinary folks. But billionaires don’t buy yachts — they buy islands. They don’t buy apartments, they buy towns. They buy tech companies and media conglomerates, fund presidential campaigns, and reshape the world to reflect their priorities. Because at that level, money isn’t about keeping score. It’s about power — power over other people’s lives, power to shape the future. Xerxes was in that category, and his feast was his statement. Not a dinner party, but six months, half a year of open doors to the treasuries of the greatest empire on earth, leaving no one in any doubt who had all the money and who had the power over life and death.
Then, seven days into the final banquet, Xerxes decided to add one more item to the display: his queen, Vashti. The king of Persia had many wives, because of course he could. If he wanted, he could have a different woman for each day of the year. But the queen was different. She was his favourite wife. She wore the crown. And most importantly, the queen’s son was the king’s heir — the queen’s son would one day rule the empire. To be queen was to have a future, not just for yourself but for your children. It was the highest position a woman in that world could hold.
While Xerxes was hosting his generals, Vashti was hosting her own feast for the wives of those same generals, the women behind the officials. In a man’s world, this was her arena, this was where she had influence, where she showed what she was building — not just for herself but for her children, and for the kingdom she was helping to shape from behind the throne. The wives of the most powerful men in the empire were in her hall. Vashti was not just a decoration. She was doing the work that the queen of Persia was supposed to do.
And then the seven eunuchs arrived with a summons. The king wanted her — not to consult her, not to honour her, but to display her, wearing her crown in front of his drunken guests, like one more item from the treasury. Xerxes was treating her like a possession. A beautiful one, his favourite, but a possession nonetheless. And when you own something, you don’t ask its permission. It is evil, but not the kind of evil we are used to from movies and books that plot murders or heists or the invasion of other countries. It is the more ordinary evil that seems harmless among the powerless but becomes devastating when it comes to tyrants — the evil that treats other people like things. Xerxes summoned Queen Vashti like a lord would call for his butler, like a farmer would whistle for his dog.
But Vashti refused to come. We are not told why — no speech, no explanation. She just refused. And perhaps that is all the explanation we need. She had dignity. She had her own work to do. And perhaps she had simply had enough of being a possession, dressed up and paraded for the entertainment of drunken men. The king was furious, not because he loved her but because she had embarrassed him in front of everyone. The man who could do anything had been told no by a woman. And his advisors panicked. Their fragile egos could not handle this dangerous precedent. If the queen’s refusal became known, women all over the empire might start defying their husbands. This was not just about one queen — this was about the whole order of things, because what was the point of these powerful men ruling the world if they couldn’t even rule their own families. An example would have to be made of Vashti so all women would know their place.
And so a royal decree went out across the Persian Empire. Vashti was never to enter the king’s presence again. Her position would be given to someone better. And every woman in the empire was commanded to respect her husband. She was not simply being demoted — she was being erased. Stripped of the crown, barred from the king’s presence, and any son she had was cut out of the line of succession. Her future, and her children’s future, ended with one thoughtless and insecure decree. One woman’s act of quiet courage was met with the full weight of imperial power. And Vashti disappeared from the story. We never hear from her again.
This is the world that our hero Esther is about to step into. Because now the king needed a new queen, and so from every province of the empire, beautiful young women were gathered and brought to the palace at Susa. Not invited — gathered. Taken from their families. It didn’t matter if she was caring for elderly relatives. It didn’t matter if she was the only child of devoted parents. If it suited the king, she was rounded up like a feral goat. One by one these girls were prepared, subjected to a whole year of beauty treatments and then sent to the king for one night. After that, they returned to the harem, to a life of isolation, unless the king called for them by name. This reminds us that this is not a fairy tale, not Cinderella looking for a prince. For many of these women, the best possible outcome was to be forgotten.
And into this system came Esther — a Jewish orphan being raised by her older cousin Mordecai in a foreign empire, far from the land God had promised her people. She was beautiful, and that was her misfortune. We might find ourselves asking whether Mordecai could have done something — could he have hidden her, sent her away before the king’s officials came? The text doesn’t say, but the honest answer is probably no, not without enormous risk, and perhaps not even then. The machinery of empire does not ask permission. It does not negotiate. It comes. It takes what it wants. And there is nothing anyone can do to stop it. Mordecai watched her go and could do nothing except walk to the gate of the palace every day to find out how she was. This is life for God’s people in their exile. This is what it looks like when the promises of God seem impossibly far away. You can’t fix it. You can’t force it. And you trust that God has not forgotten his promise.
When Esther was taken to the palace, Mordecai gave her specific instructions: do not reveal that you are Jewish, do not tell anyone who your people are. We might be tempted to judge him for that. From where we sit, in a country where faith costs us very little, we believe that we should be open about what we believe, that we should name the name of Christ whatever it costs us — a friendship, a promotion, a reputation. But we should be careful about judging Mordecai from that position, because for millions of Christians alive in the world today, this is not a theoretical question. They live in Esther’s world. Their church meetings are secret. Their faith is hidden not out of cowardice but out of the hard wisdom of people who know what exposure costs, people who have seen what happens when the empire finds out. They meet in groups of ten or fifteen, moving from house to house, rarely meeting in the same place twice. And when owning a Bible is a crime, the Bible has to live inside you. The persecuted church memorises Scripture the way Esther and Mordecai carried their faith — invisibly, in the only place no one can search.
Jesus himself said that where two or three gather in his name, there he is with them. Those small, hidden gatherings are not a compromise, not a second-best version of church. Christ specifically promised to be present in exactly that kind of meeting. Ten people in a basement in Tehran are not holding a pale imitation of worship — they are meeting Christ in the place he said he would be. And the text does not condemn Mordecai. It simply tells us what he said, which suggests that the book of Esther is more honest about the complexity of faithful living under tyranny than we sometimes are from the safety of our pulpits and pews.
In the book of Esther, ethnicity and faith are the same thing. To be Jewish is to be one of God’s people. To hide that you are Jewish is to hide that you belong to God. But God had promised that through this people — this scattered, powerless, hidden people — he would one day bless the whole world. The Messiah was coming from among them, which means that Esther’s survival is not just about Esther. It is about whether God’s promise survives. So Mordecai is not asking Esther to deny her faith — he is asking her to survive until the moment comes when survival is no longer the only thing at stake. And that moment will come in a few chapters and in a couple of weeks’ time.
And so Esther won the favour of everyone who saw her. The official in charge of the harem liked her, gave her the best place, seven maids to attend her, the best food and beauty treatments. And when her turn came to go to the king, she asked for nothing except what the king’s official suggested — no elaborate demands, no attempt to stand out, just quiet wisdom. And the king loved her more than all the others. He set the royal crown on her head and made her queen. A Jewish orphan, taken against her will, hidden in plain sight, wearing the crown of Persia. Nobody planned this. Nobody could have engineered it. And yet there she was, exactly where she needs to be.
So where is God in this story? He was there. He had always been there, working through the carelessness of a king, the courage of a woman who said no, the quiet faithfulness of a girl who had no choice and made the best of the choices she had. Not with a miracle. Without even being named.
And this is not just Esther’s story. Right now, somewhere in the world, a Christian is sitting in a prison because of what they believe. Somewhere, a church is meeting in secret — in a house, in a basement, in a forest — because to meet openly would be to disappear. Somewhere, a believer is hiding their faith the way Esther hid hers, not out of shame but out of the hard, clear-eyed wisdom of someone who knows the cost. And they are asking the same question, the question this book was written to answer: where is God?
He is with them. He sees the church meeting in the basement. And he is not a passive witness. In Iran, in China, in North Korea, the church stripped of its buildings, its programmes, its institutions and its public presence, is left with exactly what the first Christians had — the Word, prayer, each other, and the Spirit. And in many of those places the church is growing faster than anywhere with full religious freedom. They are not waiting for safety before they are faithful. They are being faithful now, memorising the Word, training the next generation in secret, preparing for a day they cannot yet see — just like Mordecai walking to the palace gate every day, just like Esther, hidden in plain sight, waiting for the moment that has not yet come.
But the persecuted church today has something Esther didn’t have. They have the promise Jesus made to his disciples before he left them in a world that was no safer than Esther’s: “And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” For Esther lived in exile, waiting for a Messiah she could not yet see. But we live on the other side of that promise. The Messiah came. He was born, like Esther, in the margins. He lived, like Esther, under the shadow of empire. He was hidden, like Esther, until the moment came. And when the moment came, he did not beg for mercy — he went to the cross and became the mercy we need.
That is the God of the book of Esther. He does not need to be named to be present. He does not need to be seen to be at work. And he is still that God — for Esther, for the persecuted church, and for us.