IN THE BEWILDERED CITY

The couriers went out, spurred on by the king’s command, and the edict was issued in the citadel of Susa. The king and Haman sat down to drink, but the city of Susa was bewildered. —Esther 3:15

While the powerful shared a drink, the people of the city were bewildered. While the processes of bureaucracy were moving with a sense of inevitability and implacability, the powerful men were plotting together and against each other, as personal resentment was being turned into an empire-wide priority. While the edict was being read in the city squares, the people were trying to work out what this was all about and how they should respond, albeit with the limited opportunities that the common people had to work with.

While the powerful men sat down to drink, hurried and whispered conversations were seeking to recruit Esther to speak up as the one hoped to undo this potential massacre. The spotlight and the headlines tend to focus on the powerful men in the palace, but the Bible’s story is alert to the confusion and despair of the common people.

Their collective anxiety spread across the empire with the progress of the king’s couriers: “In every province to which the edict and order of the king came, there was great mourning among the Jews, with fasting, weeping and wailing. Many lay in sackcloth and ashes” (Esther 4:3). A biblical worldview begins at street level, noticing the distresses and disturbances of the people in our communities and in so many communities beyond our own.

It recognizes the effects that the politics and plots of the powerful have on people who have little influence in return and sometimes only a limited understanding of how these systems work. These Bible stories show us that we should be prompted to adjust our ways of seeing and responding to the world around us—and to the people who most need our world to be different.