Bible Commentaries

Not Afraid of Sackcloth

Esther 4:2; 2 Corinthians 3:12

In the book of Esther 4:2, we read, "None might enter into the king's gate clothed with sackcloth". St. Paul in his Second Epistle to the Corinthians3:12 says, "Seeing then that we have such hope, we use great plainness of speech". In the first text we read of a refusal to face the facts of life, the hard and painful facts—"None might enter into the king's gate clothed in sackcloth". In the second we read of an unflinching sincerity of vision, and of a sincerity which does not flinch because it is armed by a great hope—"Seeing then that we have such hope, we use great plainness of speech".

There are three ways in which we may deal with the harder things of life. First of all, we may take the way of the Eastern King and resolve not to see them, to bar the door against them, to act as if they did not exist. There is a second way. We may face them without the Christian hope. There is a third way. We may face them with the Christian hope, and that is the true and only wisdom. Let us dwell for a moment on those three ways or methods.

I. We may close the eyes and ears, and say that we will not look upon the things that affright and affront us. "None might enter the king's gate clothed in sackcloth." We know what that leads to, that life lived in an unreal world, in a world of imagination. We know what it has done in history through all the ages. We may close the doors and curtain the windows and hide, as it were, our faces from misery, but it is in vain. The flaring lights flicker, the storm outside begins to mutter and to break, and the inexorable call comes, and we have to open our eyes and look out on the woe and the wrong and the torture of this world, on all the wretchedness that is rising against us to sweep us from our place. In other words, even the king cannot keep his gate against the dark ministers of pain that insist upon an entrance, and will force it at last.

II. We may look willingly or unwillingly at the facts of life without any hope in Christ. I will not speak of those, and there are many, who look upon the agony of the world simply to find in it the opportunity of new sensation. I wish to speak rather of the hopeless, earnest, despairing outlook on the miseries of life. There are those like the poet whose hearts become as

A nerve o"er which do creep

The else unfelt oppressions of the world.

They meditate upon sin and grief and death, upon the vast sum of human woe, upon their little and slow means for diminishing it, till the heart spends itself in fierce and hopeless throbs. The thought beats upon the brain like as on an anvil. Yet all becomes at last so commonplace and so sad and so far beyond remedy. The waves of mournful thought cannot be stemmed, but they flow in vain. The end is at best a quiet misery.

III. We come to the one wise way of facing the problems and the agonies of life without flinching and without fear. We may face them so as possessors of the Christian hope, and in no other way—"Seeing then we have such hope, we use great plainness of speech".

St. Paul has been speaking of the comparative dimness of the Mosaic ministry. That ministry had passages of glory, but the glory was transitory and faded away. It was shone down by the everlasting splendour of the new ministry of Christ. In Christ the veil was taken away, and taken away for ever. There was a veil on the face of Moses: there is no veil on the face of Jesus. It is as if the eyes that sought each other with such desire burned the screen that parted them. Esther 4:2

Christianity is sometimes scouted as "the religion of sorrow," and many amongst us are ready to avow that the Persian forbidding the sackcloth is more to their taste than the Egyptian or the Christian dragging the corpse through the banquet: but we confidently contend that the recognition by Christ of the morbid phases of human life is altogether wise and gracious.

I. We consider, first, the recognition by revelation of sin. Sackcloth is the outward and visible sign of sin, guilt and misery. How men shut their eyes to this most terrible reality—coolly ignoring, skilfully veiling, emphatically denying it! What is popularly called sin these philosophers call error, accident, inexperience, indecision, misdirection, imperfection, disharmony; but they will not allow the presence in the human heart of a malign force, which asserts itself against God, and against the order of His universe. The sackcloth must not mar our shallow happiness, nevertheless sin thrusts itself upon our attention. The greatest thinkers in all ages have been constrained to recognize its presence and power. The creeds of all nations declare the fact that men everywhere feel the bitter working and intolerable burden of conscience. Sin was the burden of the life of Christ because it is the burden of our life. Christ has done more than insist on the reality. The odiousness, the ominousness of sin. He has laid bare its principle and essence—not in the spirit of a barren cynicism does Christ lay bare the ghastly wound of our nature but as a noble physician who can purge the mortal virus which destroys us.

II. We consider the recognition by revelation of sorrow. Sackcloth is the raiment of sorrow, and as such it was interdicted by the Persian monarch. We still follow the same insane course, minimizing, despising, masking, denying, suffering. Nevertheless suffering is a stern fact that will not long permit us to sleep. A man may carry many hallucinations with him to the grave, but a belief in the unreality of pain is hardly likely to be one of them. Reason as we may, suppress the disagreeable truths of life as we may, suffering will find us out, and pierce us to the heart. Christ gives us the noblest example of suffering. He himself was preeminently a man of sorrows; He exhausted all forms of suffering, touching life at every point, at every point He bled, and in Him we learn how to sustain our burden and to triumph throughout all tragedy.

III. We consider the recognition by revelation of death. We have again adroit ways of shutting the gate upon their sackcloth which is the sign of death. Walt Whitman tells us "That nothing can happen more beautiful than death". And he has expressed the humanist view of mortality in a hymn which his admirers regard as the high-water mark of modern poetry. But will this rhapsody bear thinking about? Is death "delicate," "lovely and soothing," "delicious," coming to us with "serenades". Do we go forth to meet death "with dances and chants of fullest welcome?" It is vain to hide the direct fact of all under metaphors and rhetorical artifice. Without evasion or euphony Christ recognizes the sombre mystery. He shows us that death as we know it is an unnatural thing, that it is the fruit of disobedience, and by giving us purity and peace He gives us eternal life.

—W. L. Watkinson, The Transfigured Sackcloth, p3.

References.—IV:10-17.—A. D. Davidson, Lectures on Esther 4:13-17

Some people are puzzled to discover how the book of Esther comes to be in the Old Testament. It contains no religions teaching. The name of God is not once mentioned in it from the first verse to the last. How comes it in the Bible. No teaching of religion, no prophesying of Jesus, no foreshadowing of the evangelical truths of redemption—true not in pious phrase, but what the book does paint for you is a majestic picture of a human heart struggling against its own weakness, rising to a grandeur that had in it the glory of Christ's own self-sacrifice.

I. You remember the story. A dissolute Persian monarch in a drunken frolic requires of his queen to do a deed that ran against all that was womanly within her, and she refused. Mercilessly he deposes her from the throne, and he sets to to select another queen. The fair maidens of the land are collected, and from among them he chooses the beautiful young Jewess Esther 4:14

In our daily lessons yesterday we began the reading of the book of Esther 4:14

I. God's cause is independent of our assistance. Mordecai believed that God watched over Israel night and day; many a time had He delivered her, when everything appeared desperate and the help of man had utterly failed; and the record of God's faithfulness in the past gave the assurance that in some way of His own He would prevent the extinction of His people. This was a noble attitude of mind; and it is one which we should seek to cultivate in reference to the cause of Christ. If religion is real at all, then it is the greatest and most permanent of all realities. If Christ's own words are true, then it is no limited or hesitating loyalty we owe Him. One man, with truth and the promise of God at his back, is stronger than an opposing world.

II. We are not independent of God's cause. One reason there was which might have tempted Esther to do nothing; she was not known to be a Jewess. But Mordecai interposed between her and all such refuges of his by assuring her that, if the Jews were massacred, she and her father's house would perish with the rest. We cannot hold back from Christ's cause with impunity. It can do without us, but we cannot do without it. If Jesus Christ is the central figure in history, and if the movement which He set agoing is the central current of history, then to be dissociated from His aims is to be a cipher, or perhaps even a minor quantity, in the aim of good.

III. Christ's cause offers the noblest employment for our gifts. Powerful as were the opening portions of Mordecai's appeal, it seems to me it must have been the closing sentence which decided Esther. It is a transfiguring moment when the thought first penetrates a man that perhaps this is not the purpose for which he has received his gifts at all—when the image of humanity rises up before him, in its helplessness and misery, appealing to him, as the weak appeal to the strong; when his country rises before him as an august and lovable mother and demands the services of her child; when the image of Christ rises before him, and, pointing to His cause struggling with the forces of evil yet leading towards a glorious and not uncertain goal, asks him to lend it his strength—when a man ceases to be the most important object in the world to himself, and sees, outside, an object which makes him forget himself and irresistibly draws him on. This call saved Esther. The same call comes now to you. We must begin with ourselves. Are we to have aught to give the world?

—J. Walker, The Four Men, p128.

References.—IV:14.—J. E. McFadyen, The City with Foundations, p63. G. Brooks, Outlines of Sermons, p285. Bishop Woodford, Occasional Sermons, vol. ii. p55. IV.—A. Raleigh, The Book of Esther , p88. V:1-8.—A. D. Davidson, Lectures on Esther , p171. V:9-14.—Ibid. p192.

The Penalty of Hate