The Uncle

It's difficult in the story of Esther to talk about Mordecai as just the uncle. Indeed, in the scope of the story, he is so much more. 

Mordecai is a faithful man. He is known to - and hated by - Haman for his faithfulness to God, which is unwavering. He is known to the king (eventually) as a faithful friend, someone who protected the king from certain betrayal and death. The folks around the king's residence seem to know Mordecai by name; he is a very real presence in the fortress. 

He is also Esther's uncle, but he is more than that even here, too. He is her kinsman-redeemer. We don't know what happened to her father, and perhaps to her mother, too, but we are told that Mordecai has raised Esther as his own. He is the Boaz of her story, a foreshadowing of the Christ figure. He has become not just her uncle, but her father.

He protects her. He guides her. He teaches her. He loves her. 

When Esther is first chosen to come into the king's harem and compete for his affections, Mordecai gives her some advice on how to proceed. Among other things, he tells her not to tell anyone about her nationality. They don't need to know she's a Jew. 

The Jews were exiles here; they were foreigners. It's clear that at least some of the natives have a hatred for them, as indicated by Haman's heart, although it's hard to tell what the widespread attitude was toward the Jews. It's not a stretch to assume it was also negative, though, as there didn't seem to be much pushback to the idea of completely annihilating them. 

So don't tell anyone you're a Jew, Mordecai advises Esther. And she doesn't. She goes through a whole year of beauty treatments, earns the king's favor, becomes the new queen, and builds her own consort all without revealing her nationality to anyone. No one in this kingdom knows that she is a Jew, except for those who knew before she came to this palace. 

But then...

But then, Haman issues a decree that the Jews should be slaughtered. All of them. Thoroughly. And Mordecai comes back to Esther to try to convince her to use her power and her place to help her people. 

He can't, apparently, talk directly to her, though, so what he does is he tells one of her eunuchs, one of her attendants, to give her the message. 

And all of a sudden, this man who did so much to protect his niece, this man who redeemed her, this man who taught her and guided her and loved her, this man who insisted that she keep her nationality a secret...has outed her. 

He told the eunuch. He told the servant. He told someone in the fortress who wasn't part of their people who exactly Esther was. And friends, those kinds of things do not stay secret. It's not like he trusted this person not to tell. The story doesn't tell us that he even asked the person not to tell anyone else. Mordecai, who has so far protected Esther, goes out and just declares to the powers that be that she is actually a Jew, and there's no hiding any more. There's no safety any more. 

He just put her life at risk. 

Because he was concerned about his own? 

Something about having our own skin on the line, something about the threat being in our own backyard, it makes us do things we wouldn't otherwise do. It turns us into persons we never thought we'd become. Mordecai spent his whole life redeeming and protecting Esther as if she was his own, but when his own life was on the line, when the lives of his people were in danger, he walks right up to someone with the power to destroy everything...and throws Esther under the bus. 

Ouch. 

It makes me wonder who I've thrown under the bus over the years in the name of self-preservation. It makes me wonder who I have loved, but betrayed over the years out of a fear for some circumstance's impact on my own life. 

It makes me wonder what I'm capable of when it feels like my life on the line.