Queen Esther and Our Lady of Fatima - Homily for Thursday of the First Week of Lent

 

Queen Esther had been chosen Queen after King Ahasuerus (Xerxes) dismissed his wife Queen Vashti for not coming to him when she was summoned.

 

Now Queen Esther is in anguish because Haman, the wicked aide to has convinced the King to issue an order to kill all the Jews in his Empire. Haman did this because Mordecai, Esther’s cousin who raised her as a daughter, would not bow down and prostrate himself as Haman passed as the King had ordered. The King is unaware that Esther his wife is Jewish.

The date set for destruction was the 13^th of the month of Adar which corresponds to either our month of February. It is also the very day that the Maccabees liberated Israel after a four-year battle with the Seleucid Empire.

Sister Lucia to whom Our Lady of Fatima appeared died on this date. Our Lady of Fatima’s first appearance to the three shepherd children was May 13, 1917.  Her last appearance was October 13,1917. On May 13, 1981, Pope John Paul II survived an assassination attempt. He credits Our Lady of Fatima with saving his life.

 

Queen Esther clothed herself in sackcloth and ashes.  She fasted from food and water for three days and asks the Jews to do the same.  After the three days, she approached the King without being summoned.  She did this even though she was aware that the King could have sentenced her to death for doing so.

When the Queen enters into the King’s presence he extends his scepter thus sparing her life. He was so impressed by her courage and beauty that he promised her up to half of his kingdom. Instead, she invites him to two banquets and invites Haman – the man responsible for the order of the genocide of her people. At the second banquet she pleads for her life and the life of her people.  The King is horrified by what Haman has done and orders him to be hung on the same gallows he had prepared for Mordecai.  Persian law did not permit the King to reverse his decree, but he issued another decree that the Jews could defend themselves.  Instead of being destroyed, the Jewish people were saved and defeated their enemies in battle. The Jews celebrate this triumph each year as their Feast of Purim.  It doesn’t always fall on the same day.  In 2013, the Feast falls on February 24th.

Many see Queen Esther as a type of Mary and the Book of Esther as a type of the Apocalypse. A figure type is a person, place, thing or event foreshadowing a New Testament archetype (a perfect model or type). The New Testament archetype is always greater than its Old Testament figure type. For example, Jonah’s time in the belly of the great fish is a type of Jesus in the tomb. Moses is a type of Jesus.

The Jewish people were saved through the intercession of Queen Esther, so Mary intercedes for her people today.  The Apocalypse foretells a great persecution of Christians at the end of time, but the Book of Revelation speak about the Ark of the Covenant appearing in the sky and the Woman crushing the head of the dragon. (Revelation 12)

When the Blessed Mother appeared at Fatima she wore the Star of Esther. In the Old Testament of the Hebrew text, her name was Hádássah - meaning myrtle, a white, five-pointed, star-shaped flower. In the Hebrew text, her name was Hádássah - meaning myrtle, a white, five-pointed, star-shaped flower.

Like Esther, Mary came at Fatima to spare her children from destruction. She asked people to repent of sin, pray the rosary, go to confession, and receive the Eucharist worthily. On July 13, 1917, Our Lady said to the child Lucia: “…I shall come to ask for the consecration of Russia to My Immaculate Heart, and the Communion of Reparation on the First Saturdays. If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted and there will be peace; if not, she will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred, the Holy Father will have much to suffer, and various nations will be annihilated. ... In the end, My Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to me, and she will be converted, and an era of peace will be granted to the world.”

Had her requests been heeded the world would have been spared the horrors of World War II in which over 50 million people died and countless other wars and persecutions provoked by Communists throughout the world. In 1920, Russia was also the first country to legalize abortion. In 1913, Communist leader Vladimir Lenin demanded “the unconditional annulment of all laws against abortions or against the distribution of medical literature on contraceptive measures.”

 

Great evils threaten our world. Sin increases. So many hearts are hardened. We need to call on Our Lady in prayer.  Heed her requests at Fatima and Lourdes. Do penance, do the Five First Saturday devotion by going to confession, receiving the Eucharist, praying the rosary and meditating 15 minutes on the mysteries for five first Saturdays of the month in a row.  

 

Queen Esther asked her people to do pray and do penance with her. We must listen to the Blessed Mother today and ask her to intercede with her Son that he might spare us, our nation and our world. 

 

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Taken from: http://frwest.blogspot.com.au/2013/02/queen-esther-and-our-lady-of-fatima.html

Christians Have Fallen in Love With Queen Esther, Purim’s Jewish Heroine



In recent novels, sermons, and Bible-study guides, evangelicals and mainline Protestants alike find inspiration in the biblical tale

 

By Rebecca Phillips|March 12, 2014 12:00 AM|

 

Tiffany Dupont as Hadassah in One Night With the King, 2006.(Gener8Xion)
 

 

A new film reinvents Queen Esther as the very first Bachelorette

By Sara Ivry

 

Many Jews may be unaware that Esther has taken on new status among Christians, but not everyone is surprised. “Esther is this remarkable, richly developed female character in the Bible,” said Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, president of CLAL, a Jewish think tank and leadership training organization. “It’s a great story—there’s sex, politics, boundary-crossing behavior. Why wouldn’t Christians be paying attention? It’s their story as much as ours.”

 

Hirschfield maintained that non-Jews have always been enamored of Esther and that one need look no further than medieval and Renaissance painting for proof: “Positive portrayals of Esther are legion in Renaissance art,” he said. Indeed, masters from Michelangelo to Tintoretto to Rembrandt have painted images of Esther, many depicting the same scene as the Tenney novel when Esther approaches King Ahasuerus.

 

But some observers see the Christian embrace of Esther as especially relevant to our era. Christian and Jewish commentators alike are quick to point out that Esther is the one book of the Bible where God is not mentioned. Riess surmised this very absence is what is engendering this current revival of interest in Esther and adds that the story may even be a good outreach tool. “Evangelicals are enamored of the character now because we are living in a very secular culture,” she suggested. “Esther is a story that can speak to secular young people in a way that other biblical characters cannot.”

 

Rabbi Rachel Barenblat, who blogs at the Velveteen Rabbi and has written about Esther for both Jewish and Christian audiences, agreed that Esther can be a religious touchstone in a secular world. “The story is about being true to who you are and navigating the non-Jewish or multifaith world in a way that is true to her. She doesn’t leave her Jewish world, but she’s ready to leap into this wild secular adventure,” Barenblat explained. “Esther is a model for those of us who want to live in the world but still want to retain our connections to where we come from.”

 

Though Christian hero may not be the role most Jews are accustomed to Esther holding, ultimately, Christians and Jews understand the deeper meaning of Esther in a similar way. Just as the Christianized Esther depicted in the Tenney novel found God in the most secular of environments, rabbis have taught that God is present in the story of Esther despite his absence from the Megillah. “Divine presence permeates the story,” Barenblat explained in her contribution to Held Evans’ blog series.

 

Hirschfield agreed: “Like the Christian authors, the absence of God doesn’t trouble the rabbis,” he said. “The absence of God as a character doesn’t mean the absence of God in the world.”

 

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Taken from: http://www.clal.org/cms/node/3202

A Contemporary (C20th) Purim Story

by Rabbi Avi Shafran Am Echad

February 8, 2002

Taken from:
http://www.jewishmediaresources.com/article/338/

 

On a beautiful clear night in 1924 at Landsberg am Lech, where he was imprisoned by the Bavarian government, Adolf Hitler remarked to Rudolf Hess: "You know … it’s only the moon I hate. For it is something dead and terrible and inhuman … It is as if there still lives in the moon a part of the terror it once sent down to earth… I hate it!"
A chill accompanied my first encounter with that quote. Because the Jewish religious tradition sees the ever-rejuvenating, shining disk of the moon as a symbol of the Jewish people. Indeed, the very first commandment we Jews were given as a people, while still awaiting the Exodus in Egypt, was to identify ourselves through our calendar with the moon. The moon Hitler feared.
There is much other oddness about Hitler with connections to ancient Jewish tradition, things like his fondness for ravens, in Jewish lore associated with cruelty; he went so far as to issue special orders protecting the birds. And like his fascination with the art of Franz von Stuck (the artist who had the "greatest impact" on his life, he once said), whose major themes are snakes and sinister women. In the Jewish mystical tradition, snakes evoke evil and its embodiment, Amalek; and there are hints of an antithetical relationship between the irredeemable wickedness of Amalek and women.
And then there is the matter of the most loathsome of Hitler’s henchmen, Julius Streicher, the editor of Der Sturmer, the premier journal of Jew-baiting. At its peak in 1938, print runs of Streicher’s vile tabloid ran as high as 2,000,000. A typical offering included a close-up of the face of a deformed Jew above the legend "The Scum of Humanity: This Jew says that he is a member of God’s chosen people." Another displayed a cartoon of a vampire bat with a grotesquely exaggerated nose and a Jewish star on its chest. In yet another, a Jewish butcher was depicted snidely dropping a rat into his meat grinder and, elsewhere in the issue, the punctured necks of handsome German youths were shown bleeding into a bowl held by a Jew more gargoyle than human.
In 1935, speaking to a closed meeting of a Nazi student organization, Streicher, displaying an unarguably Amalekian approach, declared: "All our struggles are in vain if the battle against the Jews is not fought to the finish. It is not enough to get the Jews out of Germany. No, they must be destroyed throughout the entire world so that humanity will be free of them."
The suspicion that in Streicher’s blind, baseless, and absolute hatred of the Jews lay the legacy of Amalek makes the story of his capture and death nothing short of chilling.
Purim is the only Jewish holiday that celebrates the defeat of an Amalekite, Haman. Even a passing familiarity with the Purim story is sufficient to know that the downfall of its villain is saturated with what seem to be chance ironies; he turns up at the wrong place at the wrong time, and all that he so carefully plans eventually comes to backfire on him in an almost comical way – a theme The Book of Esther characterizes with the words v’nahafoch hu, " and it was turned upside down!"
Such "chance" happenings are the very hallmark, of Amalek’s defeat – a fact reflected in the "casting of lots" from which Purim takes its name. Chance, Esther teaches us, is an illusion; God is in charge. Amalek may fight with iron but he is defeated with irony.
As was Streicher. In the days after Germany’s final defeat, an American major, Henry Blitt, en route to Berchesgaden, made an unplanned stop at a farmhouse just off the road. It was occupied by a short, bearded man.
"What do you think of the Nazis?" Blitt asked.
"I’m an artist," came the reply, "and have never bothered about politics."
"But you look like Julius Streicher!" Blitt joked, trying to make conversation.
"You recognized me?" the man blurted out incredulously, startling Blitt, who managed to compose himself and arrest his serendipitous catch.
Major Blitt, incidentally was Jewish.
Another happy irony in Streicher’s life involved the fate of his considerable estate. As reported in Stars and Stripes in late 1945, his considerable possessions were converted to cash and used to create an agricultural training school for Jews intending to settle in Palestine. Just as Haman’s riches, as recorded in the Book of Esther, were bestowed upon his nemesis Mordechai.
There is a good deal more of interest in the life of Julius Streicher to associate him with Jewish traditions about Amalek. But one of the most shocking narratives about him is the one concerning his death. Streicher was of one of the Nazis tried, convicted, and hanged at Nuremberg in 1946.
During the trial, Streicher remained disgustingly true to form. When the prosecution showed a film of the concentration camps as they had been found by the Allies, a spotlight was left on the defendants’ box for security reasons. Many present preferred to watch the defendants’ reactions rather than the mounds of bodies, matchstick limbs and common graves. Few of the defendants could bear to watch the film for long. Goering seemed calm at first, but eventually began to nervously wipe his sweaty palms. Schacht turned away; Ribbentrop buried his face in his hands. Keitel wiped his reddened eyes with a handkerchief. Only Streicher leaned forward throughout, looking anxiously at the film and excitedly nodding his head.
While no proof was found that Streicher had ever killed a Jew by his own hand, the tribunal nevertheless decided that his clear-cut incitement of others to the task constituted the act of a war criminal; and so he was sentenced, along with ten other defendants, to hang. And hang he did. But not before taking the opportunity to share a few final words with the journalists present at the gallows. "Heil Hitler. Now I go to God," he announced. And then, just before the trap sprang open, he blurted out most clearly: "Purim Feast 1946!" – an odd thing to say in any event, but especially so on an October morning.
The "Amalek-irony" of the Nuremberg executions doesn’t end there, either. The Book of Esther recounts how Haman’s ten sons were hanged in Shushan. An eleventh child, a daughter, committed suicide earlier, according to an account in the Talmud. At Nuremberg, while eleven men were condemned to execution by hanging, only ten were actually hanged. The eleventh, the foppish, effeminate Goering, died in his cell only hours before the execution; he had crushed a hidden cyanide capsule between his teeth.
…. In scrolls of the Book of Esther, the names of the ten sons of Haman are unusually prominent; they are written in two parallel columns, a highly unusual configuration.
Odder still is the fact that three letters in the list, following an unexplained halachic tradition, are written very small, and one very large. …. The Book of Esther, (9:13), moreover, refers to the hanging of Haman’s sons in the future tense, after the event had been recounted, presaging, it might seem, some hanging yet to happen.
To believing Jews, the Holocaust was the tip of an unimaginable iceberg of evil, stretching far and deep into the past even as one of its ugly tips punctured the relative peace of the modern world.
And so, as we prepare to celebrate Purim and the downfall of the Amalekite Haman, especially these days, when Jew-hatred has once again made itself manifest in the world, we would do well to ponder that the evil he represents may have been defeated at times throughout history but it has not yet been vanquished.