THE WOUNDED HEALER

± A concept of a “wounded healer” has been known and pondered by human beings for thousands of years.

° In the biblical narrative it is a part of the suffering servant songs (Isaiah 53:3-5)

° We could also say that it is a divine concept which found its ultimate and greatest expression in the passion of Jesus Christ during that original Holy Week.

° Later the Apostle Peter will quote the same phrase (1 Peter 2:23-24) while contemplating what happened on the cross.

± In modern culture, the actual term “wounded healer” first became familiar from the work of Swiss psychoanalyst Carl G. Jung (1875-1961).

° The idea states that an analyst is compelled to treat patients because the analyst himself is “wounded”.

° Jung believed he discovered an “archetype” of the wounded healer in Greek mythology.

Mythological Origins

± In Greek mythology, the healing centaur Chiron was a "Wounded Healer", after being poisoned with an incurable wound by one of Hercules's arrows.

° The wound left Chiron in unbearable pain.

° Chiron's name was derived from the Greek word for hand (kheir) and meant something like "skilled with the hands." In myth it was also associated with the word kheirourgos "surgeon."

± Because he couldn’t heal himself, he sought to heal others.

° The Greeks believed Chiron was the inventor of medicine and surgery.

° The term expanded to generalize others who seek to heal others, including psychotherapists, nurses, pastoral counselors, and ministers. 

Our Wounded God

± Christianity is the only human religion whose God has wounds.

° Christians believe that Jesus’ mission on earth is the ultimate illustration of the principle of the healing of others through sacrificial suffering.

° The New Testament indicates that Jesus allowed Himself to become weak and to suffer torture and death for the sake of God’s greater healing purpose.

± Christians regard the “suffering servant” passages in Isaiah (especially chapter 53) as a picture of a wounded healer ultimately fulfilled in Christ.

° The wounded healer principle makes Jesus a better high priest because he is sympathetic to the needs of the suffering (Hebrews 4:15; 2:18).

° We have the examples of Jesus healing the sick, telling parables of compassion and admonishing the religious leaders of his day reinforcing the writer of Hebrews.

Identification with the Wounded

± The Psalmist makes clear: “The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves those crushed in spirit.” (Psalm 34:18) In the parable in Matthew 25, Jesus concludes: “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’”

± We are meant to understand that the Lord Himself identifies with those who are weak or traumatized and that potential healers are to “see Jesus” in them. Similarly, those who suffer may also see Jesus in those who help them.

± We are commanded to love our neighbor “as our self.” The example Jesus used was the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37). A shared history of woundedness fosters this sense of identification with those who suffer.

± The Lord made it clear to the Apostle Paul why we should not despise our own weaknesses and troubles (2 Corinthians 12:9-10).

Wounds that Heal the World

± In some mysterious way it is our wounds and sadness that have the power to heal. They are at the center of how God desires to work in us and through us.

± Both Isaiah and Peter suggest that the suffering servant(s) are the key to the healing of the world.

° Peter says that He (Jesus) “bore our sins in his body on the cross” (1 Peter 2:24).

° Jesus’s death does something. The common way of putting it is that Jesus’s death “atones” for our sins (suffering).

° The gist is that the death of Jesus does something to restore our relationship with God (and each other).

° Where did Peter (and other NT writers) get that idea?

The Suffering Servant

± In Isaiah 52:13-53:12 we read of God’s “servant” who suffers on behalf of others.

° The servant is described as despised and rejected and wounded for our transgressions.

° The passage sounds a lot like Jesus but …

± Isaiah never says the servant dies for anyone. He suffers.

± The “servant” is referred to as he/him but is referring to the part of the nation that was taken into Exile.

± Many argue the servant represents the entire Jewish people since it describes the time of suffering under foreign oppression.

± Others argue the passage is Messianic in nature and ultimately fulfilled in Christ.

The Suffering Savior

± Peter has a lot to say about suffering in his letter. He calls upon his readers to look at Christ.

° The cross is where God in Christ acts decisively to heal our wounded world.

± Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote,

° “Human beings become human because God became human … In Christ, the form of human beings before God was created new” (God in the Manger: Reflections on Advent and Christmas p.52)

° God created humans, and when we look to Jesus, we see the prototype for what humans are designed to become.

° As we look at the life of Jesus, we see someone who experienced joy and pain.

± The rest of this study we will focus on the life, ministry, and death of Jesus as the way God heals a wounded world.

Resources

Purim and the Longing for a Better World

§  The holiday of Purim is relevant to the Jewish people because it illustrates how to combat the cause of anti-Semitism and the suffering in the world.

        While most people think of Purim primarily as a celebration of deliverance, chockful of food, drinking and costumes, perhaps there is more.

        If the deeper meaning of the story it might be a model for our world.

§  The desire to eliminate the Hamans of the world takes unity and the ability to set aside the partisan divisions.

        Under the threat of imminent death, Mordecai was able to get all the Jews in Persia to fast and pray for three days together.

A Core Concept

§  The festival of Purim offers Jews a powerful lesson, teaching them not to despair even when dangers are most threatening and persecution most cruel.

§  Its festivities cheered the Jew in his darkest moments and assured him that deliverance was at hand and justice is assured.

§  The nature of the Purim festival contrasts with that of Persian banquets because Purim obligated acts of tzedakah (“justice”).

Feasts as the Skeleton of Esther

§  A prominent structuring principle in Esther is the Hebrew word mishteh, translated “feast” or “banquet”.

§  The term appears twenty times in the book – almost half of all OT occurrences.

A Core Teaching in Purim

Mordecai makes manot (sending of portions) (9:19) central.

There is joy and merrymaking but the consumption of food through which an identify is forged and sustained focuses on the praise of justice, not reveling in revenge.

The exchange of manot creates a symbolic communal banquet to which everyone is invited, thus making the banquet the main feature of the holiday.

The story’s ending returns to its beginning to transform the banquet motif on several levels—from an anthropological perspective, royal banquets that reinforce social divisions by showcasing wealth give way to a banquet that emphasizes community through mutual relatedness.

Most importantly, generosity toward the poor forces the Jewish perspective beyond a concern with self to a concern for others.

Purim, Tzedakah and Tikkum Olam

Tzedakah (justice or righteousness) has the strong connotation concerned with the recipient’s dignity irrespective of any differences.

It expresses a Jew’s duty to their fellow human being as mandated in the Torah (Deut. 16:20).

Tikkun Olam concerns social justice that repairs the world.

The Torah envisioned a just, social order intended to benefit the poor and the wellbeing of society (Lev. 25:8-17; Deut. 14:28-29; 15:1-18 etc.)

Purim extends the opportunity and obligation to perform tzedakah to establish tikkun olam.

Conclusion

In the Esther story we are confronted with a document whose narrative arc is more expansive that the deliverance of the Jews.

It is the story of the human family surviving the threats of extinction through hatred and violence.

It is a call to a bigger banquet that includes all the human family regardless of origin.

This vision is told by Jesus himself in Luke 14:1-24

Esther’s Moral Character

§  One the challenging features alongside the absence of any mention of God is the moral and ethical practices of the main characters.

§  Esther has been wholeheartedly praised and roundly criticized by various scholars.

§  She is mostly portrayed as heroic saving the nation of Israel from destruction.

§  From the other side, she can be viewed as weak, selfish, and passively obedient woman who gets her own way by using her beauty.

Stuck in the Middle

§  There are times when a compelling case can be made from different viewpoints.

§  Sometimes the ambiguity is a part of the mystique that allows for multiple means to different audiences.

§  Sometimes there are political reasons the editors of the text change the nuances.

§  Sometimes there are religious reasons there are changes to the text.

Ancient Textual References

·           The story of Esther’s character is found in three texts – the Septuagint, the Alexandrian, and the Masoretic texts.

o   From the Masoretic text, the basis for the Hebrew and Christian Old Testament, she is portrayed as heroic. Even though it was dangerous for her to approach the king, she did so to save her people.

o   The Greek text tries to clean up the mess found in the Hebrew text when Esther distances herself from Judaism to find favor with a non-Jewish king.

o   The Scroll of Esther says that Mordecai took Esther as his adopted daughter (bat, in Hebrew). But both the Septuagint and the Talmud say that he took her as a wife (bayit, literally “house”).

Two Views of Esther

Esther as a passive and manipulative woman

Esther as the hero of the Jewish nation

Questions to Consider

In 2:1-4, do the royal prescriptions for new queen require Esther to engage sexually?

In 2:8, why did Esther not seem to resist being added to the royal harem?

In 2:17, did Esther find favor with the king because it pleaded him sexually?

In 2:10 and 20, why did Esther conceal her Jewish identity?

In 4:4, why did Esther attempt to halt Mordecai’s mourning?

In 4:5, why did Esther not know the reason for the mourning?

In 4:11, why does Esther resist rush to aid?

In 9:13, why did Esther request a second day of retaliation?

In 9:13, why did Esther request the bodies of the ten sons of Haman to be hung on the gallows?

Kosher Adultery?

One of the most troubling issues for the Sages was the idea that Esther, presumably a nice Jewish girl, married a gentile and had sexual relations with him.

This was generally justified by the greater good that this act served. In order to fulfill God's plan to save his people, Esther had to be married to the king.

Some rabbis commenting on Esther 2:11, explains: ``Mordecai said that the only justification for this righteous woman to be taken to sleep with an uncircumcised Gentile was that she would eventually rise up to save Israel.

The idea that Mordecai and Esther as a married couple has had a long history in the Jewish tradition, originating in the Septuagint, flourishing in the Talmud, and continuing into the commentaries of the sixteenth century and beyond.

Is there a love triangle going on in the story?

Further Complications

If the intercourse with Ahasuerus was not consensual, then no transgression was involved.

But … Esther must have been an incredibly talented sexual partner in order to pull off such a ruse – to pretend to enjoy having sex with the king and satisfying him like no other woman (2:17), while at the same time passively resisting.

Now if Esther has agreed to have consensual sexual relations with Ahasuerus, she is forbidden to Mordecai and so cannot be with him in this way again.

God Lets His Children Tell the Story

·           When dealing with theological difficulties raised in the text, we must remember the writers told the story from their point of view, with their limitations, within the cultural context in which they wrote.

o   What are some of the story telling points in the book of Esther?

o   What purposes do they serve in their own day? In succeeding generations?

·           When God lets his children tell the story, the way that story is told deeply and thoroughly influenced by the rules of ancient tribal societies that valued in their people taking land, vanquishing (killing or enslaving) their foes and generally bragging about who has the best gods and the best kings.

o   This “rule” is stamped all over the Old Testament.

o   This is a way of understanding why the Bible behaves the way that it does.

Mordecai’s Decree

§  Mordecai writes legislation giving the Jews the right to defend themselves against Haman’s legions.

§  Yet the right to defend was only a small part of the decree (8:11).

§  What about the killing of women and children? And take the spoils of war?

§  Why does Mordecai write all this?

§  The key may be in 8:9.

§  The letter is dispatched to every governor in the far-flung provinces of the Persian Empire.

§  This decree is not about localized opposition but those who controlled the machinery of the state (provincial armies, police, fire department).

§  The matchup is not so much about actual combatants but those who control the chaos.

§  What will police and fire departments do when the mobs start to converge?

§  Will they stand by and watch? Will they intervene?

§  Mordecai knows whatever decree he writes in the name of the king must counteract the first decree of Haman.

§  Every provincial governor has a decision to make. How can they intervene in the middle of a civil war?

§  Mordecai’s decree needs to be every bit as violent as the first to pressure the politicians to act.

Now What About Just War?

§  The Just War theory is a philosophy that attempts to reconcile three things:

§  Taking human life is seriously wrong

§  States have a duty to defend their citizens and defend justice

§  Protecting innocent human life and defending important moral values sometimes requires the willingness to use force and violence.

§  The theory specifies conditions for judging if it is just to go to war, and conditions for how the war should be fought.

§  Although it was extensively developed by Christian theologians, it can be used by people of every faith and none.

Perspectives from Jewish Scholars

The slaughter in the story of Esther has troubled even Jews. Ellis Abraham Davidson, a prominent educator, was entrusted with publishing a version of the Hebrew Bible that would introduce its riches to the gentiles from a Jewish perspective, ended up cutting most of the stuff about the slaughter. There is an apologetic position for the messy business of bloodletting. There is a doubt that any Jew celebrating Purim really understood the gravity of what they were celebrating. Shulem Deen, a gifted writer and former Hasid, has credited the holiday for accelerating his decision to leave the Orthodoxy fold. He writes, “I wanted a world in which seventy-five thousand dead makes one shudder, if ever so slightly, before enjoying hamantachen and whiskey”.

Does Purim have a place in the Jewish faith today?

David Wolpe says …

Purim is a holiday of masks. A mask doesn’t fully change you, but it obscures identity, distorting who you are. A mask permits you to assume a slightly different way of being in the world.

In our day we appreciate why Purim is a holiday of masks. In the diaspora, Jews were forced to wear masks all of the time. In Muslim lands we were dhimmi, second class citizens subject to a vast range of indignities. But there was no protest against the status for Jews were powerless to change it. We wore the mask of acceptance and accommodation.

In Christian Europe, Jews were regularly exiled, persecuted, belittled targeted for conversion, and sometimes killed. But in country after country, they donned the mask of the willing subject, because rebellion against their situation only made it worse. The few who did not wear a mask, the Mordechis who did not bow down, paid a terrible price.

Final Thoughts on the Two Decrees

Rabbi Daniel Polish says holidays like Purim and Mardi Gras are marked “by a raucous atmosphere, the excessive consumption of intoxicants, masks and costumes” and both fall before “perhaps the major religious observance of their respective traditions… [Passover/Easter].”

Purim is about the capacity of ordinary people to do extraordinary things. It’s about acting in the face of fear. And it’s about speaking truth to power.

Like most history involving independence the morality of the decrees has been forgotten in the ongoing legacy of survival.

Genocidal Decrees

§  There are two competing decrees in the book both issued with the permission of the king.

§  In Esther chapter 3 we are introduced to Haman – the villain of the story who is referred to as the son of Hammedatha the Agagite.

§  When he feels slighted of honor by Mordecai, he convinces the King to exterminate all the Jews on a date determined by lot (pur).

§  The date for the genocide is set in the fifth year of Esther’s reign to be in the month of Adar (March).

§  In Esther chapters 8 and 9 in a reversal of fortunes, Mordecai issues the decree to protect the Jews.

§  They are told to defend themselves.

§  They are told to annihilate all men, women, and children.

§  The moral dilemma

§  Which decree is unjust, which is just?

What are the conditions of a just war?

A Little Background

§  Haman is referred to as an Agagite (3:1)

§  This most likely refers to Agag, the king of Amalek (see 1 Samuel 15:20).

§  The Amalekites had attacked Israel after Israel fled from Egypt (Ex. 17:8-16; 1 Sam. 15:2); for this reason, “the Lord” would be at war against the Amalekites from generation to generation (Ex. 17:6).

§  Israel was not to forget to but was to blot out the name of Amalek from under heaven (Deut. 25:15).

§  Saul’s attack on Amalek (see 1 Sam. 15) resulted in the death of most, though not all (see 1 Chronicles 4:42-43), of King Agag’s people and later the king himself.

§  Mordecai is the son Jair, the son of Shimei, the son of Kish.

§  The association with the tribe of Benjamin makes him a descendant of King Saul.

§  This sets the stage for the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Amalekites.

An “Understandable” Personal Conflict

§  Haman’s identity as an Amalekite would explain Mordecai’s refusal as a Jew to bow to him (3:2-4).

§  No self-respecting Benjaminite would bow before a descendant of Amalekites.

§  Haman’s reaction of desiring to exterminate the entire Jewish race is explained by revenge. Old antagonisms die hard.

§  Haman sought to confiscate the property of the Jewish people (3:13).

§  According to Persian law the decree could not be altered (see Daniel 6:8, 12, 15).

§  But depending on the wording of the decree, a second decree might be able to effectively invalidate it. This is what the king instructed Esther and Mordecai to do (8:7-8).

§  Esther 8:11-12 shows that the decree is calling for vengeance to utterly wipe out their enemies, including women and children.

§  The point of the new decree was for the Jews to defend themselves, but the hostility of history rises again.

When the Bible Sanctions Violence, Must We?

§  The Bible contains a lot of violence, a lot.

·           Yet not all violence is regarded the same way.

§  Sometimes the Bible makes it unmistakably clear that certain actions are wrong (Ex. Cain and Abel … Gen. 4; David and Uriah … 2 Sam. 11:27; etc.)

§  In both illustrations the violence is bad and undesirable.

·           How should we regard the “virtuous” violence texts?

§  Examples: The flood (Gen. 6); the death of the firstborn (Ex. 14-15), the conquest of Canaan (Josh. 6-11), etc.

§  Lethal violence is condoned and celebrated.

§  Do we have the moral obligation to critique the assumption that violence is somehow “virtuous”? Yes.

·           We must read the violent verses also from the perspective of the victims.

·           Critiquing the violence does not, however, render the text useless.

§  The conquest narrative (Joshua 6-11) reminds us that religious violence is extremely dangerous because it gives divine sanction to behaviors that in any other context would be deemed immoral.

§  We need to be critical of “virtuous” violence in the text while looking for ways to move beyond the critique.