Week 21 Esther
If a gallery curator mounted a photo exhibition of the worst guys in the OT and arranged the display in ascending order-of-badness Haman would be right near the end. He was lunatic-bad.
I’m tempted to go to the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and find a technical term to classify Haman. I’d be able to convince myself there’s a huge gap between him and me. And there is a big gap between us at the end when Haman was hanged. But there’s also how the whole thing began.
Mordecai the Jew wouldn’t defer to Haman. So Haman got mad, enraged-mad. Of course while Haman’s rage stayed inside his own head, ricocheting around in a kind of random-animation, well, that was okay. But then his rage slipped through into the real world of action. That means, unfortunately that my Big Gap is quite a bit smaller at the front-end, the anger-end, like the point of a flopped-over V.
Haman’s extermination plot started in anger. The bible is interested in dots that connect, and it connects the dots of anger and murder, sees an evolution taking place, a murderer’s scheme the symptom of his indigenous anger.
In Alberta we have an unwritten law that says as long as my internal anger doesn’t spill out into anti-social action then I’m okay.
But the bible is attentive to the disease, not only its symptoms.
Note: the Mordecai-Haman story begins in Esther 3.