“If you remain completely silent at this time, relief and deliverance will arise for the Jews from another place, but you and your father’s house will perish.” Est 4:14

Silence may be passive, but that does not mean it is neutral or impotent. Christianity as it has evolved in the West (and then exported around the world) reasons that it is safer and less contentious not to talk about controversial topics, to be “sensitive”, “tolerant”, and careful not to offend. We point to Jesus who did not respond when Pilate questioned him, making it a virtue to be like the Lamb who maintained His silence when being led to the slaughter. Funny how we conveniently forget that He also offended people everywhere He went.

While there are certainly times when it is virtuous and proper to remain quiet (Ecc 3:7), it is often just a cop out, a way to justify inaction, a ruse. Many equate meekness with weakness, or spiritualize their timidity by claiming what we are really interested in is souls. The truth is, we just need to grow a spine! 

Esther faced a choice. She was queen. She considered herself secure dressed in her royal regalia behind the mighty palace walls. The king had chosen her over all the gorgeous maidens in the whole kingdom. When the decree was issued and sent by couriers throughout the land “to destroy, to kill and to annihilate all the Jews, both young and old, little children and women, in one day” (Est 4:13, sounds eerily prescient, doesn’t it?!), she thought she and her family would be immune. She was wrong—nearly dead wrong. Sometimes inaction invites aggression; and silence leads to violence. 

Jeremiah had a choice too. While other “prophets” glossed over impending doom and painted a rosy picture “for encouragement”, Jeremiah was compelled to prophesy inconvenient truths for which he was beaten, placed in stocks, sent to prison, and lowered into a cesspool. The Word of the Lord “burned like a fire shut up in [his] bones” (Jer 20:9), so despite paying a dear price, Jeremiah shed the lamb cloak and roared like a lion. 

Bonhoeffer made his choice. In an age when pulpits all over Germany became the soapboxes of the Nazis, as the poison of hatred, bigotry, and deception spread like ivy into streets, homes, and hearts of the nation, he was a voice crying in a wilderness of eerie compliance and compromise. At a time when oblivious choir anthems drowned out the clickety-clack of Auschwitz-bound boxcars outside the gates of her sanctuaries, Bonhoeffer bellowed with unfettered conviction: “silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.” 

Mordecai’s message to Esther then is God’s message to us today, beloved. These too are foreboding times. We close our ears to the jackboots marching through our streets and schools and institutions of power to our peril. I want to be more than just inspired by the Bonhoeffer’s of history. I want the same fire to burn in my bones that burned in Jeremiah’s. And I want to speak up like Esther who could not be silent understanding she had “come to the kingdom for such a time as this” (Est 4:14).