The worthiness of the festival will vary according to the ideas and feelings that are encouraged in connection with it. When it has been used as an opportunity for cultivating pride of race, hatred, contempt, and gleeful vengeance over humiliated foes, its effect must have been injurious and degrading. When, however, it has been celebrated in the midst of grievous oppressions, though it has embittered the spirit of animosity towards the oppressor—the Christian Haman in most cases—it has been of real service in cheering a cruelly afflicted people. Even when it has been carried through with no seriousness of intention, merely as a holiday devoted to music and dancing and games and all sorts of merry-making, its social effect in bringing a gleam of light into lives that were as a rule dismally sordid may have been decidedly healthy.
But deeper thoughts must be stirred in devout hearts when brooding over the profound significance of the national festival. It celebrates a famous deliverance of the Jews from a fearful danger. Now deliverance is the keynote of Jewish history. This note was sounded as with a trumpet blast at the very birth of the nation, when, emerging from Egypt no better than a body of fugitive slaves, Israel was led through the Red Sea and Pharaoh's hosts with their horses and chariots were overwhelmed in the flood. The echo of the triumphant burst of praise that swelled out from the exodus pealed down the ages in the noblest songs of Hebrew Psalmists. Successive deliverances added volume to this richest note of Jewish poetry. In all who looked up to God as the Redeemer of Israel the music was inspired by profound thankfulness, by true religious adoration. And yet Purim never became the Eucharist of Israel. It never approached the solemn grandeur of Passover, that prince of festivals, in which the great primitive deliverance of Israel was celebrated with all the pomp and awe of its Divine associations. It was always in the main a secular festival, relegated to the lower plane of social and domestic entertainments, like an English bank-holiday. Still even on its own lines it could serve a serious purpose. When Israel is practically idolised by Israelites, when the glory of the nation is accepted as the highest ideal to work up to, the true religion of Israel is missed, because that is nothing less than the worship of God as He is revealed in Hebrew history. Nevertheless, in their right place, the privileges of the nation and its destinies may be made the grounds of very exalted aspirations. The nation is larger than the individual, larger than the family. An enthusiastic national spirit must exert an expansive influence on the narrow, cramped lives of the men and women whom it delivers from selfish, domestic, and parochial limitations. It was a liberal education for Jews to be taught to love their race, its history and its future. If—as seems probable—our Lord honoured the Feast of Purim by taking part in it,[268] He must have credited the national life of His people with a worthy mission. Himself the purest and best fruit of the stock of Israel, on the human side of His being, He realised in His own great mission of redemption the end for which God had repeatedly redeemed Israel. Thus He showed that God had saved His people, not simply for their own selfish satisfaction, but that through Christ they might carry salvation to the world.
Purged from its base associations of blood and cruelty, Purim may symbolise to us the triumph of the Church of Christ over her fiercest foes. The spirit of this triumph must be the very opposite of the spirit of wild vengeance exhibited by Mordecai and his people in their brief season of unwonted elation. The Israel of God can never conquer her enemies by force. The victory of the Church must be the victory of brotherly love, because brotherly love is the note of the true Church. But this victory Christ is winning throughout the ages, and the historical realisation of it is to us the Christian counterpart of the story of Esther.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Josephus, Ant., XI. viii. 7.
[2] Neh. xii. 26 and 47.
[3] Allowing some months for the preparation of the expedition—and this we must do—we may safely say that it started in the year after the decree of Cyrus, which was issued in B.C. 538.
[4] Ant., XI. i. 1, 2.
[5] Gal. iv. 4.